Sunday, August 22, 2004Thursday, August 19, 2000

Things that go bump 'inn' the night
Searching for ghosts at the Brook Forest Inn

by Stephen Knapp

One notable evening last year, Linda Morris gathered 72 women at the Brook Forest Inn for a program of metaphysical enlightenment. Morris, a sociable woman who makes a living as a "local events coordinator," had used the inn on many previous occasions for fund-raising and the ever-popular "Girls Night Out."

This particular night, the women had no sooner settled into their rooms at one of Evergreen's most fascinating landmarks, when the lights in that part of the inn failed. It was not an entirely unwelcome development, as it required them to conduct the tarot readings and psychic performances by candlelight. Later that night, as the party broke up and guests began to leave, the power was inexplicably restored.

Intrigued, Morris contacted several paranormal research organizations to see which best suited her purpose of staging a scientific ambuscade. She quickly decided on the Rocky Mountain Paranormal Research Society.

Scientists and psychics joined forces Saturday night, trying to establish, for better or worse, the truth behind the haunting of Brook Forest Inn.

"I wanted to do an event with them," she said. "Of the people I talked to, they sounded the most serious."

To complement the team from the society, Morris also invited Sydney, a celebrated area medium who finds a single name sufficient to her needs.

Geno Accetta, a Conifer resident who bought the Brook Forest Inn last October, was generally agreeable. Though he has no particular opinion about the undead, he did want the event to be conducted professionally.

"I was kind of concerned about being respectful about this thing, if it's real," he said. "Now that I've met them, I'm totally comfortable with it."

The focus of the evening's investigation was the Monte Carlo suite, purportedly the center of phantom activity at the inn. Consisting of two attractively furnished rooms with a central bath, the suite is located on the second floor at the end of the east wing. Both rooms open onto a balcony overlooking Brook Forest Road.

On Saturday night, these snug accommodations - this inviting bedroom, this cozy parlor - were ground zero.

If there is any place in Evergreen where a ghost might feel at home, it's the Brook Forest Inn. Hunkered amid ancient pines about five miles up Brook Forest Road, it's a peculiar blend of hunting lodge, Swiss chalet and feudal keep. On the east side, a gabled roof towers over the main entrance, while to the south a crenellated stone wall brings to mind crusading knights.

Although not overly large, the inn was constructed in several stages, resulting in odd turns and short, unexpected staircases on the upper floors that can confuse the uninitiated. Walking the carpeted halls, an encounter with Jack Nicholson would seem almost natural. Red rum. Red rum. Red rum.

The Brook Forest Inn was created by Edwin Welz and his wife, Marie, both Austrian by birth. They homesteaded 160 acres in Brook Forest in 1915, running a herd of longhorn cattle along the canyon. Edwin became the area's postmaster in 1921. The original mail-sorting boxes are still in place behind the reception desk.

In 1922, the Welz's 10-year-old son died of pneumonia, the only verifiable death to occur at the Brook Forest Inn. Š But not the only one, according to local lore .

Edwin dreamed of building his own alpine village. During the 1920s, the Welz's erected the main inn, plus nine chalets and one square castle tower across the road. A small man-made lake once lapped at the foot of the castle tower, which was built of native quartz.

In the 30s and 40s, the Brook Forest Inn was enormously successful. A special "Brook Forest" rail car brought guests from around the country to Denver's Union Station. A waiting bus would take them on an all-day, bone-jarring ride to the lodge. It was Welz who prevailed on the U.S. Forest Service to build the Maxwell Falls trail, the first segment of a system that now reaches to the top of Mount Evans.

A tunnel was constructed beneath Brook Forest Road connecting the main building with the chalets. Its original purpose is no longer known, and it is now sealed on both ends. Accetta believes that it may have been used to transfer coal between the buildings

Local legend maintains that Nazi spies posing as bicycle tourists used the inn as a redoubt. Stories of Nazi gold hidden at the lodge led one former owner to tear up several floors in the main building. Alas, no booty was found.

Edwin and Marie sold the inn in 1945 and moved to Denver where Edwin died 10 years later. The date of Marie's death is not known.

The inn changed hands several times in the intervening years, and has had at least eight different owners since 1972. While an interesting subject for local historians, nothing in existing records suggests a likely motive for haunting. That is where rumor and legend enter the picture.

