St. Elmo Ghost Town

St. Elmo, Colorado is one of the best-preserved ghost towns in the state, a mining camp left where it stood high in Chalk Creek Canyon. The story people tell there isn't a scream in the dark. It's a woman in a white gown, watching the empty street from the second-story window of the Home Comfort Hotel.

They think she's Annabelle Stark, and her family is why the town never got the quiet death most ghost towns get.

St. Elmo was settled in the late 1870s and organized as a town in 1880, a silver and gold camp that swelled to around 2,000 people, with five hotels, saloons, dance halls, and the railroad running up to the Alpine Tunnel above town. The Starks arrived about 1881. Anton ran a mine section; his wife Anna ran the Home Comfort Hotel and the general store. They raised three children there: Tony, Roy, and Annabelle.

Then the town died around them. Train service ended in 1922, the rails came up in 1926, and the post office closed in 1952. Roy died in 1934, their mother soon after. Tony and Annabelle stayed. They slept in their parents' old rooms, kept the keys to the hotel and the store, and would not sell.

By the end, locals had stopped calling her Annabelle. They called her Dirty Annie: tangled hair, filthy clothes, and a rifle she carried up and down the main street to keep people away from the town she would not give up. She was carried out to a nursing home in 1958 and died in 1960. Tony died shortly before.

There's no record proving any of it. The lore rests on stories passed down. A skier crossing at dusk in the 1970s is said to have looked up and seen a woman in a long white gown framed in the hotel window; she seemed to acknowledge the skier, then vanished, and the building was found locked. Guides and visitors say tools left stored at night turn up scattered by morning, sometimes from a padlocked closet.

The ghost of St. Elmo isn't a stranger. It's the last resident, still standing guard.