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How did an ordinary piece of Denver real estate become a house that people believed was occupied by murder victims, suicides, and the restless dead?

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Fourteen people are sitting in darkness not the comfortable darkness. Not somebody turned off the lights darkness. This is the darkness of an abandoned house.

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A house with broken doors, boarded windows, fallen plaster, bare rooms, and air so wet and stale that a newspaper reporter would later describe it as carrying the dampness of twenty years.

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The group is gathered on the third floor. They have climbed through a building that has been vacant for years. A building damaged by fire.

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A building the neighborhood considers a nuisance. A building that Denver newspapers have already been calling haunted.

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There is one candle. The people form a circle. They join hands. Someone begins singing. Then the candle is extinguished. And they wait. They wait for movement. They wait for voices. They wait for the dead.

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The woman leading the seance is known as Madame Thompson. She believes spirits remain inside this house. Not one spirit, several. Women murdered within its walls. People who ended their own lives. Victims whose final moments were supposedly absorbed by the building itself. Then a scream tears through the darkness. The circle breaks, people jump, someone may be coming up the stairs. For one brief moment, everyone in that room believes the house has answered them.

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That scream will turn out to have an earthly explanation. Late arrivals. Living people, not ghosts. That should have ended the seance. It did not. Because before the night was finished, women in that room would claim to see blood, feel bullets, relive murders, and speak with the voices of the dead.

SPEAKER_02 2:39

And a reporter from the Rocky Mountain News would be there to record it. This is not a story that appeared decades later in some paperback collection of Colorado ghost legends.

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It was reported while the house still stood. The fire was reported. The vacancy was reported. The seance was reported.

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The skepticism was reported, and the man connected to the property was not an anonymous homeowner lost to history. Name was James A. Fleming, a real estate man, a major figure in the development of Denver, a founder of the short lived town of South Denver, a man who understood land, buildings, money, speculation, and reputation. Yet somehow, one large brick house associated with him became so notorious that according to a contemporary newspaper, it could not be rented. The question is not merely whether the house was haunted. The deeper question is how did it become haunted in the first place?

SPEAKER_01 3:49

Not spiritually. Historically. Who built the story? Who repeated it? Who benefited from it?

SPEAKER_02 3:58

Who lost money because of it? And did anything violent ever happen inside that house at all? This is the dreadful truth. And today we're going to nineteenth and grant. Every haunted house story eventually gives you an address, and that is where most people stop investigating. They hear that a house stood on a particular corner. They hear somebody died there. They hear the windows opened by themselves. They hear footsteps crossed an empty room. Then the story gets repeated until repetition becomes evidence. But an address is not the end of an investigation. It's the beginning. Because ghosts do not appear in tax records property owners do. Spirits do not record deeds human beings do, and legends may change every time they're told. But land records are stubborn. The property connected with this story was part of HC Brown's addition to Denver. The edition was recorded on june twenty second, eighteen sixty eight. Within that edition was block thirty four, and within block thirty four were lots twenty nine through thirty two. The assessor information associated with those lots identifies James A. Fleming with the date june twenty ninth, nineteen hundred.

SPEAKER_01 5:29

That gives us an actual chain of investigation. An addition, a block, specific lots, a named man, a date.

