Grant-Humphreys Mansion

A 42-room Beaux-Arts mansion from 1902, built for Colorado's third Governor. A later owner, oil baron Albert Humphreys, died in a suspicious shooting on the third floor in 1927. Now owned by History Colorado and used for events.

The mansion at 770 Pennsylvania Street was built in 1902 for James Benton Grant, Colorado's third governor, who had made his fortune founding the Omaha and Grant Smelting Company in Leadville during the silver boom. Grant served as governor from 1883 to 1885 and designed the forty-two-room Beaux-Arts neoclassical residence as the center of Denver's elite social life. After Grant's death in 1911, his widow Mary sold the property in 1917 to Albert E. Humphreys, a businessman who had amassed fortunes in lumber, mining, and oil speculation across Oklahoma, Wyoming, and Texas. The Humphreys family would give the mansion its darkest chapter.

On an evening in 1927, Albert Humphreys excused himself from the dinner table, telling his family he was going upstairs to clean his gun. Moments later, a gunshot echoed from the third floor. He was found with a fatal wound to his head. The death was officially ruled accidental, but the circumstances have never been satisfactorily explained. Some accounts link his death to the Teapot Dome Scandal -- the massive government oil-lease corruption case of the 1920s -- suggesting Humphreys chose death rather than testify against his associates. Whether accident, suicide, or something more sinister, the violent end of Albert Humphreys on the third floor is considered the catalyst for the activity that has plagued the mansion ever since.

At least five distinct spirits are thought to inhabit the building. Albert Humphreys himself has been seen traversing the hallways, a presence still lingering near the site of his death. The most frequently encountered ghost is a blonde, curly-haired little girl who appears in doorways on the third floor. Staff member John Andrews identified her as Alice Lucille Humphreys, Albert's daughter and the first child born in the house. Multiple staff members have met her over the years, and visitors report hearing children playing, giggling, and someone singing softly to themselves on the upper floors. Flickering lights, alarm system malfunctions, and sudden temperature drops are commonplace.

In the 1970s, Denver radio station KNUS conducted a live seance inside the mansion. The broadcast captured audio with multiple voices that couldn't be accounted for, including a whisper that said "Still here." The recording became one of Denver's most talked-about paranormal artifacts. More recently, the mansion was featured on the second season of the Travel Channel's Portals to Hell, where investigators explored the building's layered history of death and disturbance.

The remaining unidentified spirits are thought by some to be displaced dead from the adjacent Cheesman Park, which was built over the former Mount Prospect Cemetery. When the botched 1893 cemetery relocation left an estimated two thousand bodies in the ground, the development of the surrounding Capitol Hill neighborhood -- including the land on which the Grant-Humphreys Mansion stands -- may have further disturbed remains. The mansion is now owned by History Colorado and serves as an event venue, but staff who work late evenings report that the five spirits remain very much in residence.