The Gates of Hell at Riverdale Road

Join me for episode 4 as the Phenomena Case Files podcast delves into what some call America’s most cursed road –this is the story of a haunting

Phenomena Case Files —a The Wildman’s Press production. For more on the show, including our blog/newsletter deep dives, links to our socials, and upcoming book titles, check out our website at phenomenacasefiles.com

Episode Transcript

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show's strict communication filters. And finally, enjoy tonight's show.
As a teenager, Brian and his friends had not much to do growing up in
the city. Brian was a quiet, rural, bright Colorado, but one place he had always wanted to

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explore was a place called Riverdale Road. The allure of Riverdale Road is that it's
unnaturally dark at night. The road itself twists and turns around a dense thicket of ominously
tall trees. It's a hotbed of urban legends. Throughout high school, he had heard plenty
of stories about the woman in the white dress hitchhiking on the side of the road. Red-Eye

(01:18):
children appearing out of nowhere or cultic rites conducted late at night. He had also
heard about the gates of hell. He was drawn to this last urban legend the most because the
backstory seemed more plausible. He had heard of mansionies to stand there and for reasons that
still remain unknown. The owner had set fire to the house in a fit of madness, while his wife

(01:45):
and children were still inside. Now they said all that remained of that one-time handsome mansion
was a set of iron gates leading to nothing more than a dirt lot and a burnt tree stump.
The legend he'd heard was that those iron gates or what remains of them
lead straight to hell. He didn't really believe that, but it sounded like an

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eerie place to spend an evening. So one night his girlfriend and two friends piled inside of
his car and headed up there just after dark. Scutted by old leafless trees in late fall,
the road was anything but welcoming. After a while, cruising Riverdale Road looking for the iron gates,

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he ended up getting off on a very hilly dirt road. After a walk, sure enough, he found some very
old looking gates. He hopped them over and found what looked like black and dashed dirt.
Signs that a large fire had happened there once upon a time, but that was it. Finding little else

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to inspect, they gave each other a few jump scares and laughed, but did little more than jostle and
poke fun at each other. At about an hour or so of being around the grounds, they hopped into the car,
headed back home, ready to call it a night. It wasn't until he dropped his friends off and

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finally his girlfriend that he realized she was missing her necklace. She figured she must have
dropped it somewhere when they were exploring past the gates. She explained that necklace had
belonged to her grandmother and if her mother found out she had lost it, she'd be furious.
She was just about past her curfew and so she begged him to go back and look for it.

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So he hit her back. There, alone, hoping to find the necklace and bring it back to her.
He agreed to go back after all Riverdale Road had been a letdown and he wondered what's the worst
that could happen. He had already seen all there was to see, or at least he thought he did. He
drove back to Riverdale Road after midnight and this time alone at Weary when he got there the

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grounds looked different. He swallowed hard and reasoned that it was after all a moonless night
in well past midnight. The road was deserted, no one around for miles. There'd be no one around to
help him if he got into any trouble. He pressed on anyway, a bang struck at the pit of his stomach
just as he heard a rustling in the weeds behind him. When he turned and cast his flashlight,

(04:20):
he saw a little more than tall wild grass. He built up his resolve. He'd already come this far
and all he needed to do was look for the shimmer of a gold necklace somewhere in the ashen grounds,
find it and leave. Casting the beam of his flashlight erratically, he wasn't finding anything but bare
earth. He felt a sudden urge to turn back. He'd tell his girlfriend that he had looked everywhere

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but hadn't found her necklace. She'd be upset, sure, but she'd get over it and things would be
back to normal in no time. As quickly as that thought had come, the beam of his flashlight
struck something atop a small mound of dirt. It was a pale ivory white and he knelt down to get a

(05:08):
closer look. Poking it with the flashlight, he realized it was a bone. He'd seen animal bones
before and this did not look like any heat seen. Long and chipped, it looked like a leg bone, a huge
a human leg bone. At that moment, he heard movement behind him again. The bulb of his

(05:31):
flashlight suddenly dimmed and then went out as if the battery had drained in only seconds.
He caught the silhouette of a figure some 30 pages away. It was creeping toward him. He froze.
Fear paralyzed but curious too. Half of him seeking to confirm the details of something grotesque,

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stalking him. Snapping out of his terrifying reverie, he tapped his flashlight frantically.
To his relief, it came back on. He flashed the light beam right ahead but it illuminated nothing.
In disbelief, he opened and shut his eyes quickly and then he saw before him the pale

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disfigured face of a stringy-haired woman. Her eyes were hollow and menacing. Her mouth was a
gait and through it, he heard a guttural sound. It was her voice and she said only, leave.
His reflexes kicked in and new life sprung into his legs. He ran so fast, never looking back

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and resolved never to return to the haunted grounds of Riverdale Road.

