Avery House

William Avery was poisoned with arsenic in 1890. His widow married his business partner 12 days later. Visitors still see William upstairs.

Twelve days after William Avery died of a stomach ailment in 1890, his widow Mary married the dead man's business partner, Frank Millington. Fort Collins drew the obvious conclusion. William's body was exhumed, arsenic poisoning was confirmed, and the ghost of the murdered man has had a house to haunt ever since.

That house is the Avery House, a two-story sandstone Queen Anne on the corner of Mountain and Meldrum. Franklin Avery, William's older brother, built it in 1879 for $3,000 using locally quarried sandstone, two rooms on the ground floor, three bedrooms upstairs. Franklin was the First National Bank founder, the man who surveyed Fort Collins in 1873 and drew its famously wide streets. The house stayed in the Avery family until 1962.

Mary and Frank Millington went to trial for William's murder in 1891. Both were acquitted. The arsenic was in the body, the twelve-day remarriage was on the record, and the jury let them walk anyway.

The activity clusters on the upper floor. Modern tenants and former residents have described a male figure moving through the middle upstairs bedroom, which gets pinned to William. Visitors have also reported the sense of a troubled child's spirit somewhere on the second story, though no one knows whose child. The pantry and the parlor get mentioned too, mostly as strange sensations rather than sightings.

Not everyone buys it. Art Lizotte, a longtime docent at the house, told reporters: "I've never seen or heard anything like that here, nor have the other docents I know." The Avery Foundation's director has been on record saying the same thing. If anything paranormal is happening, the people who spend the most time in the building aren't the ones noticing.

Paranormal investigator Abigail O'Brien has a theory for that. Spirits, she says, don't present themselves to everyone. Especially not to the people caring for the place they're attached to. Whatever you think of that framework, it explains the asymmetry in the accounts: visitors and tenants say one thing, staff say another, and the house sits in the middle collecting both.

The Avery House is on the National Register of Historic Places. The Poudre Landmarks Foundation bought it in 1974 and runs it as a museum now, open Saturdays and Sundays. Tour groups move through the rooms that used to be the Averys' entry and dining area, climb the staircase to the bedrooms, and stand in the doorway of the one where visitors keep saying they see William. Most of them don't see anything. A few do. The docents say it's all suggestion. The 1891 acquittal is still in the record.