In Brief
At Miramont Castle in Manitou Springs, Colorado, a little girl turns up in the doll room, sometimes singing from a room that's empty when you reach it. Staff don't call the place haunted. They call it inhabited.
The Full Story
At Miramont Castle in Manitou Springs, Colorado, the ghost most people meet is a little girl. She's seen in the doll room, sometimes carrying a doll, and visitors report hearing a child singing in there and finding it empty when they look. Staff and visitors describe the same unsettling thing about her: they can see through her.
The staff don't call the place haunted. They call it inhabited.
The building is strange before you get to any of that. A French-born priest, Father Jean Baptiste Francolon, started building it into a hillside in 1895 for himself and his widowed mother. He crammed nine different architectural styles into one structure, gave it more than forty rooms across four stories, and built rooms with eight and sixteen sides instead of four square corners. The walls are two feet of local green sandstone. Then, in 1900, Francolon left Manitou Springs abruptly and never came back. The stories say scandal. The records mostly say money. He died in New York in 1922.
Seven years after he walked out, the Sisters of Mercy moved tuberculosis patients into the castle and ran a sanitarium there until 1928. Staff today report nuns on the second floor, figures in habits and the rustle of robes, in the part of the building where the sick once lay.
The little girl in the doll room is the one people name most, but she has company. Staff have named two children seen playing in the gardens, Sweet Pea and Charlie. A lady in black is reported staring out of mirrors at people who didn't know she was there. A man in a top hat and frock coat, often said to be Francolon himself, appears in the glass and then is gone.
The chapel is the room people don't like. Visitors report sudden cold there even when the room is warm, and one spirit said to keep to it has been described as "less than nice." One staff member said she felt her hair lifted by something she couldn't see. Another, leaving for the day, heard a child's voice tell her "bye."
