TLDR
Emma Crawford was buried on Red Mountain in 1891, moved by a railroad in 1912, and found in pieces behind a Manitou Springs house in 1929.
The Full Story
On August 4, 1929, two boys climbing on Red Mountain in Manitou Springs found a human skull. Marshal David S. Banks tracked down the rest of it a few days later. Wrapped in a bundle behind a house on Waltham Avenue were a set of bones, a coffin handle, and strands of dark hair. The bundle was what was left of Emma Crawford, and it had just washed down the mountain after thirty-eight years underground.
Emma was born March 24, 1863, in South Royalston, Massachusetts, and by fifteen she could play complex classical pieces on piano, violin, viola, cello, and mandolin. Her mother, Jeanette Crawford, was a music teacher and a serious pianist in her own right. Around 1889, with Emma coughing up blood from tuberculosis, the two of them moved to Manitou Springs for the mineral water and thin mountain air. Emma climbed Red Mountain constantly, nicknamed it "Red Chief," and made her fiancé Wilhelm Hildenbrand, an engineer on the Pikes Peak Cog Railroad, promise that if she died, he would bury her at the summit.
She died December 4, 1891, at twenty-eight. Twelve pallbearers carried her coffin up the mountain. The Crawfords were spiritualists, and at the service Emma's mother played a selection of piano pieces described in one account as "peculiarly sweet melody and weird harmony." Hildenbrand kept the promise. Emma went into the summit.
She did not stay there. In 1912, a railroad company building a line to the top of Red Mountain decided Emma's grave was in the way and moved the coffin to another spot on the mountain. That spot turned out to be in the path of every hard rain that came through Manitou Springs for the next seventeen years. By August 1929, what was left of the casket was scattered down the slope and the bones had ended up in that bundle behind the Colorado House on Waltham.
The remains sat in storage for two years. Eventually Bill Crosby, one of Emma's original pallbearers from 1891, got them down to Crystal Valley Cemetery and reinterred them in an unmarked grave. For seventy-three years nobody put a stone on it. Historic Manitou Springs finally placed a memorial in 2004.
The ghost stories line up with exactly the part of the story that got disturbed. Hikers on Red Mountain report seeing a woman in a red dress near the summit, which is what Emma was known for wearing when she was alive and climbing the mountain by herself. People also hear piano music on the mountain at night, a detail that lines up with both Emma and her mother. The summit is the spot she asked to be buried in, not the gulch where her coffin ended up, so the lore treats her as still trying to get back.
Manitou Springs runs with it. Since 1995, the town has held the Emma Crawford Coffin Races every October, with teams pushing custom coffins down Manitou Avenue while a woman dressed as Emma rides inside. The races are silly and the town knows it. The story underneath is not. A concert pianist in her late twenties died of tuberculosis, got buried where she wanted, got moved, and ended up in pieces on somebody's lawn. If Red Mountain feels like it hasn't settled, that's because nothing about her burial ever did.
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