Tarabino Inn

At the Tarabino Inn in Trinidad, Colorado, a guest sat in the parlor turning over old newspaper clippings, stopped on one photograph, and pointed at the face. That, she told the owner, was the man she kept seeing in the house.

The man in the photo was Barney Tarabino. He and his brother John, immigrants from northern Italy, built this U-shaped Italianate home in 1907. The Tarabino brothers ran the Famous Department Store over on West Main Street, and several of them put up houses around town. Barney's is the one the guest recognized, and the suite some accounts call the Walnut Suite is said to be his.

He isn't the only one there. A common account describes a woman in a gown standing at the foot of the stairs, seen there more than anywhere else. No one knows who she is. According to one account, a psychic who walked the house counted at least seven presences in it, including children on the top floor, something in the dining room, and, in what that account calls the Chestnut Suite, "something not human."

There's a spirit the same account nicknames Hector, tied to the smell of cherry tobacco and cigar smoke that drifts through the library with no source. Footsteps climb the stairs. An oven turns itself on and off. Fans switch on. Guests have felt a hand settle on their shoulder.

Owner Teresa Vila calls herself a skeptic, which makes her own list harder to wave off. "People smell cigar smoke in the library, hear a little girl knocking, and see an elderly woman," she says. She doesn't only hear it secondhand. "I've smelled the smoke and seen the shadow of a man walking." The electrical oddities she keeps catching: "The oven's come on, off, on, and off again."

Her answer to all of it is the same flat one. "I just said, 'Cut it out!' and it stopped."

Then there's the photograph, and a guest who never knew Barney Tarabino picking his face out of a clipping and saying she sees it on the stairs.