Phantom Canyon Road

In the 1890s, F&CC passengers saw a man walking the tracks, an executed inmate from Cañon City. The canyon's labor-war dead never got off either.

In the 1890s, passengers on the Florence and Cripple Creek narrow-gauge line started reporting a man walking the tracks through the canyon. Drifters on the rail grade weren't unusual. A few of the passengers recognized this one. He was an inmate who had been executed a few days earlier at the Colorado State Penitentiary down in Cañon City, still wearing the prison uniform he'd been put to death in.

That is the story that gave Phantom Canyon Road its name, and the one locals still tell when somebody asks why the thirty miles between Florence and Victor feels wrong after dark. The road follows the bed of the old F&CC, built in 1894 to haul ore out of the Cripple Creek goldfield to the reduction mills downriver. One day after the line opened, a train derailed on it and killed a passenger. That set the tone.

On July 21, 1912, a flash flood ripped through the canyon and washed out twelve bridges, five miles of track, and pieces of several mining towns in a single afternoon. The line was repaired. It ran for a few more years after that. In 1918, the tracks were finally pulled up and the grade was turned over to the county as a public road. Everything you drive past now, the cuts in the granite, the short hand-carved tunnels, the switchbacks climbing out toward Victor, was laid for trains. The Adelaide Bridge along the route is on the National Register of Historic Places.

The prisoner is the famous ghost, but he isn't the only one people talk about on the canyon. Some of the figures seen along the old grade look like prisoners. Others look like miners. That tracks with the canyon's actual history. On January 27, 1904, fifteen men died when the elevator cable inside the Independence Mine, up at the top end of the F&CC line, was sabotaged during the Colorado Labor Wars and the cage fell. Five months later, on June 6, 1904, a bomb planted under the platform of the F&CC depot at Independence went off while non-union miners were waiting for a train. Thirteen of them were killed. This is the railway the road was built on. Nobody knows exactly how many people the canyon took in total. Locals assume it was more than the official count, and most of them assume the dead never got off.

The road is also just a bad road. Thirty miles of unpaved gravel between sheer rock walls, part of the Gold Belt Tour Scenic Byway, passing through a couple of old one-tunnel squeezes with cell service that drops at the first switchback and doesn't come back. Rockslides happen. Flash floods still happen. This drive doesn't need to be haunted to mess with you. The ghost of the hanged prisoner is the cherry on top.

The most honest thing a local will tell you about Phantom Canyon is that nobody drives it at night if they can help it. The scenery is beautiful during the day. Bring water, a spare tire, and a tolerance for tunnels cut by hand into granite walls. If you see the man in the uniform, he's not hitchhiking. Just keep driving.