HGB Ep. 558 - Croke-Patterson Mansion

Moment in Oddity - Miramichi Moose

Most people know that if you encounter a wild moose, you definitely don't want to mess with it. They typically can be very dangerous animals. However, back in the early 1900's there was a man in New Brunswick, Canada who did not heed this common knowledge. As the story goes, John Connell saved a young moose from freezing in the snow. The man got the moose up out of the snow and brought the animal into his barn. Connell named the moose Tommy and he raised him alongside his horses. He taught the moose to accept a harness just as he did with his horses so that his rescued moose could pull a sleigh. Connell also saddle-trained the moose and he would ride Tommy into town from time to time. Connell is not the only person in history to tame a wild moose. A man named Sellick was known to trap and tame moose back in the mid 1800's. He would then use the beasts as draft animals. It is said by some that moose are better than horses because they could wade through snow better and easily travel 50 miles in a day without tiring. In 1904, John Connell was contacted by the Newfoundland government. The government wanted to begin a population of moose on the island. It is said that Connell went out and captured six or seven moose and sent them by train to Howley, Newfoundland. Moose are very majestic animals, but training one to be ridden, certainly is odd.

This Month in History - Panama Canal Treaty

In the month of October, on the 1st, in 1979, the Panama Canal Treaty transferred jurisdiction over the Canal Zone to Panama. The United States had tried to negotiate a treaty with Colombia back in 1903. This agreement would give the U.S. rights to the land surrounding where the Panama Canal was to be built. Colombia would not ratify the treaty, but at the time, Panama was in the process of seceding from the country of Colombia. President Theodore Roosevelt supported the Panamanian quest for independence. Roosevelt's support proved to be beneficial as the Panamanian government signed the treaty and the Panama Canal opened in 1914. Over the years, control over the canal spurred tensions between the United States and Panama. In 1964, a riot erupted between U.S. citizens and Panamanians over flying the Panamanian flag in the Canal Zone. It was soon recognized that there needed to be further negotiations regarding the Canal. 1967 brought both governments three treaties that were agreed upon, however a shift in Panamanian government, including a coup, delayed any immediate completions of the proposed treaties. Between 1973 and 1976 communications began again with concentrations on U.S. perpetual use of the waterway instead of perpetual control of the Panama Canal. This led to the eventual Torrijos-Carter Treaties that President Jimmy Carter and Panamanian leader Omar Torrijos signed on September 7, 1977. The first treaty stated that the U.S. would continue using its military to defend the canal, thus allowing perpetual use by the United States. The second treaty stated that the Panama Canal Zone would cease to exist on October 1st, 1979, with the Canal itself being turned over to the Panamanians on December 31st, 1999.

Croke-Patterson Mansion

The Patterson Inn has been known for most of its life as the Croke-Patterson Mansion. This grand Victorian mansion is located in Capitol Hill in Denver, Colorado. This was a private home for many years and then had other uses before becoming the boutique hotel it is today. This is a location where Diane had her second ever paranormal experience. The basement is incredibly creepy and there are many ghost stories about this location. Join us for the history and hauntings of the Croke-Patterson Mansion.

There are many legends connected to the Croke-Patterson Mansion. Tracking down a real history can be difficult. On top of that, we all know that people spreading rumors and legends can give them a life spiritually, forming tulpas. We'll try to do our best, but also we'll share some of the legends because they are important when it comes to the house. The Croke-Patterson Mansion sits at 420 East 11th Avenue in Denver. Capitol Hill is the neighborhood that surrounds the state's capitol. Diane lived here for a couple of years, a couple blocks down from the capitol in Poet's Row. This area had been where Denver's rich families built their audacious mansions. The Silver Crash of 1893 caused a slump in the local economy and building shifted to apartments and boarding houses for transient middle-class families. Before all of this though, the area was homesteaded by Henry C. Brown. He owned 160 acres and it was dubbed Brown's Bluff because it was a dry, dusty bit of land. No one thought it would become prime real estate. He eventually donated a portion of the land for the state capitol to be built upon. Plans for the capitol stalled eventually and Brown claimed the land back, upon which the state sued him and got the land back.