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We're back on the case here at the Phenomena Case Files podcast and this time,
we're zeroing in on an urban tale from right around the Denver Metro area. You've just heard
the opener and it illustrates one variant of a common theme. It usually goes like this in so
many of the accounts I've reviewed preparing for this episode. One after another, the iterations

(07:26):
of this urban legend. It's about brushing up against the unknown, the dark, peril, and maybe death.
But somehow just evading danger and living to tell the tale. I never found one in which someone
may be part of a couple or group venturing into these grounds actually dying or vanishing and

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the survivors living to share the story. The takeaway seems to be this and that is,
it's a warning. It's meant as a warning. It's don't go to where there's danger. Stay in the safe
area. Don't go out past, I don't know, curfew or midnight. Don't delve in things that are

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secretive and toxic and represent scary spooky things to you. So the inside of this, if you
break down some of the tropes or some of the things that happen in that opener and in this story,

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which is usually young people or somebody venturing into where they're maybe not supposed to go to
innocently try to get a kick out of it and brush up against something that ends up being way, way
more dangerous and going over their heads. And that is that, well, one of the things I wondered

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about is why towards the end would a ghostly apparition, after going through all the motions
and the buildup of scaring this kid, what would it say, leave? What would it warn? Stay away in that
scary voice and give him all that time to escape if it's trying to really cause harm in some way?

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Wouldn't this make the ghost a rather benign figure despite her grotesque appearance? Was this the
ghost of Wolpert's housewife? The man that went mad and burned the house? Then again, in many cases,
it appears that ghosts are territorial. They want to be left alone. In their haunted grounds,
they don't like intrusions, loud noises or alterations to the landscape. Ghosts, according to

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many paranormal investigators, are like the prickly old man in the neighborhood chasing trespassers
away with a scow and a raised fist. Many cultures, whether by design or happenstance, tend to leave
certain grounds apart as no-go zones, as sacred grounds, as fenced off cemeteries. There are even

(10:08):
stories about families who upon discovering the poltergeist, learn to get along with it and just
accept it as part of the house. They'll say it came with the house. In fact, I just saw somebody
famous, although not famous to me, pretty much say she bought a house and it came with a ghost.
So it's something that is a bit of a cultural phenomenon. So shouldn't we let some boundaries

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exist between figments of the afterlife and this life? Then again, one might argue that this world
is for the living and so we go on taking down old trees and uprooting wild grass, paving roads
and breaking the ground for new housing developments, virtually endlessly. So let's talk about some of

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the urban legends of Riverdale Road. Listen to this from hauntedplaces.org. The 11-mile stretch
of winding Riverdale Road between Thornton and Brydon is, according to the local tales, haunted by
almost every form of supernatural being imaginable. A ghostly white lady, a phantom jogger, demons,

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talking animals, Native American burrow of ground curses, devil worshipers, witch hangings, and even
the gates of hell. The road signs are said to have spatters and handprints of blood made by the ghost
of a little boy who was killed here as he was walking to school. Spirits are said to roam here

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in animal form. A coyote is a friendly spirit while a gray fox is evil. One story is of a man who
murdered his family in their house along this road, then set it afire. There was an old mansion that
burned down the 1864 Wolbert Mansion, which had been a private home. A cowboy inn, a gambling bar,

(12:04):
a brothel, and a ranch for racehorses. In another source, this one from local news,
similarly lists some of the same phenomena. I quote,
Riverdale Road has a history of alleged hauntings and urban legends. From the existence of the literal
gates of hell to the story of a man who lost his mind and burned his entire mansion while his family

(12:30):
slept inside. The road is also home to so-called joggers hill, where a ghost is rumored to have
followed cars or to follow them regularly and tap on their sides. Other urban legends,
involved a phantom Camaro and the vision of bodies hanging from trees during the full moon.

