In Brief
At the Grant-Humphreys Mansion in Denver, the oil tycoon Albert Humphreys shot himself the night before he was due to testify in the Teapot Dome scandal. Of the five ghosts said to walk the house, he's the only one with a name, and he's looking for someone to hear that he was innocent.
The Full Story
At the Grant-Humphreys Mansion in Denver, the story goes that a man still walks the corridors with part of his head gone. People who tell it say he stops them to talk, and what he wants is for someone to believe he was innocent. They know exactly who he is.
He's Albert E. Humphreys, the oil magnate they called the King of the Wildcatters, who bought the house in 1917. The mansion was already grand by then. Boal & Harnois built it in 1902 for James Grant, a smelting engineer who'd been Colorado's third governor, and it ran to 30 rooms across roughly 18,000 square feet, with a ballroom, a solarium, and a two-lane bowling alley in the basement.
What put Humphreys in the corridors was Teapot Dome. He had sold oil through a shell company tied to the bribery scandal that would land a sitting cabinet secretary in federal prison, and Congress summoned him to testify. He never made it to the stand. On May 8, 1927, somewhere on the third floor, a hunting rifle went off and took away his lower jaw. He died the next day.
Accounts differ on the moment. Some say he'd excused himself from a dinner to clean his gun; others say he was packing for his mountain lodge. The Denver papers called it an accident. Most people who knew him did not. At the Congressional investigation, a man named A.A. King testified, "I know that he took his life brooding over this affair to shield some men of affairs."
He isn't the only one. Four more spirits are reported here, unnamed, often blamed on the old Mount Prospect graveyard nearby. But Albert is the one people describe, the one still arguing his case to a room.
Here's the part that stays with you. That two-lane bowling alley in the basement was later converted into an indoor shooting range. The house where a rifle ended him now keeps a room for firing them.
