Hamill House Museum

An opera actress in Priscilla Hamill's upstairs bedroom saw a Victorian dress swish past the doorway. She was alone on the second floor.

An actress practicing opera in Priscilla Hamill's upstairs bedroom saw a Victorian dress swish past the doorway. She was the only person on the second floor. She didn't finish the song.

The ghost story keeps getting retold about the Hamill House Museum at 305 Argentine Street in Georgetown. It's a thin story. One unnamed witness, one glimpse, one dress that wasn't attached to anyone. But it's the detail that sticks, because the house itself is basically a preserved museum of the people who lived there. Walk through it and you're looking at fixtures and furnishings the Hamill family used before the silver crash. If any Victorian-era dresses were going to swish past doorways in Colorado, this is where they'd do it.

The Hamill family made its fortune in Georgetown silver, the "Silver Queen of the Rockies," during the boom years of the 1870s and 1880s. The house dates to 1867, one of the oldest in town, and William Arthur Hamill turned it into the home his fortune allowed him. Then the Silver Panic of 1893 collapsed the price of silver overnight, and the Hamills lost nearly everything. The family hung on to the house for another generation, but the money was gone, and because the money was gone the house stopped changing. Nobody renovated. Nobody redecorated. The rooms you walk through today are essentially the rooms the family left behind when the mines shut, frozen not by preservation effort so much as by a sudden, permanent lack of funds.

That's the detail that makes the ghost story unusually plausible. In most haunted houses you're looking at a restoration, a best-guess recreation of what a room may have looked like. At the Hamill House, the dress in the closet is probably the actual dress. The bedroom Priscilla used is still Priscilla's bedroom, with what's left of Priscilla's things in it.

Paranormal investigators who have worked the house say they get flashlight responses to questions in the upstairs bedrooms. That's a parlor trick that works in a lot of old houses on loose thresholds, and it convinces nobody who isn't already convinced. The more interesting claim is the one the actress reported during an independent film shoot: a full-body apparition in period clothing, seen in the exact room associated with Priscilla Hamill. No reveal-all investigation has topped it in the years since.

What's unusual about this place is how little the ghost story actually needs to do. Most haunted-house tours rely on the building being empty, dusty, neglected, and then dressing up that decay as spookiness. The Hamill House is the opposite. Historic Georgetown, Inc. runs it as a museum, and the preservation is unusually intact precisely because it isn't preservation, it's abandonment frozen at the moment the silver money stopped.

Tours are by appointment through Historic Georgetown, Inc. at (303) 569-2840, donation admission. If you go looking for the ghost, go in the afternoon with the curator and ask her where the actress was standing. The answer is specific. The bedroom is still there.