TLDR
A red-haired Irish ghost named Maggie plays the slots after closing at the Colorado Grande Casino, trailing rose perfume through Cripple Creek.
The Full Story
Red hair piled on top of her head, white shirtwaist, long cotton skirt, high-heeled boots, and an Irish accent. Maggie plays slot machines after the Colorado Grande closes for the night, and she smells like rose perfume. She walks around inside a casino that didn't exist until 1991, more than ninety years after she died.
The casino shares a brick storefront in Cripple Creek called the Fairley Brothers and Lampman Building, which has been a drugstore, a hat shop, an engineer's studio, a law office, a mortuary, a hotel, and a third-floor Masonic ballroom before it ever had slot machines. Staff think Maggie was around for most of that history. She's been reported as a boarder in the hotel era, as a singer drifting out of the back of the drugstore, and now as a quiet woman in turn-of-the-century dress who likes to gamble after hours. When the casino opened in 1991, she just added slot machines to the routine.
The best-known story is the security camera incident. Overnight surveillance picked up Maggie and a gentleman companion at the slots during the dead hour after closing, and the staff pulled the tapes to review them. The tapes then disappeared from the office. Nobody claims to have moved them, nobody has produced them since, and the running joke among employees is that Maggie didn't want to be on file. The casino named its ground-floor restaurant after her.
Her voice is the most specific phenomenon. A lilting Irish soprano, coming through the wall from the old ballroom space, clear enough that regulars recognize it before they see anything. The rose perfume shows up in rooms she isn't standing in. Security guards describe cold patches near the back stairs and flickering lights on the upper floor. Old hotel rooms, old drugstore, old ballroom. The activity follows the building's previous lives, not its current one.
Cripple Creek sits at 9,500 feet on the west slope of Pikes Peak. It was the richest gold camp in Colorado for nearly thirty years, and almost every brick building on Bennett Avenue is reported as haunted by somebody. The Colorado Grande has the advantage of a named ghost, a consistent description across decades, and staff who will tell you straight-faced that the roses are real. Ask the servers at Maggie's Restaurant and you'll get an answer before your drink arrives.
Researched from 7 verified sources. How we research.
