In Brief
The Colorado Grande Casino in Cripple Creek, Colorado keeps a ghost named Maggie. Security once caught her on tape, playing the slots after closing with a gentleman beside her. Staff pulled the footage to review it, stored it away, and it vanished. No one has produced it since.
The Full Story
The Colorado Grande Casino sits on Bennett Avenue in Cripple Creek, Colorado, and it has a ghost named Maggie. The most-told story about her is the one nobody can show you.
Security guards say the overnight cameras caught her once, sitting at a slot machine after the casino had closed for the night, a gentleman beside her. They pulled the footage, watched it, and put it away. When someone went back for it, the tape was gone. "Maggie has been taped by the security cameras," the account runs. "Mysteriously, the tapes have 'vanished.'" No one has produced them since. The running joke among staff is that Maggie didn't want to be on file.
She's described the same way across the tellings: an Irish woman of about 25, in turn-of-the-century dress, a white shirtwaist and a long cotton skirt, high-heeled boots, her hair piled atop her head. The Gibson Girl look. You're more likely to smell her than see her. Rose perfume hangs in rooms she isn't in. Her boots echo down the top two floors. From the old third-floor ballroom, the one that doubled as the Masonic Temple, staff say they've heard a soprano singing in an Irish lilt.
The building was a lot of things before it was a casino. The three-story brick structure has held a drug store, a hat shop, a law office, doctors' offices, a hotel, and at one point a mortuary. It dates to the 1890s, when Cripple Creek was the world's greatest gold camp, all mining accidents and fires and labor wars. The ground-floor restaurant is named Maggie's, after her.
In October 2008, a paranormal group spent a night in the building. Around 2:30 in the morning, sitting in the restaurant's furthest room, they reported the rose smell coming on so strong "that you could literally taste it in the air."
Who Maggie was in life, no record says. There's no death, no date, no last name. Just a woman everyone agrees is here, and the one tape that proved it, gone from the office where they locked it away.
