Red Rocks Amphitheatre

The best-known ghost at Red Rocks Amphitheatre, the red-sandstone venue near Morrison, Colorado, is the one out on the rocks. The one the working crew keeps meeting is somewhere else, and he's stranger for it.

Crew members setting up for shows describe the same figure turning up in the restricted backstage areas, the off-limits parts of the stage where no one should be standing. They tell it the same way each time: an old miner, roughly five foot five, a long white beard, a battered brown hat, a bottle in one hand they take for whiskey. He's grouchy, by their account, but he doesn't threaten anyone. He's there, and then he isn't. No one ties him to a name, a death, or any real mining accident. He's just a specific man who shows up where a man shouldn't be, reported by people who clock in at one of the busiest outdoor venues in the country.

The famous one is the Hatchet Lady, and her story splits depending on who's telling it. Most accounts put her at the highest point of the rocks as an angry old woman on foot, often named as Old Ms. Johnson, a former Morrison resident, said to scare off young couples. Other tellings make her headless, riding a specter horse with a bloody hatchet, a guardian of the rocks. No record backs any version of her up.

The third haunting sits in the oldest building on the site. The Trading Post was built in 1931, a decade before the amphitheatre was dedicated in 1941. Employees there report cold spots, a male voice whispering their names, and scratching at the doorways near closing. "Usually, it's just getting dark," one Trading Post employee said. "[We all hear] scratching, like dogs scratching on doorways." In the boiler room, they say door handles shake on their own and locks open themselves. And souvenir mugs printed with the name "Randy" are said to fall off the shelf and break, pretty regularly.

The Hatchet Lady is the one everyone repeats. The miner is the one the crew keeps seeing.