Cave of the Winds

Nellie Snider helped run Manitou Grand Caverns in the 1880s and broke down after an ownership lawsuit. Guides say she blows out candles on the route.

On the Cave of the Winds Lantern Tour, when a candle goes out, the guides tell you to blame Nellie. The story guides tell in the dark is that Nellie Snider, who helped her husband George run the Manitou Grand Caverns section in the late 1800s, liked scaring the guests enough that she kept doing it after she died. Candles flickering out in buckets, lanterns dimming for no breeze, small equipment knocked onto the stone floor. Guides blame Nellie, and don't apologize for her.

Her story is specific enough to make the haunting stick. She took George Snider's tours repeatedly before they met, fell in love with him, married him, and ran the Grand Caverns operation together through the cave tourism boom of the 1880s and 1890s. A protracted lawsuit over cave ownership pushed the couple into debt, year after year, and the financial pressure eventually broke her. She had a nervous breakdown. The cave was the center of their whole life, and when they lost it, the loss went into her. Her name appears in historical accounts as both Nellie and Jennie, sources conflict on which is correct, but the story the guides tell uses Nellie.

Cave of the Winds Mountain Park sits at Williams Canyon, just outside Manitou Springs and about 6 miles west of Colorado Springs. Daylight tours run through the main caverns, and in fall evenings the Lantern Tour goes through the older Manitou Grand Caverns section where the Sniders worked. The Lantern Tour is the haunted one.

The two most active sections are Lovers Lane and Texas Pit. Paranormal investigators have run overnight watches in both areas, and the Biography Channel's 'My Ghost Story' aired an episode in 2012 featuring the Spirit Chasers' investigation of the caverns. Footsteps on the stone that no one in the group made. EVPs. Temperature drops in the Lovers Lane section that investigators clocked at around eight degrees over a minute. Cave management invites paranormal teams in and publishes the findings, which most commercial attractions won't do.

The older layer is older than either of the Sniders. The Jicarilla Apache told stories about a cave near Manitou Springs where the Great Spirit of the Wind lived, and warned that anyone who entered could be twisted in body and mind by the air moving through the gorge. That was centuries before George and John Pickett, the two brothers usually credited with the cave's 1880 discovery, found the tunnel and explored it by candlelight. The story says the wind started to wail as they pushed deeper, blew out their candles, and sent them running back to the entrance. Pickett's account was played up for tourist marketing, but the detail of the wind putting out the flames has survived intact for 140 years. The guides in 2026 tell the same story.

The scares happen inside a working geology tour. The Grand Caverns section is real history and real stone, not a haunted house setup, and the ghost stories are grafted onto an older Apache legend that predates the commercial operation by a thousand years. You're walking a limestone cave in the dark holding a lantern, and the wind that gives the cave its name does things to the flame that feel personal.

The Pickett brothers ran from this cave in 1880 with their candles blown out by air they couldn't see. A hundred and forty-six years later, the guides on the Lantern Tour carry lanterns into the same passages and watch the flames go sideways in Lovers Lane. The wind is the obvious explanation. The candles still go out in the exact places the Picketts' did, 146 years later.