Miramont Castle

A French priest built a 14,000 sq ft, nine-style castle in Manitou Springs in 1895. Most rooms have no right angles. Haunted since the nuns left.

Most rooms at Miramont Castle don't have four square corners. The floor plan has pentagons, hexagons, octagons, one room with sixteen sides, and a staircase that climbs past a stained-glass window to nowhere. The house was built in 1895 by Father Jean Baptiste Francolon, a French-born Catholic priest with aristocratic money, to impress his mother, who had just arrived in America and was expected to stay. She stayed three years.

Francolon picked nine different architectural styles and used all of them. Wikipedia's entry lists the verified ones: English Tudor, Flemish stepped gables, Byzantine, Roman, Moorish, Venetian, Chateauesque, Romanesque, and Elizabethan. The exterior of the house shows most of them at once. The interior runs heavy on the Moorish and Romanesque elements, with a 400-ton sandstone fireplace that required the first reinforced concrete pour west of the Mississippi.

The haunting accounts start when the Sisters of Mercy took the building in 1907 and operated it as a sanitarium for tuberculosis patients. Manitou Springs was a TB destination at the time because of the mineral water and the altitude. People came to recover, and a lot of them didn't. Several years of hospice use left the building with more resident deaths than most private houses accumulate in a century. The Sisters ran the sanitarium until 1928.

The ghost most often named is Francolon himself. Staff describe a man in black clerical robes seen on the second-floor balcony looking down into the Great Hall, usually at dusk, never speaking. A second figure, often called "the nun," gets reported in the chapel and on the north staircase. One docent quoted in the Denver Gazette said she stopped doing solo tours of the third floor after a child's laugh came from an empty doorway three different times on one shift.

In summer, visitors standing in the Queen's Parlor describe a sudden drop that isn't from the HVAC. Staff have confirmed the system doesn't feed that room at the temperature guests describe. A small medicine shelf in the old sanitarium wing has items that shift overnight. Museum staff stopped resetting the shelf because the shift is the exhibit now.

The 2025 Denver Gazette piece covered a new exhibit on Zebulon Pike's connection to the region that the castle added in November. The reporter spent time in the building and described hearing footsteps on the floor above her while she was alone in the Drawing Room. She wasn't writing a ghost story.

Manitou Springs is saturated with haunted-building claims. The Cliff House down the street. The Briarhurst Manor. The Old Stone Church a block away. Something about the mineral water, the altitude, or a hundred years of Victorian tuberculosis tourism makes the whole town read this way.

The castle operates as a museum today, run by the Manitou Springs Historical Society. Admission is low and the tours are self-guided. The nine-sided staircase still climbs to the window that leads nowhere.