St. Elmo Ghost Town

Dirty Annie Stark guarded St. Elmo with a shotgun until 1958. Locals say she still does. Doors slam, footsteps climb the hotel stairs.

Annabelle Stark wandered St. Elmo with a shotgun loaded over one shoulder and tangled hair down her back, and locals stopped calling her Annabelle. They called her Dirty Annie. She was the last Stark to hold the town, and after she was taken out of it in 1958, the doors she used to bar shut started slamming on their own.

St. Elmo sits at 9,961 feet in the Sawatch Range, about 20 miles southwest of Buena Vista. It went up fast in 1880 after silver strikes drew miners into Chalk Creek Canyon, and it went quiet just as fast. The Denver, South Park & Pacific railway pulled its tracks in 1922. The post office closed in 1952. Her brother Tony died first. Annabelle was moved to a nursing home in 1958 and died there in 1960.

St. Elmo is one of Colorado's best-preserved ghost towns, and the reason isn't just that the buildings are still standing. It's that the Starks never let go of them. The family had run the Home Comfort Hotel, the general store, and the telegraph office since the 1880s, and Annabelle and Tony held the keys until the end. They slept in the same rooms their parents had slept in. They refused to sell. When locals tried to visit in their final years, Annabelle would meet them at the door with the shotgun.

The Home Comfort Hotel is the center of the haunting now. In the 1970s, a skier passing through at night looked up at the second-floor window and saw a woman in a white gown watching him. He went back the next day to check, and every window and every door in the hotel was locked. Since then, guides leading summer tours say guests regularly stop in the hallway because they hear someone walking behind them. Families visiting the hotel have described their grandchildren complaining about a 20-degree temperature drop in an upstairs room. Tools left neatly at night in the general store turn up scattered the next morning.

The Stark family home, next to the hotel on the main street, has its own reputation. Doors slam in empty rooms. According to local lore, Annabelle lost the man she was engaged to when he eloped with another woman, and she was never the same. Take that part with a grain of salt. The accounts from people who actually met her describe something else. She was kind to the handful of tourists who still came up the canyon. She fed stray dogs. She just didn't want anyone touching her town.

That tracks with what people describe now. The ghost of St. Elmo isn't a scream in the dark. It's a woman with a shotgun, standing at the top of the stairs, waiting for you to leave.