The Ghost of Black Hawk

Photo by Olivia Anne Snyder

The setting was perfect: t’was in one of the oldest buildings in all of Black Hawk — an old gold-mining town in Colorado, established in 1859. It was a small brick building having been renovated into many things over the years, like a restaurant at some point in more recent years, which kept changing hands. Probably due to the fear of ghosts, I had determined after my own experience in the place.

The newest eatery in that building was opened a couple of years previously by two young men, brothers, who had just graduated from a prestigious culinary school, who wanted to see success with their new-learned skills in the kitchen. We became fans; their dishes were extraordinary. We would return often to partake of their delicious cuisine, including an array of unusual ice creams such as popcorn, pepper raspberry, and ghost chili, to name a few favorites.

Inside, the building, walls were of the same brick, cleaned and varnished, with huge hewn timbers crossing the ceiling to hold up a second floor. The floors were hardwood that had been sanded, oiled, and polished that complimented the wooden doors and trim.

The long, wooden bar in the saloon was something out of the old west including a brass foot rail and a large mirror behind, with glass shelves holding a variety of alcoholic spirits. Wooden booths lined the opposite wall and old wooden tables and chairs sat in the middle of the room.

There was a painting of saloon girls on the wall opposite the bar, and the requisite sepia-toned photos hanging at eye level throughout the building. The establishment had a lot of old-west charm and a big amount of supernatural aura, at least to those who were sensitive to that sort of thing.

One night, while dining with friends, Camille and John, first having cocktails and hors d’oeuvres, I had a much-needed urge to visit the restroom. The women’s washroom was a rather large space but with only one stall in the corner next to the sink, with an antique side-table flanked by two aged wooden chairs on the opposite wall. I glanced at the old gilt-framed, glassed, watercolor that hung above the table, which was of a soft pink vase with flowers sitting on a table on top of a white doily. It was well done and pleasing.

Thank goodness no one seemed to be in the stall, since the door stood open, so I walked to it. I was about to turn in when I saw a person standing next to the toilet, who turned toward me as I was about to enter. I stopped.

“Oh, sorry. I thought it was empty,” I said as I backed out with my head down, embarrassed. I waited by the sink for the person to exit so I could dash in.

But as I waited, I heard no sound from the stall; no movement whatsoever. Weird. My arms developed goosebumps at the silence. Something was wrong with this scenario, I thought.

I was trying to remember details about who I’d seen. The person had been rather tall, with stringy black hair flowing from beneath an unusual-looking hat, perhaps of another century, that was also black, and a long black cape covering the body. The sex of the person was not determined, as I didn’t see a face, because it had been in the shadow of the hat, and from the darkness of the corner. I had only seen movement of the head as it had turned toward me.

The more I thought about the figure, the more goose-bumpy my flesh felt. But not one to run from curiosity, and with the door still standing open, which seemed more of an invitation to look, rather than an invasion of privacy, I walked over to the open door and peeked inside. My mouth went dry as I sucked in air from my gasp. I could hear my heart pounding, which seemed to thunder in the silence of the room. There was no one there. Only a cloudy wisp was dissipating into nothingness that blended into the wall.

I stood rooted in place watching the cloudiness in the corner disappearing as if being sucked back into the bricks. What was that? Could it have actually been a ghost, or had my imagination just gone bonkers? I didn’t know what to think at that moment. I found myself excited at the thought of seeing a real ghost, and yet it was frightening at the same time. I had to think about the battle of feelings that were rushing through my system of both excitement and fear. If it truly was a ghost, why did I see it? Who could it have been in real life and why was it here?

Photo by Callie Gibson

First, I had to urgently take care of the business I had gone in to accomplish in the first place. I walked into the stall, looking all around me for further visitors before jerking down my pants. What kind of perverted ghost would hang around a bathroom stall? I wondered apprehensively.

As I sat, I kept watching the wall where I had seen the cloudy spectral disappear, and tried to hurry and be gone. Finished, I hopped up, pulled my clothes back into place and hurried out of the small space, and walked to the sink. As I washed my hands, I glanced into the mirror to see my white face and the fear in my eyes, but I also saw movement behind me. When I focused on the distraction, the same black-clad figure sat on one of the chairs behind me. I gasped and turned.

The chair was empty.

I looked back to the mirror and saw the figure still sitting as it had moments before, so I quickly whirled around, but, again, no one was there. While keeping watch on the mirror to make sure the apparition stayed where it was, I wiped my shaky hands on the rattling paper towels then dashed past the empty chair and out the door.

My husband took one look at my wide-eyed pale face and asked me, “What’s wrong, babe? You looked spooked.”

Our guests leaned toward me as I said, “I am spooked. I just saw a ghost.”

Camille wanted to know every detail: what it looked like, what I felt like when I saw it, and what my reactions had been, while John sat rolling his eyes in disbelief, and my husband squeezed my hand.

After I answered her questions, she said, a bit put out, “We come here a couple of times every week, and I have been in that bathroom a hundred times, but I have never seen so much as a breeze in there. Why you, I wonder?”

“I don’t know. I just happen to be the one who went in at the moment it was showing itself, I guess.”

“Maybe,” Camille said, “but I think that you are sensitive enough that it was trying to reach out to you.”

I laughed and shook my head. “I don’t think so. I think I just happened to be there when it showed up and that was that. But I would like to know who it might have been. I’m not sure if it was a man or a woman. The cloak could have been worn by either, and the hat was indeterminable as to the type. I didn’t stop to gape to take in details. And it wasn’t until I realized there was no noise by a person who was getting ready to use the toilet or to get ready to leave if that were the case, which prompted me to look again. Otherwise, had I known, I would have looked a bit more closely to have a better visual.”

“Mmmm! That makes sense. I wonder how you can find out about this ghost,” Camille mused.

“I’ll ask one of the guys. They may have seen it, too, and know of its origin.”

I did ask that question of Anthony, one of the brothers, who just smiled at me as if I had a screw loose and he felt sorry for me when he said, “No. No ghosts here. Sorry to disappoint you. Maybe your imagination was a bit too vivid from the cocktails.” He laughed and patted me on the shoulder. “You’re safe.”

That response was too patronizing for my peace of mind, but I dismissed it as one that an owner might give to keep from scaring a customer. Little did he know that it would have fueled my curiosity had he been totally upfront. But then, maybe they really had not seen any specters in the place. If Camille or John had not had the pleasure of seeing a ghost in all the times they had come to dine here, then perhaps the owners had not, either. But that begged the question of why me? I really wanted to find out more about this person who seemed locked in a void to wander at will.

Photo by Nadia Jamnik

Whenever we were in the small town, I’d asked the shop keepers about historical ghosts, or people who had died mysteriously or violently. Unfortunately, they seemed to know only the usual stories about the ghosts who’d become well-known, none of which fit the description of the one I had seen. I was told that there were many other ghosts around, also, who were not as well known, but no one knew their reason for being some of the haunted, therefore, my ghost could be anyone.

My heart sank. I may never learn the identity of who I saw, I realized. But I would continue to search.

A few years later, while looking through some of my mother’s old sepia photos from her grandparent’s collection, my breath caught when I saw the same type of hat on the head of a woman standing next to a man in a suit. On the back of the photo, the names of the pair had been written in flamboyant cursive and the year, 1888.

Could it have been a relative who had coincidentally been in Black Hawk back during that era and something happened to one of them? I had never heard of this couple, and all the relatives who might know more were long dead.

I would never know for sure why I had seen that person on that night in Black Hawk, but now I was determined to dig deeper into my own family’s history for answers.