In Brief
Briarhurst Manor in Manitou Springs, Colorado is a pink-sandstone mansion turned fine-dining restaurant. During one presentation, a vase flew off a table and broke in front of more than 100 guests. Diners on the terrace keep seeing a red-haired girl who isn't there.
The Full Story
At Briarhurst Manor in Manitou Springs, Colorado, an expensive vase once flew off a table during a presentation and shattered on the floor. More than a hundred guests were in the room. They all saw it go.
People tell that story the way you'd expect, and it's hard to wave off as one nervous diner imagining things. The other recurring sighting is quieter. Guests eating lunch on the terrace have watched a red-haired girl in Victorian clothes playing on the lawn, only to learn afterward that no one else saw her there.
Local lore gives that girl a name, Hyacinth, said to be one of the daughters of the man who built the house. The story goes that she drowned in Fountain Creek, which runs through the estate. The documented history doesn't support it. Dr. William Bell, born in Ireland and educated at Cambridge, co-founded Manitou Springs and built the original Briarhurst in 1872. He had five children, four of whom reached adulthood, and in 1890 the family moved to England. No record names a daughter Hyacinth, and no record shows any Bell child drowning. The legend grew up around the sightings, not the other way around.
The house people see today was rebuilt in 1888 after the first one burned one winter night in 1886 while Bell was away. It's pink Victorian sandstone, Gothic and Tudor lines, on the National Register since 1973. Inside, staff report children's footsteps running back and forth in the attic, which was the Bell children's rainy-day playroom. A motion detector in the master bedroom is said to trigger when the building is empty.
In 2009, the TAPS team from Ghost Hunters filmed an episode here and concluded on air that the manor was haunted, though a reviewer who watched the same episode called the recorded audio extremely bad, with no words in it.
The owner, Ken Healey, doesn't hype the ghosts and doesn't deny them. The manor serves dinner, hosts weddings, and runs paranormal tours alongside the menu. One of the tour operators, Tammila Wright, has her own read on the red-haired girl and the rest of them: "These apparitions are just the spirits of the family revisiting the joys of a life they once had."
