Hamill House Museum

At the Hamill House Museum in Georgetown, Colorado, the story goes that an actress slipped upstairs to warm up her opera voice in Priscilla Hamill's old bedroom while a film crew worked below her. Mid-phrase, she watched a Victorian dress flit past the doorway. Full skirt, moving on its own, no one inside it. Then she learned she'd been the only person on the second floor the whole time.

One glimpse, one dress, one room. Nobody at the house ties it to a name, but the dress crosses Priscilla's bedroom, and the room is associated with her.

The reason it lands is that the bedroom is real. The Hamill House isn't a reconstruction with period props trucked in to look the part. It's the actual room, with the family's own furnishings still in it, frozen the way they were left.

It froze because the money ran out all at once. William Arthur Hamill, a silver-mine owner, bought the house in 1874 and turned it into a showpiece. Around 1879 he added a conservatory, gas lighting, central heating, walnut woodwork, and a six-seater privy with two doors, one for the family and one for the staff. His fortune came out of Georgetown during the boom that earned the town its nickname, the Silver Queen of Colorado.

Then the Silver Crash of 1893 collapsed the price of silver overnight. The mines closed, Hamill left for Denver, and the house went quiet. No later owner could afford to modernize it, so the rooms stayed essentially the way the Hamills had them. Ralph and Edith Dick bought the property in 1954 and opened it as a museum, and Historic Georgetown now runs it.

The family left one more thing behind. William Hamill is a direct ancestor of actor Mark Hamill, several generations back.

But the part people pass around is upstairs, in the room nobody changed. The dress that crossed Priscilla's bedroom crossed the real one, with her things still in it, and the actress was alone the whole time.