Cellar Door

Open the cellar door in the basement of the Croke Patterson Mansion in Denver Colorado and you may find something awful. You see, a ghost claims that there’s a dead body buried down there.

Croke Patterson Mansion was built in the 1870s by Thomas Croke. After construction was completed, Croke walked into the mansion to take a look around. Nobody knows what happened while he was inside, but when he came out, he was so emotionally shaken and disturbed that he refused to ever go back inside. He left that day and never returned. Whatever it was that disturbed Croke so much has never been discovered but soon afterwards, he sold the mansion to Thomas Patterson, a US Senator.

Years later, when the mansion was being renovated, workmen would constantly arrive in the morning to find the previous day’s work undone and their tools had been thrown around the room. Frustrated, they decided to leave two guard dogs in the cellar to protect the property from intruders.

The next day, the workmen arrived and were horrified to find both guard dogs lying dead on the sidewalk outside. A window on the 3rd floor of the mansion was smashed and it seemed as if the dogs had jumped out of the broken window and fell to their deaths. Could something in the house have frightened them so much that they would jump out of a third-story window?

Although the workmen were incredibly shaken by this weird incident, renovation continued and the mansion was converted into an office building. However, as soon as employees started working in the offices, weird an inexplicable events began to occur. They saw office equipment such as typewriters, copiers, and telephones operating on their own.

In the 1970s the house was bought by a family, but tragedy would strike again. A baby born to the owners died in the third floor nursery. The mother never got over the baby’s death and committed suicide in the third floor turret of the house. After that the mansion was sold again. But whether used as a private residence, apartments or as office space, the structure has always been plagued by mysterious incidents. It has been described as both “elegant” and “frightening.”

Finally, in an effort to get to the bottom of the haunting, the new owners organized a seance on the property. It seems that they managed to make contact with the spirit haunting the building. It told them that the haunting was caused by the ghost of a young girl whose body was buried in the cellar.

Workers reluctantly opened up the cellar door, and began excavating the cellar floor. They found a hidden chamber under the floor that was filled with sea sand, but they never found a body. But the cellar is filled with twisting and turning passageways, so there’s no telling what could be down there.

The current owners reported waking up one night and seeing a ghostly young girl dressed in old-fashioned clothes, who introduced herself as Maggie. Researchers found that one of the children who lived in the house in the past was named Margaret. She was Thomas Patterson’s daughter.