Croke-Patterson Mansion

A 1980s séance at this 1891 Denver mansion led to a sealed basement chamber filled with sea sand. Senator Patterson's wife Kate walks upstairs.

The basement of this Denver mansion has a sealed chamber that nobody has a clean explanation for. A séance in the 1980s pointed the occupants at the cellar, claiming a little girl's remains were walled up there. They broke through. Accounts of what they actually found vary: some versions say nothing, some say ashes, and the most-cited version describes a chamber packed with sea sand, seven hundred miles from the nearest coast. Whatever is or isn't behind that wall, the chamber is still down there at the Croke-Patterson Mansion.

Thomas Croke spent his fortune on the red sandstone pile at 11th and Pennsylvania, completed it in 1891, moved in, and walked out almost immediately. He sold the house, told people it was cursed, and never returned. The senator who bought it next, Thomas Patterson, lived there for decades with his wife Katherine. That quiet stretch ended after Patterson's death, when a subsequent owner brought in two Doberman guard dogs during a renovation. One night both dogs jumped through an upstairs window and died on the sidewalk. Phantom barking from the upper floors is still the most common overnight complaint.

The best guest story at the Patterson Historic Inn, which opened inside the mansion in 2013, involves a heavily pregnant woman who was too tired to roll over in bed. A second woman appeared beside the mattress, took her hand, and helped her turn. "My name is Kate," the woman said. Katherine Patterson went by Kate, and she died in the house.

Architect Brian Higgins bought the property for $565,000 in 2011 and gutted the interior to bring it back as an inn. He hadn't planned to believe anything. Then he and his crew started describing ghostly children in empty rooms, summer afternoons where a room's temperature dropped ten or fifteen degrees in a minute, and one contractor who left the job mid-shift and didn't come back. The stories Higgins collected during that year of construction now function as the inn's unofficial marketing.

Regular guest encounters at the inn today include a figure gliding up and down the main staircase, usually clocked by somebody checking in at the front desk who sees movement out of the corner of an eye. Staff read it as Thomas Patterson himself. He also turns up in the small courtyard between the mansion and the carriage house. The Irish caretaker who worked for the family turns up in the carriage house, and babies have been heard crying from the third floor on nights when no guests with infants are checked in.

A book-length treatment, A Haunted History of Denver's Croke-Patterson Mansion by Ann Alexander Leggett, collects the witness accounts with more care than any ghost tour stop could. Westword has run multiple features on the property over the decades, most of them leaning on staff interviews. Colorado Encyclopedia lists the mansion as one of the best surviving examples of Richardsonian Romanesque residential architecture in the Rocky Mountains, which is worth a minute even if you skip the ghosts.

Take any of it with whatever grain of salt you like. The sand-chamber story is the piece that resists a tidy explanation. Nobody has ever agreed on what's behind that wall, and no one can say why a wealthy man poured his savings into a house and then refused to live in it.