rissy stories

Hey guys!

Spoilers: There are ghost stories from a Denver tour at the end of this blog!

Here’s Day 8! (Again, I have to be vague about the program, but I’ll explain what I can!)

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Day 8: July 19th, Friday

So, we began this day with another editing workshop and a review of the reader’s reports we wrote, which all in all, weren’t that great. Most of us (including me) left important parts out and didn’t make it vivid enough for the editor to understand the book.

Honestly, writing a reader’s report is difficult. To summarize and explain the important parts of a book in two pages is… well, extremely difficult. It’s one of the assignments that really turned me off towards editorial work right at the start of the program.

(However, this was somewhat intentional. Not everyone can/should want to become an editor.)

For one, getting a job in editorial is difficult. You have to start as an assistant and work your way up, like any other job, but you usually have to job hop and you sometimes have to wait for someone to leave a job before you can get one.

Secondly, as an editorial assistant, a lot of us felt like we would get burnt out really fast by plowing through books and writing reports on them. Plus, for me, specifically, I would rarely ever find time to write.

Afterwards, we discussed publishing contracts, granting rights, and financial terms along with the publishers’ and authors’ responsibilities when handing over rights. We also discussed freelancing, which is something I’d probably be interested in later on in my career.

Lastly, we had a copyediting workshop. Basically, a copyeditor (also usually a freelance job) works behind the scenes, but they’re extremely important.

If you were ever a writing tutor in college (like I was), you’ll be very used to copyediting. You’ll feel like fixing all the nitty gritty details in writing is your “thing.” However, you may not be very good at using the author’s own style. Turns out, using the author’s own style is NOT my “thing.” And, turns out, looking back on my tutoring days… I tried to get all of my fellow students to write like I did. Naturally, I like my own style. But to be successful in copyediting, you have to use the author’s style.

You can’t make changes for the sake of making changes. As long as it’s grammatically correct, leave it alone. It’s their work, not yours.

Hence… I probably wouldn’t be the best copyeditor.

But feedback to the copyeditor usually comes before the proofread (the last time one edits a book before it gets published), and the majority of the job is trial and error.

Not to mention, you also have to be extremely careful with your attitude and tone since you’ll have a long-distance relationship with the author and editor (a.k.a – it will be through your notes, not in person.)

Again, copyediting isn’t my “thing.”

However, haunted ghost tours are – which is exactly what we did after classes that day.

But this wasn’t any ghost tour… it was a pub crawl too.

It was the “Denver Haunted Pub Tour” by Nightly Spirits, and it was awesome – 100% recommend. They were even rated the “2018 Best City Tour” by Denver City Voter.

It’s a 2.5 hour tour, it’s $25 per person, and it is so worth it. (For anyone who’s looking into doing this – we did the LoDo, not the SoBo. They’re the same type of tours, but with different locations and different stories.) And obviously, you have to be the age of 21+.

This one was located downtown, by Union Station (which is also haunted, by the way.)

We grabbed something to eat at Biker Jim’s before the tour, and then we started at a local bar, Celtic. Our two female guides were dressed as “Saloon Madams,” and they gave us glow sticks so that everyone on the tour would be recognizable.

We were allowed to grab a drink while everyone else arrived, and then we were ushered into the basement to begin the tour.

(I’ll try not to spoil it for those who actually want to do it.)

At the Celtic bar, there were 4 ghost stories. The first was this portrait:

It’s reported that people have seen this little girl’s eyes watch them as they moved, and some even claimed that they saw her trying to climb out of the painting.

There’s a “giggly ghost,” who often laughs in one of the closets at strange times, and there’s one that paces.

Lastly, there’s the story of Ella Wellington, who left her husband and newborn baby and moved across the country to Colorado. (She had symptoms of postpartum depression.) She was in Denver for almost a year, working in one of the buildings nearby, when she ran into an old friend from her home town one day, and she asked about her family. He told her that her husband remarried and that they were incredibly happy.

