Bradley Davis
CRIPPLE CREEK, Colo. (KRDO) – The ghosts of the American West have made quite the home here in Colorado.
There are many more incidents beyond the bindings of a Stephen King novel.
“The Stanley has a bigger advertising budget,” said Hotel St. Nicholas co-owner, Sura-Quay Arbon.
The story behind her hotel writes itself.
“All of these were medical rooms,” Arbon said. “This is where people lived or died.”
The state of Colorado recently added Hotel St. Nicholas to its register of historic buildings. The Catholic Sisters of Mercy built the structure in 1898, and it served as Cripple Creek’s first hospital. While the medical rooms have been retrofitted for hotel guests, the exterior is almost entirely unchanged, and the building as a whole closely resembles the original structure.
Since its opening as a hotel, guests and ghost investigators have reported hundreds of paranormal encounters during their stay.
“We needed a screw and walked into the closet behind you and had a bolt roll off a shelf and drop in front of us,” Arbon said. “We laughed, and we were like, ‘Oh, we didn’t really need a bolt. We needed a screw!’ I walked downstairs into another closet and had a screw fall from a ceiling that did not have screws, and it hit me in the head.”
Arbon is a believer, and she welcomes ghost investigators to her hotel regularly to sort through the building’s mysterious past.
Last weekend, she allowed me to tag along and see for myself.
“There’s no way to disprove it, and we’re trying to prove it,” Arbon said.
I made the hour-long drive Sunday evening up Highway 24 through the rain and sleet. I couldn’t help but feel like Dick Hallorann, the cook from Stephen King’s ‘Overlook Hotel,’ as he drove his snowcat up the mountain to confront the spirits harassing young Danny (large advertising budget, indeed).
“I think it’s more of a place that invites communication, like a portal,” said owner of ‘In the Shadows Paranormal, Gail Conners.
Conners and her team aren’t out for jump scares. They aren’t afraid of what they’ll find at Hotel St. Nicholas. It’s more like a tedious research project, utilizing tools like electromagnetic frequency (EMF) readers, spirit boxes, motion detectors and other more to facilitate communication across the veil.
That doesn’t mean she’s above a little ominous mystique.
“I’d be curious in the morning to see what happens to you, Bradley,” Gail said.
Said tongue-in-cheek (mostly), her ‘concern’ comes from my sleeping arrangements for the night. I was to stay in room #11, the old surgery room. The one where Arbon said patience came to either live or die.
Before lights out, however, we had lots of work to do.
First, they ran me through the “Estes Method” in room #11. I had on a blindfold and noise-canceling headphones tuned into a spirit box. The spirit box scrambles backward through AM frequencies to pick up words you wouldn’t normally hear coming through on the radio.
It’s overwhelmingly static, but occasionally, a subtle word or phrase makes its way through. I was to shout those words out loud as Conner’s team posed questions to the spirit. In theory, the spirits could manipulate the frequencies to respond to the investigators’ questions.
So, did it work?
Maybe.
During the questioning, the team had other tools active as well. One item was a flashlight just barely turned to its off setting, with the hopes that a slight energy bump from a spirit could flick the light on.
During questioning, Conner’s team heard two thuds on the floor behind me. We caught both noises on camera. Seconds later, I blurted out a phrase heard through the static, oblivious to the commotion going on around me.
“Down on the floor.”
The investigators asked the spirit if they were referring to the floor creak. A split second after the question, the flashlight flicked on.
We continued throughout the night with moderate success. Conner’s room seemed to be buzzing with activity, spiking the EMF meter all the way to red after turning on the spirit’s favorite teddy bear.
We went until about 1 a.m., but I wasn’t through with my testing. I allowed the team to film room #11 while I slept. I wanted to know what the spirits had planned for me.
“What do you think we’re going to find?” I asked Gail the next morning.
“Probably mostly you sleeping,” she replied.
She was right.
There was one odd popping noise, but the spirits mostly left me in peace.
However, while going through the footage, we did find a surprising encounter from earlier in the night. The kind that brings Gail her own sense of peace.
“If we get Nancy Brockman tonight, it will be funny,” Conners said in our interview the previous evening.
Conners has been a Spiritualist for decades, but she started Into the Shadows Paranormal much more recently after the sudden loss of three of her friends, including Nancy Brockman.
“Spiritualism always believes that death is only a doorway,” Conners said through tears. “It’s reassuring when you can find that peace, how to have that kind of an ongoing relationship.”
It was an emotional few minutes as Gail took the brave step to tell me about her motivations and her deepest sorrows.
It appears her sincere words may have been what Nancy needed to make her way back across the veil.
The team’s motion detector went off a single time during our investigation. It was in an empty hotel room, caught on camera, right as Gail started talking about Nancy.
“Nancy would have done something like that! She promised her friends she was going to come back and bug us anyway,” Conners said.
Did we find the proof Sura-Quay needed? Well, that’s probably up to you. But Gail believes it was Nancy, her friend, using her equipment to announce their presence in Hotel St. Nicholas.
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