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According to a local television story aired in 2019 titled, Is One of the Most Haunted Roads in the
Country in Thornton? I'll add that in some of my research on anecdotal accounts, there was also
mention of a hellhound or hellhounds roaming late at night, whose menacing growls and barks could

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be heard in the moonlight shadows of the tall cottonwood patches that skirt the winding turns
of Riverdale Road. I'll share my initial impressions of when I first visited, and I'll tell you this
doesn't look like a mountain road skirted by dense woods. Okay, so this is in the Denver Metro area,
in the Denver Metro area in pretty flat earth, and if you're not from around here and you've never

(13:43):
been to Colorado, you might think of mountains or just sprouting everywhere, well not in the front
range obviously, otherwise we just couldn't get around, couldn't build cities. So it's not something
like an eerie woods, such as you find in out east, say Appalachia. I've been out there and those are
indeed some scary woods. I like that, maybe because I have an appreciation for the dark atmospheric

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effect that must have scared the wits out of the earliest explorers, and many might say they still
do. So how did this fairly unassuming section of the northern Denver Metro area become the epicenter
of reported high strangeness? And let me tell you, even though the primary sources for this episode
are thin, at least when I set out to do the research, there is an abundance of anecdotal evidence.

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Whereas other phenomena and legends I researched offer the benefit of a lot of literature ranging
from in-depth articles, curated paranormal blogs, interviews, archives of newspaper features,
and volumes of books. Riverdale presented more of a challenge. Its stories more localized across,

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handed down tales and first-hand experiences to some questionable, if fun blogs, and of course
ubiquitous YouTube spooky videos shot in low light or with sepia colored filter that's supposed to
make things look old-timey or dreamy. Anyway, I like that about this case file because in that sense

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it's fresh and calls for any paranormal investigator delving into it to put together the sources of
information about this Riverdale phenomena into as coherent as possible synthesis of
perspective, research, and anecdotal evidence. Even before I sat down to make this show, I still

(15:42):
came across people who grew up around here and who share their own personal stories. Normally these
were very brief and most often amounted to sensations, a fear, being watched, of an urgency, to flee even
despite no obvious signs. It was more as if they picked up on the aggregate of subtly

(16:06):
skew signs and literally some commented that in the signage along this road it can look as if smeared
by some unknown and old dried-up goo just like that blurb I read at the outset. And I can tell
there is a dilapidated atmosphere in the old houses and shacks that look abandoned along some parts

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despite the boom in housing developments that actually make this part of the metro area quite
expensive nowadays. Still others shared stories we could call them legends that have been passed
down to them about this area detailing one after another paranormal event along Riverdale Road.
Yes this patch of about 11 miles of road is replete with tales of supernatural activity.

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Some researchers might point out that in itself is a feature that eats into the credibility of
Riverdale roads as a genuine place where all this paranormal phenomena is going on.
Put simply it's hard enough to come across one source of supernatural activity say the ghostly

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lady in white hitchhiking down the road let alone all sorts of other high strangeness events.
This perspective makes sense and beckons that sound a dodge that extraordinary claims require
extraordinary evidence. By the way the lady in white is itself a notable American ghost story,

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more famous in the Chicago area where more sightings have been spotted than anywhere else.
That is not to say that there can't be more than one ghostly lady in white or does the same ghost
travel to other highways. Could this story have popped up here in Colorado as some midwestern
transplants made their way to Colorado bringing their ghost stories with them? These are just

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shots in the dark but the questions that arise do give us pause.
Any rate other paranormal investigators might counter that this counter-intuitive nature
of a haunted grounds, a site of unusually high spikes of supernatural activity, do have
some sort of paranormal gravitational pull as it were potentially attracting a host of seemingly

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unrelated otherworldly entities. Weird begets weirder. So back to the story.
If any of this is true, how and when did this area become this dense paranormal vortex?
Well it might have started with the Wolford Mansion. Considered a mansion at the time

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described in January 1975 by Dr. Hugo Rodig, former director of the University of Colorado Museum
from 1939 to 1971, Dr. Rodig had submitted a national register of historic places nomination form for
9190 Riverdale Road. His application form, preserved by the Colorado Office of Archeology