She then started a mantra of “I’m so happy, I’m so happy, I’m SOOO happy…” then committed suicide later that night.

The Celtic bar also has a “bathroom ghost,” the same bathroom that one of my roommates had claimed was “extremely creepy” before the tour had started.

We then discussed the massive number of Native Americans who were slaughtered in Denver, which also contributes to the hauntings. Not to mention “Prospect Cemetery,” which no longer exists, but it used to exist in a Denver park. People were hired to dig up coffins and remove them from the cemetery in order to create said park.

However, those workers realized that they were getting paid by the body, not by the coffin. So, they chopped up the bones and stuffed them into baby coffins, then sold the larger coffins on the side to make more money.

You can probably see where this is going, supernaturally speaking. You don’t really want to unbury a body – not to mention, chop up bones and stuff them together with other bodies in a smaller coffin.

However, the workers were eventually found out, and that program got shut down. Meaning, there are still thousands of bodies underneath that park. There are bodies under the Botanic Garden as well (which we also visited a couple days later).

After we left Celtic, we went to the Double Daughter’s bar, where there’s a drink called “Josephine’s ghost.” And yes, you guessed it, there’s a ghost there named Josephine.

Josephine used to work there, and she had tuberculosis (back around the time the owner of the Stanley Hotel had tuberculosis, and moved out into the mountains to recover). It’s said that sometimes you can hear someone in the bathroom, coughing up blood in one of the stalls. However, there’s no one ever there.

Next, we visited one of the old underground tunnels that transported coal. The entrance is sealed off, but one of the madams who worked down there was robbed and murdered, so her ghost still hangs around.

Next, we didn’t visit the Oxford Hotel down the street, but we did pass by it and talk about it at a different bar. There was a woman who shot her boyfriend (who was married) in room 320, and it took him 3 days to die. She still haunts that room, and women and couples are usually okay to stay in that room, but single men are not allowed to spend the night in there anymore. They usually come out in the middle of the night, screaming. She likes to mess with them.

We continued visiting a few bars here and there and talked about smaller stories.

Then we visited Union station, which houses the Crawford Hotel.

There was a fire in that hotel a long time ago, and it killed a 9-year-old girl. She still hangs around, and her doll does too.

In the actual train station, however, there used to be tobacco-chewing people who spat on the floors. The owner eventually got spittoons, but no one used them. Therefore, it drove him crazy enough that he actually dug up a skull from a grave, (yes, at Prospect Cemetery), and nailed it to the wall with a sign that warned people: “This is the last person who spat on my floor.”

It eventually worked and people stopped spitting on the floors. However, supernaturally speaking, it’s never a good idea to nail someone’s skull to the wall.

Then we were told to shine our phone lines down a vent shaft at the Union Station, and we found this:

You probably can’t see it very well, but there’s a chair down there from the fire in the Crawford Hotel. No one knows how it got down there, but no one wants to move it either, because when they tried to move it, the station started having massive electrical issues. They eventually moved the chair back, and everything went back to normal.

So no one’s tried moving the chair since.

Also, there’s a baby doll on the chair that you can’t see in the pictures. And no, it’s not the doll that the 9-year-old girl had, but it’s strange nonetheless because no one knows where it came from either, or why it’s down there with the chair.

Lastly, we went to one more bar, which used to be the home of a husband and wife a long time ago. The wife had eventually developed symptoms of schizophrenia, and she had tried to destroy part of the wall (a brick wall) on the first floor of the bar, which still has a huge crack in it to this day. She was eventually taken to an asylum, and back then, most people didn’t make it out of asylums.

The couple still hangs around the bar, following people down the hall, wondering why there are other people drinking in their home.

That bar also served alcohol on the roof, and so we ended the tour up there. They gave us   koozies as gifts. I got a blue one with the “Nightly Spirits” logo on it.

And that’s a wrap for Day 8! It was one of my favorite days on this trip.

Until next time,

Rissy ❤