SPEAKER_02 5:39

This is already more useful than a hundred years of somebody saying there used to be a spooky house around here somewhere. The Denver Public Library Special Collections and Archives identifies the location as the corner of nineteenth and grant and reproduces assessor material connecting James A. Fleming to the property. The library also describes the building as a three-story, fourteen room brick residence. Now, we need to be precise about something. The surviving newspaper language does not always describe Fleming in exactly the same way. The 1902 report calls him a real estate man who has charge of the property. That wording could mean he owned it. It could mean he managed it. It could mean he represented another owner. Assessor material appears to associate him directly with lots 29 through 32, but we should not quietly turn hand charge of into personally owned every part of the property throughout the entire period. Unless the complete deed chain proves that. Because that's how bad history is made. Somebody reads that Fleming handled the property, but the next person writes that Fleming owned it. The next person says Fleming built it. Then somebody else claims Fleming lived there. And before long, a tour guide is standing on the corner telling twenty people that Mayor Fleming murdered a chambermaid in the attic. We have no evidence of that. Here's what we can responsibly say. By 1900, assessor information associated James A. Fleming with the relevant lots. By 1902, a newspaper described him as the real estate man responsible for the property. And during those years, the house had acquired a reputation so destructive that the paper said it could not be rented. That is the documented foundation. Everything else has to be built carefully on top of it. James A. Fleming was not some frightened homeowner who inherited a crumbling mansion and had no idea what to do with it. He was connected to real estate and development on a much larger scale. Historical accounts identify Fleming as a Pennsylvania born businessman who became involved in Colorado real estate. He was one of the men associated with the creation of the town of South Denver in 1886, an independent municipality established partly in opposition to Denver's saloons and what its founders regarded as the corrupting influence of alcohol. Fleming became South Denver's mayor. Sources describe him as serving three terms, although some modern summaries loosely call him the town's first and only mayor. That distinction is that he appears to have been the only person who held the office during the municipality's short existence, but he served through multiple terms. South Denver existed independently from 1886 until its annexation by Denver in 1894. Its boundaries covered a large area south of the existing city. Its founders wanted development. They wanted homes, they wanted institutions, they wanted order, and they wanted fewer saloons. A liquor license reportedly cost $2,500, an enormous barrier at the time, which tells you the town was not casually discouraging alcohol. It was trying to price it out of existence. Fleming also had a substantial residence of his own in South Denver. The house stood near South Grant Street and Florida Avenue and later became South Denver's town hall. Accounts say it also served at different times as a jail, library, clubhouse, and recreation facility. The historic building survives today as the Fleming Mansion. That shows that Fleming was not unfamiliar with large houses, public buildings, or changing property uses. He understood that a structure could be a residence one year, a municipal building the next, and an investment throughout. He also understood reputation. Real estate is not only lumber, brick, and land, it's perception. A house can be structurally sound and financially worthless if nobody will enter it. A neighborhood can become valuable because people believe it is desirable, and a building can become impossible to rent because enough people believe something terrible happened there. By 1902, according to the Denver Times, that was exactly the problem at nineteenth and grant. The house was empty. Its reputation preceded it, and Fleming could not rent it. But here is where you need to correct an assumption. We do not currently possess a source in which Fleming explains why he retained control of the property. We do not have a surviving interview where he says, I kept the house because I expected the land to appreciate. We do not have a letter in which he says I was waiting to repair the fire damage. We do not have a diary entry saying I could not find a buyer. We do not even know from the newspaper excerpts alone that he consciously decided to hold it for the entire period from 1900 to 1904. He may have been trying to sell it. He may have been managing it for someone else. He may have expected redevelopment. He may have been unable to obtain a price he considered acceptable. Those are possibilities, they're not facts. There is a difference between mystery and a blank space. A mystery contains evidence pointing in conflicting directions. A blank space means the surviving evidence has not yet answered the question. Why Fleming continued to be associated with the house is at present a blank space. That does not make it unimportant. It makes it honest. By the time the Denver Times had reported on the house in february nineteen oh two the property already had a history. The paper said it had been empty for three years. That would place the beginning of the vacancy at approximately eighteen ninety nine. The article said it had once been owned by a wealthy family. But the surviving excerpt does not identify that family. The omission is critical, because haunted house legends often depend upon an unnamed former owner, a wealthy family, a beautiful daughter, a jealous husband, a servant who knew too much, a visitor who never left. That's the beauty of it. The less specific the story, the easier it is to reshape.

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The moment you attach a real name, the claim becomes testable. Was there a death certificate? Was there an obituary? Was there a police report? Was there a coroner's investigation? Was a person actually reported missing? But a wealthy family can support almost anything.

