The Croke-Patterson Mansion's Ghosts

A visit to 12 Spirits Tavern

After one of my tours at the Molly Brown House this summer, a man and his two daughters approached me to ask about any ghosts in the house. As I mentioned last week, this happens frequently on tours. The Molly Brown House does not have any really chilling stories (that I know of, at least), so if guests press a bit, I might tell them about the Croke-Patterson-Campbell House, commonly referred to as the Croke-Patterson Mansion, which has much spookier stories associated with it.

Haunted by a Myth

I started to tell this father and his daughters about the dogs at the Croke-Patterson Mansion, but cut myself off, “Is this too scary?” I asked waving my hands vaguely above the little girls’ heads, looking for permission.

“It’s alright,” the father said, “We like to listen to these things in the day, then think of them at bedtime, right?”

“Meeee too,” I said, then continued, “So, they were doing work on the house and they kept coming back in the morning to find the work undone or the job site a mess. So the owners got some guard dogs. One morning, they came in to find that the dogs had thrown themelves from the turret and were dead on the lawn below.”

Leaving the Molly Brown House after my tours that day, I wondered why I had never ventured down the street to see the Croke-Patterson Mansion myself. When guests asked about it, I would gesture and say, “It’s several blocks…that way,” but truthfully, I had never been there. That night, I looked the house up on the map and felt ridiculous when I saw it was three blocks south of the Molly Brown House, at the corner of Pennsylvania and 11th. I also noticed that they had a bar.

My friend Allison, my daughter’s godmother, comes to visit us for a week each September and this year I asked her if she was up for visiting a haunted bar. “I don’t have a costume,” she said, hesitantly. When I informed her that it was not a Halloween thing, but a research trip to a bar in a historically haunted house—no costumes needed—she was game.

12 Spirits Tavern

We visited 12 Spirits Tavern on a Thursday evening and it was quiet in Capitol Hill. When we arrived, there were only two other customers in the bar, so we got to take a good look at the place, which sits in the basement that was once Mr. Patterson’s smoking room. The ambiance was nice, with stringlights, an outdoor dining area (pet friendly), and plenty of two-top tables as well as a couch with a stash of games under the coffee table. The biggest startle of my night was sitting down and finding that the couch was much lower than I thought.

We each enjoyed a cocktail off the specials menu. I got a rosemary aviation which was very beautiful, but sweeter than I prefer. Allison got something with blackberry and a nice tequila.

Despite the fact that the bar’s name nods to the alleged twelve spirits who haunt the house, I will admit that I was feeling shy and nervous that asking about ghosts would be annoying. Allison had no such qualms, so when the bartender came back she told him that I had questions. Thanks, girl.

I explained my connection with the Molly Brown House and that I bet he also gets asked about ghosts at the house all the time. And, I mentioned that I overhear tours outside the Molly Brown House who get the history completely wrong—like, they didn’t even do a basic Google search.

The bartender, who was also the manager, said that yes, people get the history of the house all wrong. I thought back to when I worked in the jail library and we got a couple copies of The Haunted Heart of Denver, which had a brief moment of intense popularity. I got asked enough questions, that I did a bit of research so I could talk with the guys in the pod about what I found. I mentioned to the bartender that I watched The Castle Project, and did not think it was any good. He agreed, but told us that the Portals to Hell (S2 Ep 7) episode on the house is much better.

The History of The Croke-Patterson Mansion

When told that “almost everything written about the house gets something wrong,” I asked what the best source for history on the house was and was brought a copy of "The Stronghold of the 'Smart Set': Denver's Croke-Patterson-Campbell Mansion" by Amy Zimmer to read while I drank a Manhattan.

According to Zimmer, Thomas Bernard Croke was born in 1836 in Wisconsin. He moved to Denver in 1874 and began working in the carpet department of the Daniels & Fisher store. He worked his way up quickly and within a few years he opened his own store on Lawrence Street in partnership with Daniels & Fisher.

Croke's store must have done well because in 1890, he obtained a permit to build a $18,000 house on Pennsylvania Street. The house he built was in the Chateauesque style, meant to evoke the castles of the Loire Valle of France in the 1600s.

After living in the house for just six months, Croke traded the house to Thomas Patterson in exchange for 1,440 acres of ranchland. After the death of his wife and, shortly after, his mother, Croke preferred living on the ranch he owned north of Denver.

Thomas Patterson, who acquired the house in 1893, was a lawyer, journalist, and politician. He and his family emigrated from Ireland in 1849, when he was ten, and settled in Crawfordsville, Indiana, after a time in New York. He studied law at Wabash College and passed the bar in 1867. (Margaret Brown fans, that was the year she was born. He moved into the Croke-Patterson house the year before the Browns moved to their house up the street.)

Patterson moved to Denver in 1872 and he and his wife, Katherine devoted themselves to local charities and causes such as women's suffrage. In 1874, he was elected city attorney and then the first Democratic territorial delegate to Washington from Colorado. In 1890, he acquired a majority of shares of The Rocky Mountain News and served as news editor, using his leverage to take local politicians to task.

The Pattersons' daughter, whose married name was Margaret Campbell, owned the home until she and her husband, Richard, moved away in 1924, by which point the neighborhood had fallen from its fashionable status. After the Campbells sold the house, it served as a music school, then a radio station, and then apartments and offices, before being turned back into a single-family home in 1998.

Today, the house is a boutique hotel, Patterson Inn. And that hotel is where 12 Spirits Tavern is.

So, is it more haunted than the Molly Brown House?

“I’ve heard some pretty scary stories about this place,” I said. “Is it haunted?”

“I mean, no,” I was told. “But things happen.” I made a mental note of how similar this answer was to the one I start with when asked about ghosts at The Molly Brown House.

Allison and I leaned in, eyebrows raised. We were told that several people who have stayed in the Prague Room reported seeing a male figure sitting in a chair watching them or walking across the room. It seems to be the most haunted room in the hotel.

The innkeeper said that she was making a bed in that room and stepped away to go get something and when she came back, there was a visible dent in the bed and the pillow, like someone was resting there.

Another time, she said that a piece of paper came out of the printer, which she had not printed. She left the front desk and came back and the piece of paper had been placed on the keyboard of her computer, like someone was helping her out. Only, she was alone.

So, much like at the Molly Brown House, it seems that the Croke-Patterson Mansion has plenty of scary stories to tell, but maybe the haunted history is overhyped. The bartender said that the house has its little incidents, but it is not haunted in the sense that there was a bad presence with the house in its grip. Still, I’m not sure I would want to stay in the Prague room overnight. And I wonder about those dogs.