Tabor Opera House

A couple on tour described the man standing beside owner Evelyn Furman. She was alone. Their description matched Horace Tabor, dead a hundred years.

A middle-aged couple took a tour of the Tabor Opera House sometime in the late 1990s, and at one point they asked the owner, Evelyn Furman, who the man standing next to her was. Furman was alone. They described him anyway: heavyset, dark complexion, mustache, a gold watch and chain across his vest. That was a perfect description of Horace Tabor, who had built the place in 1879 and been dead for a hundred years.

Leadville sits at 10,152 feet, the highest incorporated city in North America, and it was one of the rowdiest silver camps in the West when Horace Tabor decided it needed an opera house. He built one in 100 days. It opened November 20, 1879 with a comedy called The Serious Family. Within five years, he'd made and lost one of Colorado's great silver fortunes, divorced his wife Augusta to marry a young widow named Baby Doe, and become a national scandal. He died broke in 1899. Baby Doe died frozen in a cabin at the Matchless Mine in 1935. Their youngest daughter, Silver Dollar, died in Chicago in 1925 after being scalded in a flophouse.

That's a lot of tragedy attached to one building, and the opera house wears it. The main hauntings are documented in pieces over decades. Horace is the one most often described, always in the main seating area or on the stage itself, always fitting Furman's witnesses' description. Furman bought the Tabor in 1955 for $20,000 and ran it until her death in 2011, collecting dozens of accounts from visitors along the way. Musicians setting up for shows have felt someone standing too close behind them.

Oscar Wilde lectured here in 1882, John Philip Sousa conducted, and Buffalo Bill performed. Harry Houdini is said to have used the trap door at center stage for an escape act, though the only evidence of Houdini ever being at the Tabor is a rumor, which is fitting. In the upper balcony, tour guides talk about a man in 19th-century dress who pops up in photos and isn't there in person.

The mood in the building is strange. The Tabor isn't frightening; it's a theater that still hosts plays and tours, with dusty wallpaper, an orchestra pit, and a chandelier that was too heavy for the ceiling so they installed reinforcement in 1881. The ghosts here are the lingering kind, the ones Tammy Taber has called mischievous rather than malevolent. Horace shows up because this place was his proudest thing. He spent a fortune on it when he had a fortune, and he kept a box reserved for himself when he came to town.

The detail that gets me every time is the gold watch. Every witness who saw Horace mentioned it. Tabor actually owned a heavy gold chain across his vest, wore it in every known photograph. Nobody tells their tour guide that unless they actually saw it.