31 Days of Spooky Stuff, October 8: Croke Patterson Mansion

08 Saturday Oct 2016

Posted by Yvonne Montgomery in Ghosts, Haunted Denver

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Not far from my home in Denver’s Capitol Hill is the Croke Patterson Mansion. When the lovely old house was vacant, I often stopped to stare at the upper-story windows, hoping to see a face looking down at me. Alas, I never did, and now the place is known as the Patterson Inn, a 4-star hotel.

Croke Patterson Mansion – Built in 1890 by Thomas B. Croke, this sandstone residence was one of the country’s most elegant homes. Now serving as a [hotel], it is also said to be one of the most haunted.

According to the legend Thomas B. Croke only entered the palatial mansion one time and was so emotionally shaken by “whatever” was there, that he never returned. Just two years later it was sold to Thomas M. Patterson, who’s family kept the home for several decades. Over the next several years, the building served many purposes, including a dance studio, a radio station, and a boarding house before it was converted to an office building. During the renovation to office space in the 1970’s, construction crews began to experience a number of strange occurrences.

After a long days work, they would often return the next day to find that the tasks they had completed the day before had been “undone.” After this had occurred several times, guard dogs were left to protect the property from what the workmen thought might be intruders. However, the next day they found the two Doberman Pinschers dead on the sidewalk after having apparently jumped from a third-story window. Once the renovation to office building was complete, employees almost immediately began to notice equipment, such as typewriters, copy machines, and telephone that mysteriously began to operate by themselves.

When a séance was held to determine who was haunting the building, they found it to be the spirit of a little girl whose body was supposedly entombed in the cellar. However, when the basement was excavated, they found a hidden chamber was found, filled with sea sand, but no remains of a little girl.

A ghostly image has often been sighted gliding up and down the main floor stairway and otherworldly voices have been heard here as well. Thomas Patterson, former owner of the home, is said to have been spied numerous times in the courtyard between the mansion and the carriage house.

When the building still served as an apartment building, occupants on the lower levels were known to complain about wild parties taking place on the third level. But, when these parties were investigated, they would be met with only silent emptiness.

Legends of America http://www.legendsofamerica.com/co-denverghosts.html

Comment on this post and you’ll be entered in the drawing at the end of the month. The prize: a copy of the Wisdom Court Trilogy: Edge of the Shadow; A Signal Shown; All In Bad Time. Good luck!

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Boomer Gothic and a Year of Her Own

14 Thursday Feb 2013

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Barbara Michaels, Bronte sisters, mansions, Mary Stewart, shadows, Victoria Holt

Back in the day, my favorite fiction genre was gothic, and I read as many such novels as I could find. My favorite authors were Mary Stuart, Charlotte and Jane Bronte, Phyllis A. Whitney, Barbara Michaels, Elsie Lee, Dorothy Eden, Victoria Holt, Joan Aiken..the list is long. As an English major in college I read Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, and discovered Anne Radcliffe, Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, more Poe, some of Dickens, Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Stevenson’s Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde. You get the drift.

By the time I got serious about writing, the market for gothics had pretty much dried up, and I was reading mysteries. I decided to write one set in Denver, and after hundreds of years and thousands of revisions, I published two of them, the previously mentioned Finny Aletter mysteries, Scavengers and Obstacle Course (both soon to appear as e-books.)

But, in my heart of hearts, I still yearned for gothics. I wanted to tell myself a story set in an old house where odd things happened, and I wanted to create characters who began to regard each other with suspicion. Dark psychological overtones would match the shadowy corners and somewhere along the line, a scream would split the night. Good times would ensue. Thus was born Wisdom Court.

Set in Boulder, Colorado, Wisdom Court is an institute for accomplished women who have not yet achieved their professional goals. Each is invited to spend a year there (short trips home allowable, but most time is spent in Boulder), all expenses paid. Artist, scientist, writer, whomever the Board chooses, receives a year of her own.

Andrea Bellamy, the protagonist in book I, Edge of the Shadow, is a forensic artist who yearns to paint, and her invitation to Wisdom Court allows her to imagine a new career as a fine artist. Widowed some years earlier, she has seen her daughter through college and now has the opportunity to truly change her life. She takes a leave of absence from her job, rents out her house, and heads for Boulder. She is welcomed at Wisdom Court by the staff and other associates staying there. As she settles into bed that first night, her heart is filled with gratitude and her mind races with excitement. At last she will be able to focus on her artistic dreams. For at least this one year she can put herself first. And then she awakes screaming…

You’ll have to read Edge of the Shadow to find out what happens to Andrea and the other women at Wisdom Court. The book will be published online in the next few months. I’m writing about it now out of curiosity. Having written EOS as well as being two-thirds into the second Wisdom Court book, A Signal Shown, I’m wondering how many fellow gothic fans are out there. I don’t yet have throngs of blog followers, but I’m impatient enough to issue the question anyway: how many readers out there are interested in gothics? The Wisdom Court story arcs through three books, so I’m committed to at least the trilogy. Will I find readers to share in the pleasures? Let me know. I’ll keep writing.