Lumber Baron Inn

The Lumber Baron Inn in Denver's Highlands neighborhood rents out a third-floor room called the Valentine Suite. It's a working bed and breakfast, and most of its ghost stories settle into that one room. It's also the room where two young women were killed in 1970.

On October 13 of that year, Cara Knoche, who was 17, was found dead in her apartment in the building. She had been strangled. The same day, in the same bedroom, 18-year-old Marianne Weaver died of what the police records call an "apparent gun shot wound." No one was ever charged. Colorado's official cold-case database still lists both files as unsolved, more than fifty years later, and the Denver Police still ask the public for information on each one.

The mansion wasn't always rented rooms. A Scottish lumber magnate named John Mouat built it in 1890 for his wife and five children, using cherry, sycamore, oak, and walnut from his own company. The top floor held what was once the largest private ballroom in the city. He lost his fortune in the Silver Crash of 1893 and left a decade later, and over the years that followed the house was chopped into apartments, more than a dozen of them by World War II, until it was condemned. Knoche was renting the room that is now the Valentine Suite when she died.

Walter Keller and his wife bought the condemned property in 1991 and spent four years restoring it. Guests and staff have reported the two women ever since, in the Valentine Room, in the hallway, on the stairs, along with voices, footsteps, and cold spots. Some accounts add a flapper in the ballroom and the smell of pipe tobacco. Netflix sent three investigators for its series 28 Days Haunted in 2022.

The story most people tell is that Weaver walked in mid-crime and was killed because she saw something. That part isn't in the cold-case files. What the files hold is plainer and worse: two young women, dead in one room on one day, and a case no one has closed.