A cannibal, killer in the attic and headless chicken: Real-life horror stories of Colorado

Colorado, like the broader West, is rooted in myth. In legends that seem to grow larger as the years go on.

But somewhere between the colorful narratives are truths, or half-truths. Stories stranger than fiction — and also more terrifying than any author could spin.

Ahead of Halloween, what better time to return to these?

Cheesman Park’s lost souls

It’s one of Denver’s worst-kept secrets, a dark legacy beneath the surface of a sunny green space.

Cheesman Park took on its modern reputation for jogging, cycling and dog-walking starting in the early 1900s. The city’s long dream was realized: a cemetery dating to 1858 — to be the final resting place for some of Denver’s early settlers — was finally a park for generations of open air-seeking residents to come.

But the dead never left.

In 1893, an undertaker named Edward McGovern was hired by city government to begin removing a reported 5,000 bodies from the land. McGovern would do so at a per-body rate.

Soon, a scam reached the pages of The Denver Republican. “THE WORK OF GHOULS,” read the top of the paper.

The article detailed McGovern and his men dismembering corpses and placing parts in child-sized coffins to earn double or triple the pay.

The work was stopped, never to be finished. The city carried on with park development.

It’s believed thousands of unmarked graves remain around Cheesman Park. This century has seen grim discoveries — including in 2010, when workers upgrading sprinklers uncovered three skeletons.

‘The Colorado Cannibal’

Some sources refer to him as Alferd Packer, others Alfred Packer. The world came to know him by another name: “the Colorado Cannibal.”

Packer is “perhaps the most sensational character in Colorado history,” historian Tom Noel said in a History Colorado podcast that explored some of the overlooked nuances of Packer’s case.

The courthouse in Lake City tells the story of that case. It swiftly concluded with a judge ordering Packer to be hanged until he was “dead, dead, dead.”

The judge pictured Packer by a stream “as pure and beautiful as ever traced by the finger of God upon the bosom of the earth. ... Your every surrounding was calculated to impress upon your heart and nature the omnipotence of deity and the helplessness of your own feeble life. In this goodly favored spot you conceived your murderous designs.”

After the harsh winter of 1874 in the San Juan Mountains, the bodies of five mine-seeking, ill-prepared explorers were found dismembered and stripped of flesh. Packer was the lone survivor of the group. Judging by the missing meat, it was no mystery how he avoided starvation.

Packer indeed confessed to cannibalism. The criminal point of murder was a point explored in the History Colorado podcast, along with the court of public opinion. Packer would forever be known by such names in The Rocky Mountain News: “man eater,” “mad man” and “poisonous reptile.”

Spider House tragedy

Between tall pines in Grand Lake sits an old, log home of intricate design, railings of curved wood like a spider’s web. This was to be the dream home of Warren Gregg, a woodworking pioneer from the Midwest, and his wife, Mary O’Brien.

The home is now remembered as the scene of a nightmare.

History recalls a mother’s tormented soul. “Despair finally got the best of her,” reads an account from Grand Lake Area Historical Society.

It was “a sunny Sunday in 1904,” according to the society, when Mary O’Brien turned a gun on her four young children and then herself.

The society has led tours to the house, noting the still-standing trees: “The tall pines moan their mournful song as they sway to and fro in the winter wind ...”

The haunting of Hotel Colorado

Colorado’s most famous hotel tied to horror might be the one atop a hill in Estes Park. The Stanley, of course, inspired Stephen King’s “The Shining.”

But paranormal investigators have long looked to another historic hotel in the mountains.

In Glenwood Springs, Hotel Colorado has inspired many chilling tales of unexplained phenomena.

It was a rosy start after 1893: The Victorian marvel was built to attract the likes of Theodore Roosevelt and dignitaries near and far.

Then came a macabre period during World War II.

The hotel was converted into a naval hospital. The morgue was in the basement, the scene of strange events told by the hotel today: a janitor spotting an old woman peering through a window; a guard unable to locate the source of chatter and a typewriter.

Other spirits have become known over the years. Some connect a certain perfume to Bobbie the nurse. While smoking is prohibited, guests swear they smell a cigar — perhaps Walter smoking again, the ghost named for hotel founder Walter Devereux.

