Tabor Opera House

At the Tabor Opera House in Leadville, Colorado, a quiet couple lingered after one of Evelyn Furman's tours and asked if she'd ever seen anything strange in the building. She said no. Then the man told her, seriously, that he'd watched a heavy-set, middle-aged man stand right next to her the whole time she was talking. Dark-complected, a mustache, a gold watch and chain across his vest. Right there under the balcony, near a pillar.

Furman saw no one. But she wrote down what the stranger described, and the description stopped her cold. "It fit H.A.W. Tabor perfectly," she put it. "Could it really have been Horace Tabor?"

Horace Tabor built the place. He was Leadville's first mayor, then a U.S. senator, and he made one of Colorado's great silver fortunes before he divorced his first wife to marry Baby Doe McCourt in a scandal the whole country followed. He put up the opera house in 1879, finished in 100 days, with 16-inch brick walls and 72 gas jets for light. It opened that November with a comedy. He died in 1899, broke.

Furman knew the building better than anyone alive. She bought it for $20,000 in 1955 to keep it from being torn down for a parking lot, and ran it herself for some 60 years, climbing onto the roof to tar leaks into her 70s. She owned it until she died in 2011. And in all that time, the one figure a visitor put beside her wore the gold chain Tabor wears in every photograph of him.

The Tabor has a wider reputation now as one of the West's most haunted theaters, the kind that collects stories. Tabor himself is even said to turn up across town at the Delaware Hotel, where ghost hunters claimed a poker game with him in the library.

But the account Furman left is the one with the watch. A stranger who'd never met Horace Tabor, describing the chain he never took off, on a man only he could see.