SPEAKER_02 13:26

The house itself was substantial. Three stories, fourteen rooms, brick construction, not a small cottage, not a mining shack, not a cabin isolated in the mountains. This was a significant urban residence on a Denver corner. By nineteen oh three, the newspaper would describe it as a public nuisance. By nineteen oh four, the seance reporter would describe large empty rooms, broken doors, boarded windows, fallen plaster, and damp air. But we should not protect the ruined condition of nineteen oh four backward and assume the house always looked that way. Buildings deteriorate quickly when vacant. A broken window admits rain. Rain damages plaster. Damaged plaster exposes laugh. Openings invite trespassers, trespassers break doors, fire damages woodwork, neighbors begin calling the place abandoned. Children dare one another to enter. Every new wound becomes proof of the old story. By the time a building looks haunted, people no longer ask whether the reputation causes deterioration. They assume the deterioration proves the reputation. That may have happened here. The house's vacancy could have produced the haunting story. A perfect circle. Vacancy creates rumor, rumor prevents occupancy, lack of occupancy creates neglect, neglect makes the house appear haunted, and the appearance creates more rumor. You do not need a ghost to trap a property in that cycle. You only need people. On february thirteenth, nineteen oh two, the Denver Times reported that the haunted house at nineteenth in Grant had narrowly escaped destruction. The cause was attributed to firebugs, an old term commonly used for arsonists or people who deliberately set fires. Someone had ignited the building. The exact motives of whoever started the fire are not established in the library's excerpt. Perhaps it was vandalism. Perhaps an attempt to destroy an abandoned nuisance. Perhaps someone seeking shelter built a fire that was interpreted as deliberate. Perhaps the newspaper had additional evidence not included in the surviving summary. What matters is that by february nineteen oh two the house was already publicly identified as haunted. The fire did not create the legend. The legend was already alive. The Denver Times reported that the building had been empty for approximately three years. Then came the sentence that transforms a ghost story into an economic story. He said he could not rent it because of its haunted reputation. Think about that. The newspaper did not merely say children were frightened by it. It did not merely say neighbors heard noises.

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It reported an actual consequence. No tenants, no rent, a fourteen room brick residence producing nothing.

SPEAKER_02 16:46

That does not prove the building was haunted. It proves the belief had value. Or in Fleming's case, a cost. The alleged haunting had entered the real estate market. And once a supernatural rumor affects what somebody will pay or whether somebody will sign a lease, the haunting becomes real in at least one measurable sense.

SPEAKER_01 17:09

Not as a spirit, as an economic force. Someone did not have to see a ghost to hurt Fleming.

SPEAKER_02 17:20

They only had to refuse to rent the house because somebody else claimed they had. More than a year after the fire, the house was still standing. Still empty, still notorious. On June 18, 1903, the Denver Times returned to the property. Now the tone had shifted. This was no longer merely a peculiar haunted residence. Neighbors and health officials regarded it as a public nuisance and a detriment to that part of the city. The paper described it as a three-story, fourteen-room brick residence. It also reported that the house had not been occupied for ten years because of the haunting rumors. That conflicts with the February 1902 report, which said the property had been empty for three years. Three years and ten years are not the same. If the house became vacant around 1899, that supports one timeline. If it had been vacant since approximately 1893, that creates a very different history. Maybe one report was wrong. Maybe the 1902 story meant continuously empty for three years, while the 1903 story referred loosely to a longer period of irregular occupancy. Maybe the journalist relied upon different neighbors. Maybe ten years was simply a dramatic exaggeration. Historical newspapers are primary sources. They are not infallible sources. A primary source tells us what was said at the time. It does not guarantee that everything said was true. That's one of the most important rules of this entire investigation. The newspapers prove that the reputation existed. They prove that reporters wrote about it. They prove that people gathered for a seance. They do not automatically prove that murders happened inside.

SPEAKER_00 19:32

Remember using Moose back in the 80s? Well, this ain't that. Zombie vomit is the hair gel with the dead smell. Make sure to click follow so you do not miss the conclusion of The House at Grant and 19th.