Raise Your Spirits: Denver's Bar Scene Has a Spooky Side

"It's really, really haunted — more than I thought it would be," says Connor Biddle, who runs the YouTube channel Paranormal Encounters with his fiancée, India Hopwood. The duo, who moved to Colorado in 2021, have explored haunted locations all over the country both separately and together since they met in 2019. But a night at one Denver bar resulted in an experience the two will never forget.

"People look at me like I'm nuts, but I saw it," says Zach Young, owner of Bar Red, at 437 West Colfax Avenue, and son of late, legendary Denver restaurateur Cliff Young. The "it" he's talking about is hard for him to explain. He was in the basement of the bar during the day when he saw "a mist," he recalls. "I thought it was a spiderweb, but when I walked up to it, it disappeared."

Could it have been some kind of supernatural portal? He's not sure, but that mysterious experience was just one of many that he and other Bar Red employees have had since the place opened more than a decade ago. "There's lots of noises," Young says, like footsteps, bathroom doors opening and shutting when no one is in them, the sound of a chair moving and, recently, a large crash that came from the kitchen while there were still patrons imbibing upstairs. "It sounded like the plates got knocked over, but I went in there, and there was nothing," he recalls.

The building where Bar Red is located was constructed in 1890, though Young believes the foundation pre-dates that. There is a door in the basement that leads to nothing — Young's theory is that the door used to be the main entrance and was off the street before a flood raised the ground level, rendering the door unusable. The basement is also home to a Prohibition-era tunnel that is now blocked off by a retaining wall on Colfax.
Though he hasn't been able to dig up too many details about the history of the space, Young has found evidence that it was once a brothel. The previous owner also passed down stories about having to move out bathtubs and trunks of clothes left behind from that era.

Throughout the years, Young has occasionally posted about the spooky happenings at Bar Red on social media, which attracted some attention from people interested in otherworldly happenings. "My friend is in a paranormal group around here and had been to Bar Red," Biddle says. "They'd taken a photo, and the person's face was all distorted. They were telling us about it and said we should go investigate."

Young agreed to let the pair film at the location, and the results far exceeded Biddle and Hopwood's expectations. "Most of the activity happened in the basement," Biddle notes, in a space mainly used as Young's office these days.

"In an attempt to get the spirits of Bar Red talking, we switched to using the Estes Method, our favorite investigation technique. ... Little did we know that this Estes Method would be the best one we've ever had on Paranormal Encounters," Hopwood says in the episode, which debuted on October 8, 2022, on YouTube.

The Estes Method is a practice in which one investigator — in this case, Hopwood — is blindfolded and wears noise-canceling headphones while listening to a device known as a spirit box. As the others ask questions (which Hopwood can't hear), she relays anything she hears through the spirit box out loud.

At Bar Red, the spirits were ready to talk, even adding some humor as they seemingly tried to blame the chef for that recent loud crash in the kitchen. "Chef says he always feels like something is messing with him," Young notes.

"It really creeped me out when I watched it back," Hopwood says of the 48-minute-long Estes session. "I didn't know how many questions I was answering."

The investigation may have resulted in more questions than answers, but it certainly fell in line with what Young has experienced. "Nobody's ever said they felt anything evil," he says. "But there are times when you're leaving...sometimes you don't feel like you're by yourself. You don't want to look behind you."
While Bar Red may be the latest Denver drinking establishment to lean into its haunted history, it's certainly not the only one. The Cruise Room opened in the Oxford Hotel on the day Prohibition ended. "Many guests over the decades have reported seeing a gentleman in a historic postman uniform," the hotel shares. "He comes in, sits at the bar and orders a beer, muttering, 'The children, I have to get the gifts to the children,' before leaving." Research revealed that there was a mailman in the 1930s who "was en route to deliver Christmas gifts to children in Central City, but he got stuck in a snowstorm and never made it."

The Victorian building at 1526 Blake Street, the former home of the Blake Street Vault, has long been rumored to be haunted by the ghost of a barmaid named Lydia. It also has an actual vault in the basement, which Lexi Healy, the owner of current tenant Honor Farm, describes as "terrifying." Honor Farm, named for part of the state's old mental institution in Pueblo, leans into the spooky nature of its home with skeletons as part of the decor and animal heads on the figures in a large wall mural.

In March 2022, Kinga's Lounge on Colfax became the Mansion, a concept that also embraces its history, which includes two former owners who may have never left: G.V. Kram, who designed the lavish Colmar Mansion but, according to legend, never got to see the completed structure because he committed suicide when he discovered that his much-younger lover had cheated on him; and pharmacist Thomas R. Bray, who bought the place in 1913, turned it into a speakeasy during Prohibition and passed away in 1950.
The Croke-Patterson Mansion, at 420 East 11th Avenue in Capitol Hill, which is now the Patterson Inn, bills itself as the "second most haunted hotel" in Colorado. The building was home to Thomas M. Patterson, a territorial delegate to Congress, a U.S. congressman and a U.S. senator who also edited and published the Rocky Mountain News and later the Denver Times. "Patterson lived in the home from 1893 until he died there in 1916, tragically preceded in death by his wife Katherine, his son James, his daughter Mary and an infant child — all of whom met untimely deaths in the home," the Inn reveals. It's rumored to be haunted by twelve spirits in total, which inspired the name of 12 Spirits Tavern, which opened last year and welcomes the public to Patterson's former smoking lounge for nightly libations.

The Rock Rest Lodge in Golden was the site of a modern tragedy last October, when a 29-year-old patron used a truck to kill one person and injure six others outside the bar early on October 9. But the building's history includes other tragic tales, including the story of Molly Barton, who is said to have been living at the Rock Rest Lodge in the summer of 1923, when it was a brothel. After a patron stole her clothes and threw them off the balcony, a tussle ensued.

Then Barton took a shot of whiskey and "climbed up the post like a crazed bathtub gin-soaked monkey," reads the story on the Rock Rest's website. As she collected her clothes, "the crowd had reached a fever pitch of stomps and whistles when Molly lost her footing. Making a desperate grasp, Molly found herself hanging from the moose’s snout. Suddenly, the mount gave way and Molly crashed to the floor. The giant beast tumbled down upon Molly, where his mighty antlers pierced the young girl’s heart. Molly wanders the Rock Rest Lodge to this day, doomed to eternally look for the bra that she will never find."

That's just the start of the spirited stories about haunted spots around the state, including the Brown Palace and Union Station. And then there's the most haunted hotel in Colorado: the Stanley in Estes Park, which was famously the real-life inspiration behind Stephen King's The Shining.

It seems that the ghosts of Colorado enjoy a night out in a good bar as much as the living do.