Tales of ghostly sightings at the inn abound. The most enduring ghost story at the inn involves a man named Carl who is said to haunt the second floor. Legend says that he strangled his wife in the Monte Carlo suite and then hanged himself in another room, possibly the Parisian. Another version has him committing suicide in the livery stable up the road.

Another common story is about a small boy said to have died of influenza on the third floor. His footsteps are said to be heard running up and down the hall, and he is suspected in frequent incidents of gentle hair-tugging experienced by women who wear their hair down.

At least three guests have described seeing an elderly woman unpacking a suitcase on a bed in a second floor room. At the same time they hear a man's voice, speaking with a pronounced British accent, coming from the bathroom. Invariably, it is later discovered that no such people were staying at the inn.

An apparition of a woman has been reported walking the balcony in front of the Monte Carlo suite. And the image of a woman is said to occasionally appear to guests while they are looking into mirrors.

It is difficult to find anyone at the inn who doesn't have a weird tale to tell. Inn manager Laurie Lees recounts an evening when she was alone in the building doing paperwork in the bar area. She was startled by loud footsteps and banging coming from the floor over her head. Investigating, she confirmed that there was nobody in the building.

"It's actually true," she insists. "I won't be here by myself anymore."

Although Lees won't flatly discount the possibility of ghostly residents, she has conceived another theory to explain the odd goings-on.

"I think it's a paradox," she explained, "like time overlapping."

According to local lore, previous investigators have fared worse than Lees. One man is said to have run from the building in a panic, abandoning his costly equipment. Another is rumored to have killed himself as a result of his experience at the inn.

At shortly after 6 p.m. Rocky Mountain Paranormal Research Society founder Bryan Bonner of Westminster, dressed casually in sandals, jeans and a Broncos sweatshirt, arrived with colleague Carol Olivacz. It required four arms and two trips to lug several large cases of electronic equipment to a room adjacent to the Monte Carlo suite.

A third member of the team, Mark Manning, showed up at 6:30. A trim, goateed young man from Aurora wearing a t-shirt and black leather jacket, Manning had his own freight of gadgets and gizmos. After conducting a major redeployment of the furniture and arranging their equipment in every available space, the scientists' tiny command center looked like something you could find under Cheyenne Mountain in the space occupied by the North American Air Defense Command. All that high-tech equipment represents a major investment for the two men.

"It's a big money loser," acknowledged Bonner.

The final member of the society team arrived; Wendy Haver, who says she has been aware of her psychic abilities since the age of five when she sensed the death of a close relative. Although she operates along the lines of a psychic medium, Haver prefers to describe herself as an "intuitive."

Haver's job is to gather spiritual and emotional impressions from a site and relay them to her associates. Her talents are useful in directing the efforts of the computer whiz kids, and the electronic gimcrackery can sometimes tell her if she is on the right intuitive track.

When she isn't hunting specters, Haver is a spiritual counselor and healer. "My main focus is to assist others in their spiritual journeys."

This is not the first time that the society has sought to unlock the mysteries of the Brook Forest Inn. In 1999, the property was purchased by Acrew LLC, a Microsoft certification school. Between six-week sessions, the management permitted these same spook-chasers unrestricted access to the otherwise empty building.

"It was a paranormal researcher's dream," Manning, who has been hunting ghosts for the last five years, remembers. "Great building, lots of history, in the middle of nowhere, and vacant."

"This is a little like going home again," Bonner added, although he admitted that, with Isabella's restaurant going full-bore downstairs and plenty of action in the bar, conditions were less than optimal for ghost-busting.

Bonner created the society in 1999. He said that out of literally thousands of self-described paranormal research organizations in the country, "maybe three or four" apply scientific method to their inquiries. Their brief is simple: to study and document paranormal phenomenon.

Bonner and Manning say they have become experts at distinguishing between truly extraordinary photographs and the vast majority that are merely the result of poor photography. They have also learned to spot a deliberate fraud when they see one, a not uncommon occurrence.

Bonner developed an intense interest in Brook Forest Inn during the course of his investigations and even compiled a brief history of the site.

At last the investigators were prepared. Almost immediately, Haver began picking up vibes. "I believe there are spirits that still inhabit this hotel. There is a lot of residual energy here."

The Monte Carlo suite was arrayed with video cameras, electromagnetic detection devices, laser thermometers and motion detectors. An air-ion counter and radiation detector stood ready, and a night-vision scope was available at need. A cricket couldn't pass unchallenged in that meticulously surveyed precinct. Of course, nobody had come to see a cricket.

