Continuation of a series intended to tell non-fictional ghost stories:
001 - Looking for ghosts was my adrenaline rush since I was very young before they became overdone
Ghosts don't exist: You are complete in the right to be a skeptic. I discuss this side of things in the following:
Esoterica, Magic, and other unknown or perhaps occulted concepts

Introductory Concept

I asked in ghosts 001 if people would let me know if they were interested in more similar stories, and how they would like them approached. A desire that I take a detailed approach was really the only reply that gave me a preferential choice that I received. This was several weeks ago.

I posted the Esoterica post mentioned above expecting a very different reception than it received. Yet another indicator of how great a community we have. I mentioned there were a few "ghostly" encounters that I had growing up and in my life that I could not explain. Most of my personal experiences I can lay to rest with some healthy skepticism. This story I am about to tell you has aspects I cannot rationally explain. I will share it and you can consider it.

Setting: Takes place in Lake City, Colorado which was described in the GHOSTS 001 post above.

A House - Run down, clouded windows, cobwebs, and antiques

During the time of this tale I was 11 or 12 years old and it was known that I was very fascinated by ghosts and I liked to go on ghost hunts. This was decades before any reality shows on the topic would exist.

My mother and I were at a local grocery store that was called The Lake City Market. I was walking around with my mom babbling about ghosts, though I don't remember the substance of this dialog. We made it up to the cash register to pay for our food and one of the owners of the market Midge Murphy was at the register and overheard us. Here is as close to a recreation of the dialog I can remember.

Midge: "We have ghosts at my house"
Me: "Really?"
Midge: "Yes, they are these little children that come out and try to play with our dogs at night and or dogs are terrified."

Her house was a few blocks from my house down a dirt road. Most of the roads in Lake City were dirt. If you have seen the Netflix Series The Stranger Things our environment was like that to some degree and we ran all over day and night as children much like they did. (That series inspired a lot of nostalgia in me)

I didn't usually look for ghosts by myself. It was scary (though that was the point) yet you also needed other people there to back up your story. So eventually I gathered up two other people to go look at this house with me. One was a friend by the name Colin Gray, and another was one of the Angeli boys.

Somehow that I no longer recall we had gathered other stories. There was a ridge that ran up behind a lot of these houses called Hog's Back. We had always been told there were some graves of children from the mining days up on Hog's Back. Before we actually got around to looking for the ghosts we queued in on Midge reporting there were little kid ghosts in her yard. We found out that these children supposedly lived in the house that was smaller and right next to Midge's house. That worked great for us because that house was spooky looking.

Midge lived in a beautiful Victorian house, and the house next to it was a smaller house that all the paint was chipped and cracked, the windows were fogged up, you could see cobwebs all over in the windows, and if you peaked through the windows there were lots of antiques lying all over the place. No one was living there at the time.

I had a much older condenser microphone based tape player like the one in the image here, but far older and less advanced. I liked playing with it and making different sounds, rocket ships, explosions, and wooshes using my mouth. I had the idea of using my tape player to ask questions at the small house. I had never heard of the term EVP until many years after this incident.

We went in the daytime, as that house was far too spooky to go at night. We pushed PLAY and RECORD to get the tape recording and we ran up to the porch and set the cassette player down in front of an old screen door. We then ran about 15 yards away back out to the street at the beginning of the walk way.

We shouted many questions and tried to indicate we wanted to help the ghosts, etc. So we are a bunch of kids shouting at a tape recorder sitting on a porch about 15 yards from us.

"Tell us your name, we want to help you."

Wait, if we hear something we are going to get scared and run away.

"Tell us your name, say it in the tape recorder, don't say it out loud."

We finished our line of questions with no apparent incident. Colin (he was two years my senior) ran up to the porch and grabbed the tape recorder. We all jumped on our bicycles and road them quickly back to my house which was not that far away. I had a "fort" with a little raggedy couch in it built out of plywood behind my house. We went there to listen to this tape player.

You could hear our shouts and every thing on the tape player just fine. We started getting distracted and not paying a lot of attention to the tape player as it played the sounds back, and went on talking about things like kids do.

Suddenly the color drained from our faces...

A very loud sound that was way louder than us that we did not hear while we were there. I frantically reached for the tape recorder and pressed rewind. We listened again.

You could hear us shouting in the background and louder than us you hear a quick scratch at the screen door followed by a distinctly deep male, and unnatural sounding "Lee!". This was right after we asked them to tell us their name. It was no little ghostly child. We had no clue who "Lee" was.

We frantically knew we had to let other people hear this. We found my father in one of the bars (yes he was an alcoholic at the time). We played it for him and some of his friends and he just chuckled. He or someone there may have been the ones who recommended going to the newspaper.

We went and spoke to Grant Houston who was the local owner of the Silverworld Newspaper and played the recording for him. Grant would become the president of the Hinsdale County Historical Society for many years and he also was an extreme history buff for the area. Coincidentally the house we recorded this voice at belonged to him, and he had plans to some day remodel it and move into it. That had not happened yet. He would eventually do this. I will get to that a bit further in the story.

Grant told us there was a man named Lee that once lived in that house yet he indicated that person had not died at that house, and seemed to indicate they moved somewhere else where he passed away.

So at that point my friends and I thought maybe it said "Leave!" and we got a little frightened. We were paranoid the ghost was going to come after us because we didn't help them like we promised. We eventually would record over that tape out of paranoid fear of youth. Yes I am kicking myself. This was before computer audio editing, or anything like this. You didn't have to amplify our recording it was far louder than we were on the tape, yet we heard nothing while we were there.

To this day I when I watch all the amplifying and filtering out sounds and such on EVP recordings on the ghost hunter type reality shows I chuckle and shake my head. No audio editing required with the one I had.

So that is where it ended... for quite some time

Years later I moved back to Lake City, Colorado with my two youngest boys (biologically mine from first marriage) as a single father. I also started up a local Computer Consulting business.

Grant Houston was still around and he was president of the Historical Society. He had stated the museum was planning on giving a couple of ghost tours to tourists in the summer, and he asked me if I wanted to co-guide the tour with him.

By this time he was living in that house and it was absolutely beautiful. He had no ghostly encounters himself, but he will talk about how workers on the site were constantly talking about tools being moved around as they were remodeling the house. He lives there peacefully as far as I know still today. He is also fond of visiting England, so I don't know exactly where he might be.

My consulting business was doing well and I had work in Lake City, Gunnison, and Creede, Colorado purely by word of mouth. I ended up taking a job at Williams Engineering in Gunnison, Colorado.

I was chatting with them about Lake City and possibly saying I needed to go back to help on a ghost tour (I don't remember if that was how we got on the subject of ghosts or not). All I know is we came up to my story about this house on Bluff St where I recorded a ghost. They became very surprised and interested...

You see their great grandfather was named Lee Williams and he and his family lived in that house. He had a tragic death in Lake City (did not move away like I thought).

He and another miner were sitting on crates of dynamite (mining was still happening) smoking cigars. It is suspected a spark set off the dynamite and blew the pieces all over the place. There are old news paper articles about them paying children 5 cents and 10 cents to go pick up the pieces (Very different times).

He also tells a story of how a neighbor saw a finger with Lee's wedding ring on it calmly stepped over it so Lee's wife would not see it and go into shambles.

For me this is one that is hard for me to skeptically explain because there were so many things that no one knew that came out of this event.

I did learn one important thing though.

Don't smoke cigars while sitting on dynamite...