Peabody-Whitehead Mansion

A dozen spirits share Denver's 1889 Peabody-Whitehead Mansion, including a maid who fell down the back stairs in 1895 and an unwired chandelier.

The chandelier in the Peabody-Whitehead Mansion flickered so often that the owners finally called an electrician to fix it. The electrician almost fell off his ladder. He'd opened up the fixture and discovered the chandelier wasn't connected to any power at all.

At least a dozen spirits are supposed to share the mansion, which is a lot for one Queen Anne house on Grant Street. The building has been called Denver's most haunted for decades, and the people who have tried to run restaurants, bars, offices, and apartments out of it over the last seventy years have mostly agreed that something in the place does not want to be left alone.

Dr. William Riddick Whitehead built it in 1889. He was a battlefield surgeon who had patched soldiers together in two wars, for the Russian Army in the Crimean and for Virginia in the American Civil War, before settling in Denver and becoming one of the city's most prominent physicians. He hired Frank Edbrooke, who designed the Brown Palace and the Oxford Hotel, to draw the place up in Red Rock Canyon stone. Whitehead died in the mansion in 1902. Colorado Governor James Peabody moved in the next year and used it as an unofficial governor's residence through 1904, because the state didn't have one of its own.

The ghost stories start with a servants' staircase at the back of the house. In 1895, a young maid fell down it and died. People who have walked those back stairs since describe the same sequence. A sudden cold presence rushes past. The sound of feet. Then a sickening thud at the bottom. No body, no impact, just the sound, and the chill after.

The basement has its own story. A waitress from the mid-century bar era is said to have killed herself down there, and employees working late have reported the cries of a baby coming from somewhere in the stone foundation. During the restaurant years, kitchen equipment and furniture flew across rooms regularly enough that the owners stopped trying to explain it. A woman is said to have died in the building waiting for a fiancé who never came, and she still turns up in the upstairs hallways.

In 2012, Zak Bagans and the Ghost Adventures crew filmed an episode inside the mansion. The show is what it is, but the list of complaints that long-term tenants had filed about the place over the years lined up with the episode's findings better than anyone wanted to admit. The local legend about Whitehead is that the soldiers who died under his care in Crimea followed him home to Grant Street and never left.

The current owners bought the mansion in 2013 and spent more than a decade rebuilding it into eight luxury apartments at 1128 Grant. They kept the skeleton of the 1889 structure and replaced almost everything else. Whatever was in the house before the renovation, by most accounts, did not leave with the old plumbing.