I spent a night with ghost hunters in a Colorado gold mine and lived to tell this tale
Darkness swallowed me the deeper I crept inside a former Breckenridge gold mine, but my other senses heightened. Water droplets slipping from ore-bearing rock above plunked on my hard hat. Mice skittered across a bygone minecart track below my feet.
Members of a ghosthunting team surrounded me, cranking up a tool that swept across the AM/FM radio dials, searching for paranormal voices among the frequencies.
As the ghost hunters peppered potential spirits in the mine with inquiries one late September night, a voice rose above the radio static, coating my skin in goosebumps: “I’ll ask the questions.”
Dear reader, while that may seem like the retort of an irritable journalist, I can assure you the firm, feminine voice I captured on a crummy phone audio recording was not my own.
It would not be the only thing I couldn’t explain during my night tagging along with XX Paranormal Communications, an all-female paranormal research team in Colorado. But it would be the moment I
most eagerly recounted to friends, colleagues and my mom, who wondered whether I had survived my night in a mountain mine chasing ghosts.
Country Boy Mine, founded in 1887, was known for its gold and silver production, later gaining national fame for producing hefty amounts of lead and zinc used during World War I and II, according to mine owner Mike Shipley.
Shipley gave us a tour of the grounds, describing the dangers of mining back in the day — the men and children who lost their lives amid dynamite explosions, the dwindling life expectancy as shards of rock filled miners’ lungs.
Shipley skedaddled once night fell, calling out behind him as he headed home, “You ladies are brave. I’m not going to stick around.”
Mackenzie Koncher-casiano, co-founder of XX Paranormal Communications, told me not to be afraid as we headed in — that being a ghost hunter was just like being a journalist. You ask people questions about their lives, what they’re up to, where they’ve been and how they’re doing now.
“I’m hoping to find answers to questions,” Koncher-casiano said. “Who or what are we speaking with? Are they there because they want to be or because they’re trapped? Is there life after death or what happens after we die? Are there UFOS? What else is out there besides us? It’s a lot of exploring our curiosities.”
“Not the only weirdo”
Colorado is home to many curious minds, it turns out.
More than 100 Colorado-based paranormal teams are listed on the ghoulish online directory paranormalsocieties.com, based out of Denver, Colorado Springs, Grand Junction, Pueblo and in between.
“I think it’s Colorado’s pioneer spirit that fuels our spiritual activity,” said Rose Glenn, who has been active in the paranormal community for eight years. “The mining towns, the people who came here and took great risks to get here, the people after gold. That rich history makes Colorado unique.”
All of the ghost groupies I spoke with found their way to the paranormal community after experiencing something supernatural and wanting clarity.
Glenn compared herself to Haley Joel Osment’s character in the 1999 film “The Sixth Sense,” saying she used to communicate with the dead in her home as a child. Koncher-casiano saw a ghost in her curtains as a kid. Kurz said her grandfather’s spirit appeared before her to say goodbye moments before she received a phone call informing her he’d died.
“I thought, ‘There’s got to be more people like this,’ ” Glenn said. “Should they call in the white wagon and have me taken away?”
As Glenn and the others grew older, their paranormal experiences nagged at them until they found a community of people with similar encounters.
Glenn created the Colorado Ghost Hunters Meetup group and an accompanying Facebook group where she cultivated members — thousands strong — who get together for investigations and paranormal events throughout the year and share their experiences, photos and niche metaphysical memes.
Callea Sherrill, former resident paranormal investigator at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, said her favorite thing about the ghost-hunting community is watching new people find their way to it.
“You watch that spark of interest in a newbie’s eyes that says, ‘Oh my gosh! I’m not the only weirdo out there,’ ” Sherrill said.
A flickering flashlight
Koncher-casiano’s team is still in its infancy, having formed in November. The 32-year-old Aurora resident has been thrilled to harness ghoul — er, girl — power and gather a group of passionately spooky women to go along for the ride.
Julia Allie, Megan Mccorkle, Christine Hendrickson and Luana Kurz joined Koncher-casiano huddled near the mouth of the Breckenridge mine last month, wielding ghost-hunting equipment consisting of devices tracking electromagnetic activity, radio frequencies and temperature drops.
A headlamp placed at the mine’s opening beamed light down the shaft, making it just bright enough to discern the shapes of the paranormal team getting to work.
The crew asked, with reverence, whether any spirits among us could make themselves known. A flashlight the ghost hunters had placed on a wooden beam off to the side flickered on, illuminating a wall of hard hats.
“Thank you,” said Hendrickson, who explained that some spirits prefer the ease of turning the flashlight on and off to communicate.
For the rest of the evening, the flashlight blinked as the investigators interrogated: “Can you turn the flashlight on if you’re a miner? Can you turn the flashlight on if there is more than one of you here? Can you turn the flashlight on if you were hurt in the mine?”
From the line of questioning and corresponding light flashes, the ghost hunters devised there were six spirits in the passage, among them the wife of a miner in search of her long-lost husband.
While I ascended into the mountains yearning to witness an apparition, I now hoped whatever was illuminating the mine with the flashlight’s warm glow would not turn its attention to my beloved speck of light back at the mine’s opening.
“If that light went out, there’s only one way out of this mine,” said Mccorkle, her voice much more upbeat at the prospect than mine would have been. “We would have to walk right toward it.”
The headlamp stayed on, and I was grateful. The closest thing to a spirit I saw was the ghostly cloud of my own breath, vindicating the chills running up my spine.
Nevertheless, I had experienced what XX Paranormal Communications considered a successful night — the team documented a solid amount of paranormal activity via the flashlight and got some blips of audio, Koncher-casiano said.
“I can’t wait to review all the footage and audio and see what else we got,” Mccorkle said.
Koncher-casiano wished the paranormal scene in Colorado, as a whole, was as tightknit as her crew. She, Glenn and Sherill called the Colorado paranormal community fractured — full of ego, drama and division.
To counter this, Koncher-casiano is organizing Colorado Paracon, a local convention for supernatural super-fans that’s slotted for October 2020. She wants the public to know her team is available for residential investigations — and, yes, she will tolerate and maybe even embrace your “Ghostbusters” references.
“I really want to get to know other paranormal investigators and members of the community so we can work together to find answers and collaborate on something that we love and are passionate about,” Koncher-casiano said.
Having a conversation
Driving back to my hotel from the mine around midnight, I heeded Koncher-casiano’s advice, announcing aloud in my car that any spirits we encountered needed to stay in the mine and leave me be. I didn’t feel spooked heading back to my room and was looking forward to a warm bed after hours of crouching on slick rock in frigid temperatures.
I shut the door behind me, crawled under the covers and turned off the light, thinking about the fall foliage I could photograph the next morning.
I woke up in a sweat after a string of what I prayed were merely nightmares of otherworldly creatures hovering above my hotel bed. I turned on the lights, flipped on the television and watched “The Andy Griffith Show” for the rest of the night.
I beat back a memory from earlier in the day when one of Koncher-casiano’s ghost-hunting tools alerted her to a spirit in my hotel room as we chatted.
When morning dawned, I packed my things and drove back down the mountain, appreciating the autumn leaves from the safety of my car windows.
“You never know who or what you’ll be communicating with — and that’s part of the fun,” Koncher-casiano said earlier in the day, assuring me all was well in my hotel room. “These are just people we’re trying to have a conversation with, just like me and you. We’re like journalists of the dead.”