Central City Opera House

Whiskey smells backstage mean Mike Dougherty is working the room. Next door at the Teller House, caretaker Billy Hamilton wants you to say hello.

The smell comes first. Whiskey, strong enough that actors and stagehands stop mid-rehearsal and look around, then gone a second later. Usually a light push on the shoulder follows, or the feeling of somebody walking past you very close in an empty wing. That's Mike Dougherty, a nineteenth-century Gilpin County miner who made his living as a stage performer in Central City before drinking himself to death. Backstage at the Central City Opera House is where he was happiest, and he hasn't left.

The Opera House opened in 1878 at 124 Eureka Street, built of native granite by Cornish and Welsh miners at the tail end of the Gilpin County gold rush. The acoustics are unusually sharp for a building of its age, and the opera festival has run there every summer since 1932, which makes it one of the oldest continuously operating opera companies in America. The hall seats about 550 and the interior is restored close to its 1878 look. Dougherty isn't the only ghost on the program. The Gilpin Historical Society also credits an unnamed female patron with the floating orbs over the stage, the cold spots that hit rows of empty seats, and the footsteps that carry through an empty house.

Then there's Billy Hamilton, and he isn't at the Opera House at all. He's next door at the Teller House, the 1872 hotel where the opera company keeps its post-performance bar. Billy was the caretaker. The historical society's director describes him as a man who considered the Teller House his home, and when he died, he stayed to protect it. Staff know him for one rule. If you walk in without introducing yourself, he will make your night uncomfortable. Doors stick. Things move. People who say hello on the way in tend not to have problems.

The Teller House's strangest feature isn't a ghost. It's a face. In 1936, the Denver artist Herndon Davis was hired by the Central City Opera Association to paint portraits and interior work for the Opera House. He had a heated argument with Ann Evans, the association's director, about how his work should be executed. He was told to quit or be fired. The hotel manager had already refused to let him paint on the barroom floor, so on his last night in Central City, Davis and a bellboy named Jimmy Libby snuck into the bar after midnight and painted his wife's face directly onto the hardwood. They finished at 3 AM. The face is his wife Edna Juanita Davis, known as Nita. The painting is still there. Bar patrons walk on her every night of the summer season.

The Teller House is arguably more haunted than the Opera House, and the two buildings share a lot of their reputation through the narrow alley and covered walkway that connect them. Staff and performers moving between the buildings late at night talk about cold drafts on the staircases, doors that open when nobody's near them, and the general sense of being watched from above. The alley itself has a small legend. More than one person has reported something brushing past them between the two buildings on the way to the back door.

The opera company runs a Haunted History Tour during the summer season that walks through both buildings in order, told by opera staff and docents who know the architecture better than they know the ghosts. It's not a scare tour. It's a history tour with ghosts woven into it, which is the correct way to tell these particular stories. The buildings aren't trying to frighten anyone. They're just full.

What keeps the two ghosts separate is temperament. Dougherty is cheerful, drunk, affectionate in the way a performer is affectionate, and he announces himself with whiskey and a hand on your shoulder. Billy, next door, is territorial, a retired caretaker who wants a name before he lets you pass. One building is his stage. The other is his house. Neither is empty.