It was here in Capitol Hill that Thomas Bernard Croke decided to build his massive mansion. Croke was the son of Irish immigrants and was born in Wisconsin in 1856. He moved to Denver in 1874 with some siblings and he got a job at the Daniels & Fisher store in downtown. Croke did an excellent job and was quickly promoted to management and before long, Daniels and Fisher partnered with Croke so he could open his own store. This store specialized in carpet and he made enough to build a mansion at the corner of East 11th Avenue and Pennsylvania Street. Croke hired contractor J.M. Cochran and architect Isaac Hodgson, Jr. to design what would become one of the three finest examples of the Chateauesque style in Denver. This is the only one still around. The design was meant to mimic the Chateau d'Azay-le-Rideau (ah-zeh luh ree-doe) castle in France. Many people believe the home follows after the Richardsonian Romanesque that was popular at the time though. The mansion stands three-stories and has a basement. 

The outside was made from Manitou sandstone and featured turrets, dormers, bay windows, arched doorways and spires. Initially, that sandstone would have been beautifully carved, but sandstone doesn't hold up and the years were not kind to the facade. The stable was connected to the house and was a mini replica of the main house. The main floor featured a large hallway with a library, parlor and dining room were on either side of the hallway. The second floor had five bedrooms and the third floor had servant bedrooms and a playroom for children. The basement had the ballroom and a laundry and storage rooms. In all, the house spread over 14,000 square feet.

Croke's wife, Margaret Dunphy Croke, had died before Croke moved into the mansion with their two young children, probably in 1887. He also moved his parents in, but his mother died shortly after they moved in. After six months in the house, Croke decided to move everybody out. He built this grand house and only lived in it for six months. Croke wanted to move back to his ranch north of Denver. He approached a man named Thomas Patterson and made a deal to trade the mansion to him for 1,440 acres of ranchland. The real reason Croke left his mansion was probably because of the silver crash and he was unable to pay his mortgage anymore.

Thomas Patterson was an Irishman who moved to America with his family when he was ten. They lived in New York and then Indiana and Patterson joined the 11th Indiana Infantry during the Civil War. After the war, he went to law school  and he became a successful lawyer, politician who served in Congress from 1877-1879 and journalist who purchased the Rocky Mountain News in 1890. While studying, he met Katharine Grafton at school and the couple married in 1863. They would have five children with three of them living to adulthood - Mary, Margaret and James - and moved to Colorado in 1872. The couple became prominent residents of Denver and Katharine was known for her philanthropy and she was an influential suffragist serving as president of the Colorado Equal Suffrage Association. Things weren't rosy for the Patterson's early on. Their two-year-old son Tom died and Katharine felt that her husband didn't offer her enough comfort. On top of that, their son James ran away from home and got into trouble with the law. Katharine felt it would be best if she moved herself and their three living children to Europe and she did so for four years from 1884 to 1888. Thomas felt that the Croke Mansion would be a wonderful showplace for his family and so he  moved into it in 1892. The Pattersons would live in the mansion for the next thirty years. Only Margaret would live past her twenties. James died in 1892 at the age of 26 and Mary died in 1894 at the age of 27. Katharine died in 1902. Thomas died in July of 1916.

Margaret Patterson had gone to school and studied to become a medical missionary. She never followed that path. Margaret had cared for her siblings before they passed and after that, she met Richard Crawford Campbell who was a distant cousin. He was an influential newspaper editor. The couple married and Richard became the business manager for the Rocky Mountain News under his father-in-law Thomas. After the paper was sold, Campbell turned to real estate and founded the Campbell Investment Company. Margaret and Richard had three children and they lived with her parents in the mansion and then continued on at the mansion after their deaths until 1924 when they bought another home that was more modern. Margaret died in June of 1929 and Richard died shortly thereafter in February 1930.

The Campbells had a daughter who was also named Margaret and she sold the mansion to the Louise Realty Company. This was leased to the Joe Mann School of Orchestra. By 1927 KFVR radio station was housed in the mansion and then in 1930, it was converted into seven apartments. The house changed hands several times for decades and it fell into disrepair, particularly the outside. Several mansions around it had been demolished to make way for apartment buildings and so a grassroots effort started to save the rest of the old mansions in Capitol Hill. Realtor Mary Rae had fallen in love with the Croke-Patterson Mansion and she bought it and continued to run it as apartments. She and her husband worked to get the house on the National Register of Historic Places and they succeeded in 1973.