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and Historic Preservation acronym OAHP, describes the home's physical appearance and its history.
Attributing the building to an early Colorado settler named David Wolford.
Two-story and attic brick house built about 1864, fine-looking structure with dignity

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in a favorable position beside a through drive backed by Platte River banks and flood plain.
The Wolpards were typical of the hordes of people coming west to make their fortunes
in gold and silver like many other organots making their way west. Wolford found his true fortune

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in agriculture and permanent settlement. Looking at some old photographs compiled by Kitty Rudolph,
an archivist and contributor to the Denver Public Library, special collections and archives.
In black and white photographs the house looks like a nine-room two-story brick rectangular
building with tall windows on both levels and a prominent triangular feature atop.

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Reminds me of a bit of those big east coast townhomes except this is a freestanding structure with no
other building attached, no garage, and it's sitting on not 150 acres of land.
There is a barn and brick chicken house on the plot of land which burned down two.

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I found no photograph of the iron gates or how close the chicken house was to the main house,
but no make no mistake this house looks nothing like a farmhouse. In his application to decimate
the house as a historical place of interest Dr. Rode goes on, the house is a mansion in a strict

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sense in that it was a better house than that which most people were building in that time.
Considering when it was built and who built it, it would be one of the most interesting houses in
Colorado. I tend to agree this would have been a good solid home for an upper income family,
but nothing compared to what we would think of as the new money built mansions of say St. Louis

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or farther out east. Now let's see this part of Dr. Rode's application statement.
There is a history in human interest rumors alone. It has been said that the mansion was a
drover's inn for cowboys, a gambling den in the 1920s, a house of prostitution,

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and a racehorse ranch. It is said one owner became drunk and lost the mansion in a card game,
and there have also been rumors of murder occurring on the land,
and because the house has somehow been involved with every aspect of Colorado history,
ranging from the Indians to the hippies, it is of great historical significance.

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Did you notice there's a lot to digest here? The house's story is linked to quite a variety
of colorful events passing from the original builder and owner to tenants and new owners.
There is quite a nugget surreptitiously listed here too, a murder occurring on the land.

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Could this be the source of the stories about ghostly apparitions, sounds of boot heels to the
present day, and when there is no one around? Then who knows what kind of fused, perdition,
human suffering, all bad juju stemming from its brothel and house of gambling days.
This is what happens when you investigate local legends and the paranormal. At first,

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there is only that surface of fightful vignette accounts, but then as you dig deeper, you find
hints. Hints could point to something, some original source of contention, of trauma,
the kind of thing or string of highly charged events that lead to unusually terrifying conditions.
This is the stuff of hauntings. And first, digging through a potential research

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clues, I had the impression that the legend of the man who went insane in an individual rage
set fire to his house with his wife and children in it. So who was this man, Wolford? David H.
Wolford was born in Ohio in 1883. As a young man, he traveled to Iowa and Illinois for brief stays

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at both places. In 1859, he began moving west with a gold rush. He followed the Santa Fe Trail
to New Mexico, then back upwards Pykes Peak, probably the Colorado Springs area,
included in a party of 16 men, Wolford then traveled to North Park, North of Denver,

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to the Fair Play Breckenrich area seeking gold. While there, the party got involved with Indians
and then separated. When David Wolford came to Denver, he built a Clayton block on Larimer
Larimer Street in downtown Denver. He followed the Platte River North nine miles and on a piece of
land he patented in the late 1850s, he built a house in 1864. David Wolford acquired property

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on patent from the US government September 1, 1869, and was recorded January 21, 1870.
His land told 145 acres on both the east and west sides of Riverdale Road. The land parcel is legally
described as south one half northwest one fourth except road of the southwest one fourth except

(25:07):
parcels, roads, rivers, and public service right of way of section 19, T25, R67W. So there you go,
simple as that, try putting that in your GPS. Anyway, back to Rotarix, back to Rotix description.
The street address is 9190 Riverdale Road. Oh, and here I just want to briefly caution anyone

(25:29):
interested to please restrain from visiting this address unannounced. This, the original
mansion burned to the fire and a new house was built but it's not built right over where the old
one was. Remember this was a 150 acre plot of land. So over here it says 145 and I heard 150.

