St. Elmo Ghost Town

One of Colorado's best-preserved ghost towns, founded in 1880 during the gold and silver mining boom in Chaffee County. At its peak, nearly 2,000 people lived here at 9,961 feet elevation in the Sawatch Range. The railroad stopped service in 1922, effectively ending the town.

St. Elmo is the best-preserved ghost town in Colorado, sitting at over 9,900 feet of elevation roughly twenty miles southwest of Buena Vista in the heart of the Sawatch Range. The town was founded in 1880 when the Denver, South Park and Pacific Railroad pushed through the area to service the gold and silver mines of the upper Arkansas Valley. At its peak in the 1880s and 1890s, St. Elmo had a population of nearly 2,000, with hotels, saloons, a school, a town hall, and a general store lining the main street. When the mines began to play out and the railroad ceased operations in 1922, the town emptied rapidly. By the 1950s, St. Elmo was essentially abandoned -- but one resident refused to leave.

The most famous ghost of St. Elmo is Annabelle "Dirty Annie" Stark. Her parents, Anton and Anna Stark, arrived in 1881 with the Pacific Railroad. Anton worked as a section boss in the mines while Anna ran the Home Comfort Hotel on Poplar Street and the general store. Anna was known as a cruel and controlling woman who never allowed her three children -- Roy, Tony, and Annabelle -- to mingle with what she considered the simple townfolk. Annabelle grew up beautiful and passionately devoted to St. Elmo, but after her mother's death, the once-impeccable Home Comfort Hotel fell into shambles under her care. As the town's population dwindled to nearly nothing, Annabelle lost her grip on reality. The few remaining residents began calling her "Dirty Annie" as she appeared in filthy clothing with tangled hair, patrolling the empty streets with a shotgun slung over her shoulder, fiercely guarding a town that existed mostly in her memory.

After Annabelle's death, the hotel was left to a family friend whose grandchildren were playing inside the building when all of the doors suddenly slammed shut simultaneously and the temperature dropped twenty degrees. The children screamed and cried until the room slowly warmed back to normal temperature and the door released, swinging open on its own. A woman skiing down Poplar Street at dusk saw a lovely woman in a long white gown staring out of the second-story window of the Home Comfort Hotel -- though she knew the owner was on vacation and no one should have been inside. When the skier turned back for a second look, the woman in the window lowered her head, nodded, and vanished. Annabelle is said to roam the streets of St. Elmo at night with her shotgun, just as she did in life, and visitors have reported the sensation of being watched from the windows of the old hotel.

Today St. Elmo is accessible by car during summer months and draws thousands of visitors who come to photograph its remarkably intact buildings. The town's combination of genuine preservation, mountain isolation, and the vivid legend of Dirty Annie make it one of the most atmospheric haunted destinations in the American West.