Lumber Baron Inn

A Queen Anne Victorian mansion built in 1890, now operating as an inn and event venue in Denver's Potter-Highlands neighborhood. The mansion gained notoriety after two young women were murdered inside in 1970 -- a case that remains unsolved.

In 1890, Scottish immigrant John Mouat built a Queen Anne mansion at 2555 West 37th Avenue as a showcase for his Denver-based lumber company. Mouat had arrived in Colorado in 1873 at age twenty-five and built his fortune supplying the materials for over two hundred homes and buildings across North Denver between 1889 and 1892. The mansion featured elaborate woodwork in cherry, sycamore, oak, and walnut from his own mill, all designed to impress potential clients. It was crowned by what was then the largest private ballroom in the city. The Mouat family -- John, his wife Amelia, and their five children -- lived in elegance until the lumber industry declined and the house passed through a series of owners.

By the late 1960s, the once-grand mansion had been carved into over twenty cramped apartments and deteriorated into a tenement. On October 13, 1970, police discovered the bodies of two young women in one of the tiny rental units. Cara Lee Knoche, just seventeen years old -- she had turned seventeen only two days earlier on October 11 -- had been sexually assaulted and strangled, her body found stuffed under the bed. Her friend Marianne Weaver, eighteen, had apparently arrived during or just after the attack and was shot and killed by the assailant. More than fifty years later, the double murder remains completely unsolved. No suspect has ever been identified or charged.

The mansion sat condemned for two decades until Maureen and Walter Keller purchased it in 1991 and spent four years restoring the eight-thousand-square-foot house to its Victorian grandeur, reopening it as the Lumber Baron Inn and Gardens bed and breakfast. Almost immediately, guests and staff began encountering things they could not explain. At least six distinct spirits are said to inhabit the building. The ghosts of Cara Knoche and Marianne Weaver have been seen in the Valentine Room -- the suite built where their murder took place -- as well as on the staircase and in the hallway near their former apartment. Cold spots and unexplained noises are reported throughout the inn. A female spirit in flapper-era clothing from the 1920s has been witnessed, along with the apparition of a maid and male figures believed to be former residents or family members. Guests have reported door handles rattling violently in the middle of the night, particularly in certain rooms known for the phenomenon.

Spirit Paranormal, a Denver-based investigation team, conducted two separate investigations in 2011 and 2012. During spirit box communications, the team claimed to have received the same name both times -- the alleged identity of the killer -- though they have never publicly released it. In 2022, the Lumber Baron Inn was featured prominently on Netflix's 28 Days Haunted, a series based on Ed and Lorraine Warren's theory that twenty-eight days of isolation at a haunted location allows the boundary between the living and the dead to thin. Paranormal investigator Shane Pittman, previously of the Travel Channel's The Holzer Files, spent an extended investigation inside the mansion. A producer staying overnight during filming reported someone knocking persistently on her door in the middle of the night -- the room she occupied is specifically known among staff for this phenomenon. The Lumber Baron Inn remains open to guests willing to sleep in one of Denver's most actively haunted buildings, where a violent unsolved crime and over a century of history converge.