Dr. Douglas and Melodee Ikeler bought the mansion in 1998 for $600,000 and they lived in it for 10 years. Dr. Ikeler was a very successful veterinarian and he wanted a grand home to reflect his wealth. The architecture of the mansion was perfect for him and he said of it, "I was able to live in a large place shaped like a castle with fancy and elegant interior and exterior." The couple eventually divorced, the house went into foreclosure in 2007 and sat in limbo for a while with different plans for it. One of them involved a religious organization using it as a homeless facility, which thankfully didn't happen because they were going to gut everything inside. Architect Brian Higgins bought the mansion in 2011 for $565,000 and he began renovating it into a bed and breakfast. He was also a director and produced a documentary on the renovations he named "The Castle Project." The film was released in 2013 and the remodeled Patterson Inn opened that same year. Chris Chiari became owner of the mansion in 2018 and he runs it as a boutique hotel, still named the Patterson Inn. Our listener Dolly, who has joined us on several investigations, stayed overnight at the mansion. The mansion has nine uniquely themed rooms for rent. The 12 Spirits Tavern serves up drinks in the basement.

That name for the pub is because there are claims that there are 12 spirits here. Ghost stories have been told about the mansion for decades. There are many reasons for hauntings. The incredibly haunted Cheeseman Park is nearby. Denver was once called the "Little Venice" because of all the ditches crisscrossing through the city to bring water to the neighborhoods and Capitol Hill was full of these ditches and since water can be a conduit for paranormal activity, it is thought the ditches helped this. And then there are the legends. One legend that is told is that a baby died in the house and the mother was so upset about the death that she buried the baby in the basement within a wall. For a number of years, that hole was there. I have a story about it. And the hole was there when our listener Dolly visited. We'll share a picture on Instagram. This legend never shares what the baby died from or who the mother of the child had been. There also is no proof of any of this story. But psychics and mediums have for decades claimed something about a baby and this basement.

Another legend is told about these guard dogs. In the 1970s, there was remodeling going on and the workers would come in to find that their work had been undone overnight. There were a lot of homeless people near the mansion, so they figured some of them were breaking in at night. They put up a fence and hired a security guard. The same issue kept happening so it was decided to bring some guard dogs in to watch the house at night. Three dogs were brought in and on their first night, one of the dogs went through a plate glass window on the third floor and it passed on the driveway. On the second night, a second dog went through the same window and the third dog was found shaking and drooling in a corner. There is no plate glass window on the third floor, so if dogs did go out a window, it was a tiny window in the turret room.

The mansion has always been a creepy place to me. This is the location where I had my second ever paranormal experience. (Diane tells story about visiting the mansion and going down to the basement where there is a hole she stuck her head in and felt the presence of something and what felt like something touching her head.)

Thomas Patterson is one of the spirits here and he shows up in the downstairs pub, which had been his smoking lounge. Katherine Patterson is thought to haunt the Biltmore room. She likes to turn the lights on and off during the night. An Irish caretaker is said to haunt the carriage house.

When Mary Rae owned the mansion, she received several complaints from renters who stayed on the fourth floor. The tenants complained of hearing sounds on the fourth floor that sounded like a loud party and sometimes they heard a screaming baby. The area where the sounds emanated from was a small storage area. Mary was perplexed as to where the sounds could've come from. Trenton Parker who converted the mansion to an office building said, "My mom used to live there in the 1970’s when the mansion was six apartments and she lived on the third floor for about six months, and heard a woman screaming and a baby crying in the tower and would hear parties going on in her apartment and when she opened the door nothing would be going on. Her and the roommate that she lived with could not live there anymore because the ghosts were very active and they could not get any rest living there."

Melodee Ikeler was pregnant with triplets when she and her husband lived in the mansion. She had a great deal of trouble getting out of bed near the end of her pregnancy. She was home alone and needed to get out of bed and couldn't do it. She said, "I was rolling trying to get out of bed and looked to the side of the bed and saw a woman standing next to the bed, offering her hand to help me out. I took her hand and got out of the bed. Then, she just vanished through the wall next to the bed." Melodee decided to get the house blessed, so she had a priest come in and he walked into the front parlor to start his blessing and all of a sudden all the plaster peeled off around the fireplace and a dark vortex of wind came out of the fireplace. The priest ran out of the mansion. Melodee claimed that the drawers in her husband's desk would open and close on their own even though it was locked.

