Hauntings Of The Croke - Patterson Mansion

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The Patterson Inn is located in Denver, Colorado and was at one point in time the home of some of Denver’s most wealthiest and notable people. Today, the mansion serves as an inn for those who are visiting Denver from all over America and even the world. This historic mansion sits in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of the city and is close to the Colorado State House. But what you may not realize is that the neighborhood itself is known for being haunted. And the Patterson Inn itself is said to be right in the middle of it all. This neighborhood is attractive to many, but at night it reveals a completely dark side to it. We will discuss the Patterson Inn and its early beginnings. We will also dive into why the place may be haunted (and perhaps why the Capitol Hill neighborhood itself has a spiritual presence like nothing else).

The Patterson Inn was first known as the Croke-Patterson or the Croke-Patterson-Campbell Mansion (depending on which local you talk to). It was built in 1890 out of sandstone. The home contained a total of ten bedrooms and nine bathrooms at completion. At the time, the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Denver was dubbed “Millionaire’s Row” since the desired land was attractive to many wealthy people who wanted to live on a piece of prime land near the Colorado State House. Soon, many homes would soon be constructed throughout the last decades of the 19th century. The home was originally built for Thomas Croke, a son of Irish immigrants who later built a department store business from the ground up. After making enough money, he decided to purchase land in the Capitol Hill area to build a home for himself and his family. Croke decided to build the home based on a 16th-century French castle.

Croke had commissioned architect Issac Hodgdon and contractor J.M. Cochran to build the home. Both Hodgdon and Cochran were responsible for the design and construction of a handful of houses that were located in the immediate vicinity of what would become the new home for the Croke family. However, in a bizarre turn of events, Croke decided to sell the home six months after living in it. He had moved in shortly after his wife’s passing, but the death of his mother made Croke assume that the home that he wanted to live in was somehow cursed.

Eventually, he sold the home to Thomas Patterson, who was a known journalist who later became a prominent attorney and politician. Patterson wanted a home that symbolized his success. The newly constructed mansion became that home for him. Once Croke handed ownership over to Patterson, the latter began making it home for the family that he was devoted to. Patterson’s daughter would later assume ownership of the home after her father’s passing (she was married to Richard Campbell, hence the inclusion of the Campbell name). The mansion was sold and later converted into a radio station for a short time before it was changed to an apartment building sometime later. Despite the many changes and renovations that have occurred throughout the early 20th century, the story of hauntings have arisen (and probably still do to this day). Is the mansion still haunted or cursed? If so, what sort of events have occurred at the house that could have written perhaps a sordid past for one of Denver’s most beautiful and oldest houses? There are so many stories that can be told about the hauntings of the Patterson Inn.

The stories and apparent hauntings of the home can be dated back to the time when Thomas Croke sold the home. It was said that Croke may have sold the home quickly after living in it briefly due to the death of his wife and mother in a span of a couple of years. Some say that Croke had consistently felt feelings of unease while being inside the home. Those who have visited the home in the past have witnessed seeing the movement of mysterious figures and even the spirit of a woman who was apparently helping a pregnant woman. Some have seen the same woman (who may have been Thomas Patterson’s wife).

There also had been some who had heard the phantom sound of dogs barking upstairs. However, no dogs were said to be found. The story behind this was two Doberman dogs were trapped in a room inside the house. There had been no apparent reason behind why they were confined. However, the dogs were said to have met their demise after they had both jumped outside an upstairs window and fell to their deaths. Some may have even sighted what may have been the ghost of Thomas Patterson himself (who had died in the home in the 1920s).

Over time, there had been rumors of phantom sounds and other spirits that may have taken residence inside the home. One paranormal expert said that there had been a story about a baby that could be heard crying in a downstairs basement. Some have said that there had been phantom noises of hysterical crying coming from the same room. Word has it that a child may have died in the home. The mother was so visibly distraught that she buried the child somewhere inside the basement without ever having anyone know what might have happened. How the child died is unclear.

Whether the stories that lead to these apparent hauntings are true or not, one thing is for certain: this is considered to be one of the most haunted places in Denver. Since it happens to be in one of the potentially haunted neighborhoods in the city, could it be that the ghosts from down the road moved into the Patterson Inn and overstayed their welcome? Let us take a look at the neighborhood itself.

Not to be confused with the real Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., the neighborhood is located in the immediate vicinity of the Colorado State House. By the time Colorado entered the union in 1876, the land owned by Henry Brown for more than a couple decades had yet to be occupied. Brown was discouraged that many of the homes were being built in the eastern half of the city. It would be another ten years until the Colorado State Capitol building was soon built. In 1886, Brown’s fortunes would change after the land near the capitol would increase exponentially in value. Soon enough, some of the wealthier citizens of Denver were looking to places near the state capitol to build a home there. However, then-Governor John Evans had built a home in the present-day Capitol Hill neighborhood (and was likely the only occupant of the area).

