Rocky Mountains
Colorado
The Hearthstone Inn
506 North Cascade Avenue Colorado Springs, Colorado 80903
Tel: 1 (719) 473-4413
Website: www.hearthstoneinn.com
The stately Hearthstone Inn is comprised of two Victorian mansions. The first was built in 1885 and was home to the Judson Moss Bemis family. The second was constructed in 1900 and became a tuberculosis boarding house—serving as the final refuge for many patients who sought the cool, dry Colorado air to help relieve the symptoms of the often-fatal disease. Since 1978, the mansions have been home to the Hearthstone Inn—a bed and breakfast that offers many relics of the past—old, cast-iron radiators, hardwood floors, antiques, and even some ghosts.
David Oxenhandler and his wife bought the inn in 1999, but they weren’t aware of its haunted nature until they started working there. “When somebody tells you an experience in the inn— whether it’s an employee or a guest—your first reaction is, is there a problem with my inn or a problem with the person telling me this?” Oxenhandler said. But over time, he noticed people began to relay very similar experiences. Considering they didn’t publicly talk about their ghosts, there had to be something more to the story.
The encounters picked up after lightning struck a tree outside of the building in the summer of 1999. The bolt knocked large sections of the tree into the street and was close enough to damage computer and phone equipment inside the Hearthstone. The following day, someone checked into the inn and was given a room on the third floor. Within minutes, the guest came down and asked if they could change rooms. “We put them in a new room,” Oxenhandler said, “and the front desk person went back to the first room and saw that there was a mahogany mirror face-down on the floor. She just assumed it was smashed. She picked it up and it wasn’t broken. So she hung it back on the wall. The next night, somebody else checked in to the same room. They again asked to be moved. This time they said the mirror floated off the wall and down to the floor.”
After the lightning strike, Oxenhandler phoned his insurance company to report a claim for some of the electrical equipment that had been damaged by the lightning.
But he also asked his insurance company about another problem. He said, “I said to them, ‘If we had a problem with one of our rooms since the lightning strike and can’t use it, would that qualify?’ And they said, ‘Sure. What, does it have a leak in the roof or something?’ And I said, ‘No, it’s haunted.’ Needless to say, faxes went all over the world from the insurance company laughing about this thing. They sent down an electrical engineer to examine everything and absolutely nothing happened.”
The Hearthstone Inn has been investigated by paranormal investigators and psychics who feel the haunting stems from several former tuberculosis patients, the spirit of Alice Bemis Taylor, daughter of Judson Moss Bemis, and a man who may have hung himself on the third floor landing. During her life, Alice Bemis Taylor donated two other buildings in the Colorado Springs area: Colorado College’s Bemis Hall, and the Fine Arts Center in Colorado Springs. Both buildings also have reports of Alice Bemis Taylor’s ghost still wandering through—on some occasions, she’s been reported in both buildings and the Hearthstone Inn on the same night.