Rocky Mountain Paranormal wrote about an incident that Diane heard about on the radio the morning after it happened, "In 2004, the 850 KOA ZOO BOO Tour radio show featured the mansion. We were the featured paranormal research group. At the end of the nights broadcast, all of the people who were staying for the 5:00 a.m. broadcast were told to 'find a place to sleep in the mansion.' Casey Lamb a radio station employee, decided he was going to sleep in the basement where the medical offices had been located. When he got to the room he saw a person in the corner of the room by the fireplace, then he realized that he could only see the head and he knew that there was not supposed to be anyone left in the building. He ran upstairs to get us to search for someone who had either been left behind or had broken into the mansion. Several people went to the basement and searched, but nobody was found. The next morning, one of Melodee Ikelers children said that that was where they always 'saw a man standing in the corner.'" Now the way Diane remembers it, it was the morning after they stayed overnight and Casey was the last one out of the house, but he didn't know that and he told everybody that there was still a guy down in the basement sleeping in the corner. Someone took a picture of this figure and it sure looked like someone under a blanket with just their head showing.

Nobody could do any kind of investigating after that because Dr. Ikeler started asking for $5,000 a night for rental. So this was going on long before the Conjuring House. As we said, Melodee divorced the doctor in 2007 and the house went into foreclosure. Someone visited in January of 2010 and said of the experience that the home felt very peaceful, but "I will say, however, there was a very dark and penetrating feeling in the cellars – the game room and the family room was fine. However, the cellar areas were very unsettling and again, I was EXTREMELY anxious to get back upstairs. I truly don’t know if I could live in that home." Brian  Higgins noticed that the mansion was haunted while they were doing renovations. He and his work crew reported seeing apparitions of children, they felt cold spots and they heard strange sounds and voices.

Ann Alexander Leggett and her daughter Jordan wrote the book "A Haunted History of Denver's Croke-Patterson Mansion" in 2011. Here is an excerpt from the book. (pg. 25) 

Ann wrote, "When they had offices there, they couldn't keep tenants because typewriters would type in the middle of the night by themselves, babies crying on the third floor, party noises coming from a back closet, and so those kinds of things persist. When we first started the research I had just googled "Croke-Patterson" and I got this lady's blog and she said she used to have an office there in the late 80s. She said all kinds of strange things happened there. So I got her email and said, you know, "Would you be willing to talk to me about it?" And she didn't answer me and didn't answer me. Finally, she came back and said "Why?" So I explained who I was and that I was writing a history of the house and about the hauntings as well. She said, "Well, okay, I just want my stories to be taken seriously because they were very intense to me." So I sent her this list of questions and she answered a couple of them and it's a little bit vague, and then I don't hear from her again and so I emailed her back and time goes by and she sends an email back that says "Good luck with the book." She just couldn't go back there. She just couldn't deal with it anymore." 

Jordan and Ann were interviewed by Westword and they shared this with the paper. Jordan said, "A few people have had a lot of trouble walking up the stairs to the third floor. You get two thirds of the way up the stairs and all of the oxygen is gone. On the tape you can hear Mom and the psychic gasping. Months later, I found a death certificate totally by accident. Death certificates are not easy to come by, and I was at the clerk and recorder because at a certain point in the 1960s anything beyond that is either in the basement of the City and County building or in the library, so I was going to find out where exactly the book I was looking for was. And he pulls up on the microfiche, he's like "Oh yeah here's back to 1960 or something" and he's like, "What is this?" and it says "Death Cert." So he pulls it up and there's a random death certificate stored with the tax records on this house and it's for the house when Dr. Sudan owned it. Dr. Sudan his wife it turns out committed suicide in the house. It wasn't publicized, there's no obituary, there's really nothing about it, and then he got remarried five years later and so this death certificate is a copy of the one issued the day of, so it looks like he had to prove that she was dead or something so he could get remarried. So I found this death certificate and it says how she died and all this stuff we didn't know. The woman who committed suicide, she mixed rat poison and water, which creates cyanogas which is similar to Zyklon B, which is the gas they used in the Holocaust to gas people. Within one to three minutes, all the oxygen is gone." Ann said, "Krista felt [the gasping] was the woman who died form the cyanogas suicide and basically suffocated and couldn't breathe. She felt that woman stands at the top of the stairs. And how bizarre that Krista and I didn't know that."

The Patterson Inn appears to be a gorgeous upscale boutique hotel, but could the historic ambiance be hiding something sinister? Are there spirits from the past hanging around in the afterlife? Is the Croke-Patterson Mansion haunted? That is for you to decide!