Over the years, many homes would be built and the neighborhood would soon be known as “Millionaire’s Row”. However, the souls of those who make their presence known may not just be those who were the well-to-do. In the Capitol Hill neighborhood was a park that is currently named Cheesman Park. It is said that the park was built on a burial ground (presumably a Potter’s Field). The spirits may have belonged to those who may have died poor or have had diseases like yellow fever and had to be buried far away from the city to prevent an epidemic. In what seems to be a strange turn in spiritual events, the less fortunate of Denver seems to rule what may have been considered to be the richest neighborhood (but only in spirit).

Spooky Particulars:

By: Ann Alexander Leggett, who co-authored A Haunted History of Denver's Croke-Patterson Mansion with her daughter, Jordan Leggett.

10. The caretaker in the carriage house

Ann Alexander Leggett: The carriage house has a whole different energy than the main house and it's interesting because here's Krista [a psychic] having a conversation with people that I can't hear. There's a spirit in the carriage house of an Irish caretaker, and both the Pattersons and the Crokes were of Irish descent. And she [the ghost] was in the carriage house and she was immediately put off by us being there and just said, "What are you doing here?" and Krista explained that I was writing this book and everything and immediately the woman said "Okay, if she's ever afraid in the main house, just tell her she can come here and she'll be safe" and then the next thing she says when we're getting ready to leave, she says, "Tell her we want her to write the whole story. She has to tell the whole story." That's a little bit of pressure.

9. The ghost of Kate Patterson helping a pregnant woman

AAL: There was a woman who lived there with her family and she was pregnant with triplets at the time.

Jordan Alexander Leggett: They were the last single family to live there in the late 90s, early 2000s.

AAL: In the late stages of her pregnancy, she was obviously pretty uncomfortable. One morning she was just in bed and not feeling well and just couldn't roll over and an apparition appeared to her and offered her hand and actually helped her roll over in bed. The apparition said "My name is Kate." And, of course, Thomas Patterson's wife was named Kate, or Katherine, so that's one of the stories that people don't know so much about.

8. The opening and closing drawers

AAL: The same woman's husband had an office up on the third floor and he had a desk in between these two little closets, and they had a couch on the right-hand side, and he always had his drawers locked. And she said you could sit on the couch and watch the drawers open and close and open and close. And then you'd get up and they're all locked.

7. The attempted exorcism

AAL: When the woman who lived there had the triplets, she had a friend who brought in a priest who was gonna bless the house, kind of exorcise it. So they brought in this priest. He walked in and immediately went in to the front parlor to start his blessing and all of a sudden all the plaster starts to peel off where this fireplace was and this dark vortex of wind comes out of this fireplace. The priest just left.

6. The phantom voices

AAL: The psychics that we brought in and the paranormal groups picked up you can't believe how many voices.

JAL: Mom took a psychic in and this woman just had a tape recorder in her hands and two days ago I finally got the tape and from what I can hear it's some of the craziest stuff ever. Like, Krista will pick something up and say "Oh, I'm getting a woman named Rosemary, Rosemarie, something Marie, Mary? You know, I don't know" and you hear a pause and there's this whisper that's like, "Rose."

5. The woman who feared for her soul

AAL: When they had offices there, they couldn't keep tenants because typewriters would type in the middle of the night by themselves, babies crying on the third floor, party noises coming from a back closet, and so those kinds of things persist. When we first started the research I had just googled "Croke-Patterson" and I got this lady's blog and she said she used to have an office there in the late 80s. She said all kinds of strange things happened there. So I got her email and said, you know, "Would you be willing to talk to me about it?" And she didn't answer me and didn't answer me. Finally, she came back and said "Why?" So I explained who I was and that I was writing a history of the house and about the hauntings as well. She said, "Well, okay, I just want my stories to be taken seriously because they were very intense to me." So I sent her this list of questions and she answered a couple of them and it's a little bit vague, and then I don't hear from her again and so I emailed her back and time goes by and she sends an email back that says "Good luck with the book." She just couldn't go back there. She just couldn't deal with it anymore.

AL: She did answer a few questions initially and one was "Did you ever feel like you were physically unsafe in the house?" And she's like, "I never felt physically unsafe, but I feared for my soul."