"I don't want to burst anyone's bubble," Bonner told a small group assembled in the unnaturally convivial Monte Carlo sitting room, "but this is a really boring thing to do. We sit and wait." While true, his words did little to dampen the mood, a heady combination of suppressed apprehension and keen anticipation.

Diane Preisser is the head of Denver's UFO Society and the creator of Out of the Norm, a program that airs twice weekly on Denver's DCTV, a community access channel. The show features anything and everything that is strange or unusual. She is planning to film a segment about RMPRS and came to Brook Forest Inn to see them at work. She is also an enthusiastic channeler and psychic medium. "There's tons of stuff going on in this building," she declared. "I'm going to try to meditate in some of these rooms."

At 9 o'clock Sydney appeared. She wore a loose-fitting white dress, beads and a sequined purple scarf. Hanging from her neck was an embroidered lavender pouch filled with dried sage leaves. She distributed these, saying they would mollify the spirits of the inn.

She wore a 1930s-vintage black hat over her bright red hair. She has hundreds of hats, she said, and likes to wear one that will be familiar to the spirits she may encounter. It is a simple form of appeasement. After testing the ambient energies, she feared her evening's selection was off by several years.

Sydney had been in the Brook Forest Inn before. Her last experience there was largely neutral, with the powerful exception of the Rose Quartz room. Located immediately beneath the Monte Carlo suite, the Rose Quartz room is now the inn's cigar lounge. On her last visit she said she noticed a sadness clinging to the building, and on entering the cigar lounge she felt "pushed back."

"It's the only place where I felt miserable and wanted to dash out."

She said that on arriving Saturday she had perceived a new, contented energy coming from the inn. The careful attention Accetta has lavished on the old inn, she believes, has pleased the spectral residents.

After laying hands on several people in the room to determine their unique spiritual gifts, interpreting some auras and reading a few palms, Sydney embarked with Preisser on a tour of the lodge, together sampling the smorgasbord of phantasmal forces.

Preisser perceived a distinctly playful quality about the third floor. Sydney explained that ghosts may come back to a place to relive good times, as well as bad.

Depending on whose account you choose to believe, the small Parisian room, located in an older part of the second floor, is where the lovelorn Carl hung himself, or where Welz's 10-year-old son died of pneumonia. It is furnished with a supernaturally comfortable bed covered by an eerily picturesque flowered spread. A sinister wrought-metal and cane wardrobe stands passively against the wall opposite the bed. Two stained-glass windows splash alarmingly colorful patterns of sunlight onto the carpet. Both women felt an instant aversion to the Parisian.

"I felt knocked against the wall," Sydney said. "Even now, I can't feel my legs."

"That room is steeped in despair," Preisser informed the man who was booked into the Parisian for the night. "There is a strong sense of bitterness, of hatred, of anger at the world. Whoever is in there is out of his mind."

Neither woman had a significant reaction to the Monte Carlo suite, the supposed heart of darkness.

By 12:30 a.m., with the restaurant closed and most of the employees gone for the night, the scientists prepared to begin their work in earnest. They were quickly joined by the spiritualists. While this made for lively conversation in the makeshift laboratory, it tended to confuse the delicate instruments the team had carefully placed earlier in the evening.

But on this night there would be no proof of a haunting.

Failure is the usual lot of paranormal researchers, Manning said. "Ninety-nine percent of the time absolutely nothing happens."

Well before dawn, the crew packed up their gear and left the inn. Silence descended on the rooms like a shroud.

Guests made their way downstairs Sunday morning to find coffee and sweet rolls waiting in the breakfast room. Bright sunshine spilled through the inn's many windows, bathing the rooms in clear light.

The excitement, the mystery and the possibilities of the night before seemed distant and improbable. The venerable building had assumed its familiar face; a charming hotel, a superb restaurant, a local landmark. If restless shades truly inhabit the Brook Forest Inn, they do nothing to detract from its appeal.

Nor did they interrupt a good night's repose. The guest who spent the evening in the Parisian? He slept like well Š the dead.

For more information about Linda Morris' Girls Night Out events, call 303-946-9454. To learn more about the Rocky Mountain Paranormal Research Society, visit www.rockymountainparanormal.com. To reserve a room at Brook Forest Inn, call 303-679-1521.