Denver’s Spider-Man

This story is not of some friendly neighborhood web-slinger. It is not of a hero, but rather a villain lurking in the neighborhood — some wicked phantom, went suspicions around 3335 W. Moncrieff Place.

Inside this home on Oct. 18, 1941, a retiree named Philip Peters was found “battered and bloody.” It was a murder that “Capt. of Detectives James E. Childers characterizes as one of the most repellent in Denver history,” read The Denver Post.

Detectives for months failed to find any trace of the murderer. Meanwhile Peters’ widow and her caretaking friend “reported strange happenings” around the house, reads an account posted by Denver Public Library, “food missing, strange sounds, things out of place.”

The women fled the house. Officers kept watch. During one search, “everything looked normal,” a lead detective recalled in a later interview. “But suddenly they heard a noise! Upstairs! It sounded like a key turning in a lock!”

All along, the killer had been living in the attic.

It was Theodore Coneys. The police chief described him in a way lending to an infamous nickname: “the strangest looking human I had ever seen. ... a tall man, just under 6 feet, but thin as a wilted weed. His dirty hair hung low over his ears, and his skin was the ugly, unwashed gray of an overcast sky.”

A most fowl tale

Life magazine in 1945 published a picture that captured the nation’s attention. It showed a chicken named Mike — but not just any chicken.

Read the caption: “Minus the head, Mike stands erect with ease. He is 5½ months old and weighs about 3½ pounds. His late head (right foreground) is quite dead.”

The story of western Colorado’s Mike the Headless Chicken began on a day like any other for Lloyd Olsen. The Fruita farmer was decapitating chickens, prepping them for the meat market, the story went.

He tossed another corpse ... only to find it kept walking.

“He threw it in an apple box and put it there on the back porch where the cats or nothing could get it,” Olsen’s grandson, Troy Waters, said in a previous Gazette interview. “Next morning, the damn thing was still alive.”

Life magazine caught on to Mike’s promotional tour around the West. Other disturbing pictures emerged showing a dropper used to drip nutrients down the bird’s esophagus, and a syringe used to clear mucus and prevent choking.

Death finally spared the bird after 18 months, the story goes.

‘Ghost lights’ of Silver Cliff

In 1969, National Geographic published an essay by Edward Linehan, who had traveled to a southern Colorado cemetery in search of what he heard to be mysterious lights shining at night.

Linehan wrote of the experience alongside a companion, Bill:

Slowly, vague outlines of grave markers emerged, in ragged rows.

”There.” Bill’s voice was quiet, almost a whisper. “And over there!”

I saw them too. Dim, round spots of blue-white light glowed ethereally among the graves.

So grew the legend of the lights. “Ghost lights,” as some locals have always known them. Some paranormal investigators have known them to be the “orbs” of resident souls at Silver Cliff Cemetery.

Other investigators have dismissed the occurrence as phosphorescence. That includes Bryan Bonner.

Nonetheless, Silver Cliff Cemetery fascinated him so much that he purchased a plot, he said in a previous Gazette interview.

“Is it haunted? Who knows. But by reputation? Absolutely,” he said. “Either way, it’s fun to tell a ghost story.”

The frozen dead guy

On the other side of the canyon west of Boulder, little Nederland is the kind of town that tends to boogie down with the latest Grateful Dead tribute band stopping by. The kind of town that maintains a Carousel of Happiness. The kind of town that tends to flowers beside the grave of a former mayor that was a cat.

And that tends to a dearly departed man simply called Grandpa — kept frozen in a hilltop shed.

Keeping a frozen body in town has been outlawed since the 1990s. The ban was inspired by the discovery of Bredo Morstoel, who by then had been “grandfathered” in and would inspire a volunteer tradition of ice-packing as bizarre as an annual festival: Frozen Dead Guy Days.

The Norwegian Morstoel died in 1989. That’s when his grandson, Trygve Bauge, launched his grand plan for a cryonics facility. Bauge had his test subject, and he picked Nederland to be his hidden test center. The frozen body arrived in 1993.

Bauge ended up being deported for an expired visa. The jig was up before it hardly began. Or maybe not: Helping hands reportedly pack Grandpa with 1,600 pounds of dry ice every month.