4. The super-human wind

AAL: In the early 70s they were gonna tear it down and a woman named Mary Rae, who's now a realtor in Denver, basically saved this house and bought it. It had tenants in it; it was an apartment building at the time. But she couldn't keep people in it. They were bailing in the middle of the night because of the baby crying and all this kind of stuff.

JAL: Not even like, "I'm gonna leave." They were just gone in the morning. Didn't pay their rent, just left.

AAL: She had a young couple living down on the main floor in one of the units and she gets a call on a Sunday afternoon, and they have a baby and he says "You need to come over now." And so she goes over and he opens the door and the place is just turned completely upside down—everything is in shambles. There's a big fireplace that had a huge wood and brass insert, really heavy. And it's not there anymore simply because they were sitting in the apartment and all of a sudden this insert blew out from the inside like this terrible huge force of wind came down the chimney and blew this thing out. A super-human force Mary said would have had to have done this. It was an extremely old heavy piece.
JAL: 75 pounds at least.

3. The baby in the basement
JAL: In the 80s they have this seance and the medium is like "I'm seeing something in the basement. There's a child who died, a crazy weeping mother," like the whole shenanigans. So they go down to the basement. In this back corner somewhere behind the electrical panel there's this corner of brick that sticks out that's vaguely the size and shape of a fireplace and so I guess that night they dug behind that wall and they found, well, it varies what they found. Either they found ashes or they found nothing or they found sea salt and sea sand that you can't find in Colorado. As time has gone by, there have been people who have done tours of the house, legally or not, and they replenish the sand in the hole. I guess apparently there was a story about a woman who had lost her baby and dug it up and buried it in the wall, and then it was found and re-entered in the cemetery. It's kind of an odd conglomeration of rumor that has gotten larger over the years. It's really hard because the census is once every 10 years so if there was a child it may not have been reported. We've had a few mediums and psychics in there who do say there was definitely something with a child in the basement.

2. The suicidal guard dogs

JAL: There was some remodeling going on in the 70s, they were turning it into offices, so they had had some trouble with a transient population—people were breaking in and whatnot.

AAL: The workers would come in every day and find that everything they'd done the day before was undone.

JAL: They were blaming the homeless people, but there were people who were like uh, maybe it wasn't the homeless people, maybe it was the house. So they got a guard and a fence, and neither guards nor fences apparently had any effect, so they got three guard dogs instead.

AAL: And put them in the house.

JAL: So night number one, one dog goes through a plate glass window on the third floor—he dies on the driveway. Crazy. Night number two, the second dog goes through the same window and they find the third dog shaking and drooling or whatever in the corner somewhere on the third floor, basically out of its mind.

AAL: So basically the premise being they were so afraid by something in the house that they jumped to their deaths.

JAL: One of the guys from Rocky Mountain Paranormal has found a guy who was there, like, found the dogs on the driveway. So part of it is true. I don't think there was a third dog according to that gentleman and there's no temporary or plate glass window on the third story, so I think they went out of the turret room, which is a little tiny window.

1. The woman at the top of the stairs

JAL: A few people have had a lot of trouble walking up the stairs to the third floor. You get two thirds of the way up the stairs and all of the oxygen is gone. On the tape you can hear Mom and the psychic gasping.

Months later, I found a death certificate totally by accident. Death certificates are not easy to come by, and I was at the clerk and recorder because at a certain point in the 1960s anything beyond that is either in the basement of the City and County building or in the library, so I was going to find out where exactly the book I was looking for was. And he pulls up on the microphiche, he's like "Oh yeah here's back to 1960 or something" and he's like, "What is this?" and it says "Death Cert." So he pulls it up and there's a random death certificate stored with the tax records on this house and it's for the house when Dr. Sudan owned it. Dr. Sudan his wife it turns out committed suicide in the house. It wasn't publicized, there's no obituary, there's really nothing about it, and then he got remarried five years later and so this death certificate is a copy of the one issued the day of, so it looks like he had to prove that she was dead or something so he could get remarried. So I found this death certificate and it says how she died and all this stuff we didn't know. The woman who committed suicide, she mixed rat poison and water, which creates cyanogas which is similar to Zyklon B, which is the gas they used in the Holocaust to gas people. Within one to three minutes, all the oxygen is gone.

AAL: Krista felt [the gasping] was the woman who died form the cyanogas suicide and basically suffocated and couldn't breathe. She felt that woman stands at the top of the stairs. And how bizarre that Krista and I didn't know that.

JAL: We didn't know till months later. - https://www.westword.com/arts/ten-spooky-stories-from-denvers-own-croke-patterson-mansion-5784702

https://denverterrors.com/patterson-inn/

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