Cave of the Winds

On the Haunted Lantern Tour at Cave of the Winds, west of Colorado Springs, your only light is a single candle lantern through 250 feet of low passage, some of it as tight as 42 inches. When the flame gutters out in the dark, the guides tell you to blame Nelly — and to thank her, so she doesn't escalate.

Nelly Snider, by the story the guides tell, helped her husband George run this section of the cave through the 1880s tourism boom. The history that's documented is harsher than romantic. In 1886, Rose Rinehart, wife of a co-owner, sued George over the Grand Caverns. The case was re-tried for years and reached the Colorado Supreme Court in 1894, which declined to hear it — leaving the ruling against Snider to stand. The guides say the slow ruin of it broke Nelly, that she had a mental breakdown and was institutionalized.

The rest is the tour's account, not the record. They say that after her release she vanished one night while George worked in his cave office, and that he found her body at the bottom of a nearby cliff. He swore her spirit went back to the caverns they'd built their life around. No newspaper or archive confirms any of it. Some older accounts call her Jennie.

The flame-snuffing came first. The cave is named for the wind that moans across the natural entrance on the Williams Canyon cliff. The brothers usually credited with finding it in 1880 supposedly fled when that wind wailed and blew out their candles. The ghost story just gave the snuffed flame a name.

In 2012 the cave turned up on Biography Channel's *My Ghost Story*. A skeptical team, Rocky Mountain Paranormal, ran their own investigation across two visits and found nothing measurable — no stray EMF, a steady 54°F, and lights at the back of the tunnel they pinned on Prisoner's Cinema, the "light show" people see when kept in the dark.

So the science came back empty. The candles still go out.