Local historian Phil Goodstein has written so many books about Denver that he’s lost count. His favorite subjects are bumbling politicians, cheats, liars and crooks who got the city started.
He’s perhaps best known, though, for the ghost tours that he has conducted for decades. And it’s a tradition that may be coming to a close soon.
“This might be my last tour season,” he wrote in a recent email to his followers.
That was some truly scary news, so we joined Goodstein on a walk last weekend to hear his glorious ghost stories once more. If you want to catch his (possibly) final ghost tour, it's this Thursday, Oct. 31.
These ghost tours combine history, horror and pulp fiction.
“Across the street from us is what might be the most haunted house of all in Denver, something called the Whitehead Peabody Mansion,” the historian said, ominously, to a group gathered around him on a Capitol Hill sidewalk last weekend.
“Trays are always tipping over. Glasses break on tables. Knives and forks supposedly fly around the kitchen. There's mysterious crying sometimes heard up on the second floor.”
The place at Grant Street and 11th Avenue was built for Dr. William Riddick Whitehead, a surgeon who Goodstein said killed a lot of his patients. Its second occupant was James Peabody, who served as Colorado’s governor in the early 1900s and is remembered for calling in the National Guard to put down striking miners.
Maybe it was the owners' follies that instilled the home with so many spirits.
“Mysterious things keep happening,” Goodstein creaked.
There’s a “crotchety old man” haunting the third floor, but he won’t bother you, so long as you don’t try to bartend in his space. A pretty young apparition named Ella, or Eloise, appears to handsome young men and jealously pinches waitresses who get too close to them.
A six-year-old boy messes with the chandelier, causing lights to flicker despite electricians’ best efforts to fix them. Psychics have flocked to the place to hold seances and communicate with its dead.
Meanwhile, restaurateurs have tried and failed to keep businesses afloat here; none of them lasted long. Once, the tax collectors came knocking after a bar went belly-up, Goodstein said. The clairvoyants tried to defend the place.
“[The mediums] go down to the basement and they say, ‘Spirits, we are going to be leaving you. Evil forces are going to be taking our place. We want you to take possession of their calculators and their newfangled cell phones and laptops,’” he said. “And I put a sign in front of the place declaring ‘Our ghosts now rest with the IRS.’”
This is a typical arc for a Goodstein story: Hook your audience with lore, lead them into bona fide local history, and end with a punchline. The punching bag is usually the government.
Goodstein has been steeped in local history for decades.
It was 1986 when Goodstein first discovered the power of the walking tour. He was teaching local history when, one evening, nobody showed up to class.
“I got bored and I decided to go out for a stroll. And here I was, simply walking down Colfax backwards, wildly waving my arms about talking to myself — pre-cell phone era — and people started following me around,” he told a crowd gathered around him last weekend.
“I figured I might as well give walking tours," Goodstein continued. "However, no sooner am I giving walking tours, I have the challenge: Do I tell the upright positive version of events? Or the outrageous, scandalous version of events?”
The crowds seemed to love stories that were scandalous, fantastical, or both.
“Originally, a criticism I had of my tours, there was too much history,” he said. “People wanted more ghosts.”
It’s one reason his tours near the Capitol have skewed south of Colfax Avenue.
“That sort of is becoming the standard. I don't know whether it's the best idea,” he added. “There's better ghosts to the south. There's more bloody murder to the north.”
But during his tour Saturday night, his audience found they liked the true history that underpinned Goodstein’s stories of poltergeists.
“I do like the mix of history and the kind of spooky, outrageous, scandalous stories,” Krista Wells said as we walked into the neighborhood. “He's a great storyteller.”
“I enjoyed his personality,” Alan Pagan added, “Just how excited he was … Sounds like this area overall is pretty haunted.”
Is this really Goodstein's last season?
Ghost walks weren’t a thing when he began this work, all those years ago.
“When I started, nobody else was doing tours like this,” he told us.
Times have changed. As Goodstein dug into Capitol Hill’s ghouls last weekend, he steered his audience through a neighborhood haunted by several other guides, who had their own big groups.
But it’s not the crowded field that’s pushing him toward retirement.
“I have been getting increasingly tired on my tours. I almost collapsed twice,” he said, after his guests dispersed for the evening. “The magic is gone.”
He’s still thinking about a succession plan, he added.
“I have a couple of people that have expressed interest in taking them over,” he said. “I just don't know that I have the eagerness, energy to keep at it.”
Though Halloween is nearly here, there are still opportunities to hear Goodstein spin unsettling tales. He is slated for a series of talks about his latest book, “Fairmount: Denver’s Ultimate Cemetery,” through the end of the year.
And even after he ends his ghost junkets, the sardonic storyteller will still be telling Denver’s history — perhaps.
“Either that or I'll be like some of the ghosts,” he said. “They just disappear and fade away.”
