Red Mountain - Emma Crawford's Grave

Emma Crawford came from Massachusetts in the 1880s hoping the Colorado air would cure her tuberculosis. She asked to be buried at the top of Red Mountain, 7,300 feet up. The town of Manitou Springs still hosts a coffin race in her honor every fall.

Emma Crawford was a celebrated young concert pianist who moved to Manitou Springs, Colorado, in 1889, hoping the mountain air and mineral springs would cure her tuberculosis. Despite the town's reputation as a health resort, Emma's condition worsened. Before she died on December 4, 1891, she made a single request: to be buried at the summit of Red Mountain, which she had loved for its sweeping views of Pikes Peak and the Garden of the Gods. Twelve men carried her coffin up the steep mountain trail, honoring her wish and laying her to rest near the summit she had so admired.

Emma's grave on Red Mountain was disturbed twice in the decades that followed. First, when the landowner decided to build an incline railway on the mountainside, her remains were exhumed and reburied on the other side of the mountain. The second burial was reportedly done carelessly -- not very deep, covered with little more than loose dirt and rocks. Years of harsh winters and heavy spring rains eroded the shallow grave. On August 4, 1929, two boys found a human skull on the slopes of Red Mountain. Marshal David S. Banks of Manitou investigated and discovered human bones wrapped in a bundle along with the handle of a coffin. Emma's remains had come racing down the mountainside, nearly forty years after her burial, in what became one of the most macabre incidents in Manitou Springs history.

One of Emma's original pallbearers, Bill Crosby, took responsibility for her scattered remains. She was eventually interred at Crystal Valley Cemetery, and in 2004, Historic Manitou Springs, Inc. provided Emma with a memorial stone in the approximate vicinity of where her bones had been found. But locals say Emma's spirit never truly left Red Mountain. Hikers on the mountain trails have reported seeing a young woman in Victorian dress standing on the slopes and gazing out over the valley, only to vanish when approached. The wind on Red Mountain sometimes carries the faint sound of piano music on certain evenings, attributed to the gifted pianist who loved the mountain so deeply.

In 1995, the Manitou Springs Chamber of Commerce transformed Emma's story into a celebration by launching the Emma Crawford Coffin Races and Festival, the first coffin races in the nation. Each October, costumed impersonators of Emma ride in coffin-like contraptions pulled by teams of four mourners down Manitou Avenue, drawing thousands of spectators to this eccentric mountain town. The festival has become one of the most popular Halloween-season events in Colorado, a joyful tribute to the young woman whose love for Red Mountain outlasted her life and, some say, even her death.