Riverdale Road

Eleven miles of road between Thornton and Brighton with a ghost jogger, a phantom Camaro, a hanging tree, and one real 1975 mansion fire.

At 1 a.m. on November 28, 1975, a two-story brick mansion at 9190 Riverdale Road burned to the ground. The house dated to the 1860s, empty at the time of the fire, so nobody died. But the fire is the one documented event on the eleven miles of asphalt between Thornton and Brighton that the rest of the Riverdale Road legend hangs on, and it's why the story refuses to die.

Riverdale Road is straight. It runs past horse pastures, cottonwoods, and a handful of old farmhouses in the South Platte bottomland. It is not obviously sinister. Then you start asking people who grew up in Thornton about it, and the list starts. A jogger in running clothes who taps on car windows at 2 a.m. and is gone when the driver looks back. A black Camaro with one working headlight that chases you down the road and disappears at the bridge. A woman in a white dress who stands on the shoulder with her thumb out, gets in the car, and isn't there when you turn to talk to her.

The ghost children have their own story. Local lore says a boy was killed walking to school along Riverdale years ago, and since then the street signs on the road have occasionally been found smeared with dried blood and small handprints. Drivers also report seeing small kids playing in the ditches at dusk who aren't there by the time anybody stops. Other versions of the children story circulate too, including a school bus crash nobody can pin a date on, but the Thornton Police have no record of one.

Then there is the tree. Locals describe it as an old hanging tree behind what used to be a dairy, where in one version women accused of witchcraft were strung up in the 1800s. Other versions mention a man on the road who lost his mind, set his own mansion on fire while his family was sleeping inside, and never made it out himself. Drivers have reported seeing bodies hanging from the trees along Riverdale during the full moon. There is also the stretch locals call the Gates of Hell, a gap in an iron fence that used to front a private drive. None of it is documented. All of it shows up in the same breath when somebody lists what's wrong with Riverdale.

The Denver Public Library's special collections actually wrote up the 1975 fire. The house that burned was the David Wolpert place. Wolpert came west in 1859 and farmed the Platte bottom into the 1860s, married Catherine Henderson in 1864, and built the brick house on the river. The fire happened a century later, in a building his descendants had already left. Nobody was inside. The ruins stuck around long enough to turn 9190 Riverdale into the legend's mailing address.

The Thornton Police have a quote they use when reporters call. Matt Barnes, a department spokesman, told 9News: "We are aware of the urban legends out there regarding this road and how it might be haunted. However, we have not been able to remember or locate any calls for service worth mentioning that would be in any way related to these urban legends." Translation: no bodies, no missing persons, no bus crash. Just a lot of people saying they saw something.

That doesn't mean the road is nothing. Riverdale is old South Platte bottomland that was farmed and fought over before Thornton existed as a suburb, and the sense that something in the landscape hasn't moved on is pretty close to universal among people who grew up driving it at night. You can spend five minutes parked on the shoulder and talk yourself into anything. The strongest argument for Riverdale being haunted is how little effort anyone ever needed to get the stories going.