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The both numbers kind of get thrown in there so somewhere in between there is the real amount.
But in fact to find the exact location where the old mansion sat you'd have to scour over
over old county land use and property records which probably haven't even been digitized.
I've been to the area to visit and the house that now sits there is rather nice resembling

(26:16):
something like a Spanish style house at least to me. It's definitely nice and big and right next
to what is now a big open space plot of land cared for and designated by the city for recreational use.
I gotta tell you though, even if you knew nothing about the lore of this place,
it still looks like a pretty somber creepy place with gigantic leafless cotton trees.

(26:40):
It was fall when I visited. Anyway, if you have any interest please remember to be respectful
of private property and never ever trespass. So back to Kappauf, Dr. Rodig's brief account
written some 50 years ago, he goes on to say that David Wilpert was married in 1864 to

(27:02):
Catherine Henderson of whose family the town of Henderson is named. They had a son, David, and
two daughters Lucille and Mary. One of the daughters and the son were deaf mutes. Mr. Wilpert
was a celebrated agricultureist in his lifetime. The Wilpert's lived in the mansion for about
50 years. David Wilpert died October 21st in 1909 and is buried at Riverside Cemetery.

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So there you have it. Right at the end, this family, the original inhabitants of Wilpert House
lived peacefully. The couple stayed married for over four decades. David Wilpert was buried and
looking through findagrave.com, I wasn't able to find the exact plot or any record of it.

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But the burial is corroborated by this and other historical documents according to the same website
findagrave.com. I discovered that Riverside Cemetery is also known as Pioneer Cemetery.
Throughout the course of an investigation involving very old burials, you find that a lot of things
can happen to a burial site as a dick gets piled on. In extreme cases, and especially as cities grow

(28:16):
and real estate prices rise, cemeteries get dug out and the buried, re-buried elsewhere so someone
can build something else. A little side-stip, that's what actually happened in a popular park here
in the Denver Metro area, Washington Park or Cheesman Park. It used to be a poppers grave

(28:36):
lot and until it got plowed over and this is a whole discover but the businessmen contracted to
rebury the dead didn't do that in many cases, leaving the corpses right where they lay into
present day. And yeah, not surprisingly, this park is also said to be haunted. We've covered quite

(28:57):
a bit in a short time as we dove headfirst into the high strange vortex of Riverdale Road.
So let's take a small pause and I'd like you to listen to a brief message on how you can dig
into more narrative, more interesting scenarios and support this show along the way. One man's
solitary mission into the mysteries becomes an obsession. Coming this fall, Phenomena,

(29:22):
a new novel by Robert Cavalier, puts you in the shoes of Julian Carr, a crime reporter turned
paranormal investigator who almost loses everything that once mattered to him in his search for the
truth in what could be his one last case. Published by the Wildman's Press,

(29:43):
stay tuned for release news on PhenomenaCaseFiles.com and on eggs at Phenomena X-Files and for
advanced copies at Amazon and Kindle. To wrap up this part of the Wohlberg House, it was fascinating
to ponder the history of this house in one snapshot, namely the country's transfer of land

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record in one neat table spanning from January 1870 to January 2nd, 1975. I found this sort of
archival information. I'm looking at a nice, like I said, a nice table. It's got all the years from
1870 over the 1975 listed and it's quite a simple thing to talk about, but you think about that's

(30:31):
the whole history of this house from the beginning to its end. All these lives that stayed there and
all the things that they must have seen, all the seasons that they experienced, the history that
it witnessed. You might not know, as I'll mention this later, but this date, the state of Colorado,

(30:58):
is pretty new. It was founded in 1876, so this house actually precedes the state as a
state foundation. Pretty amazing stuff if you start to think about it. Recently, there was a movie
based on a graphic novel that I had heard about and I even added it to my wish. It's one of those

(31:20):
things that you do and you really don't even act on it. I ever buy it, but it's called Here.
It's an interesting angle in terms of, I believe the graphic novel I took a preview of it, it's just
different or maybe the same frame or so of this house across decades and across different families

(31:45):
and just the things that happen there. If you were a piece of furniture that was somehow sentry
and observant and you could just watch all these developments go and go and go, it's kind of how
I think about what a ghost-like experience might be to be something tethered to, almost possessed

(32:06):
by, say, the house or possessing the house without knowing it, but unable to move and tethering and
just observing, observing, observing, observing, observing and even having a sense of time just
jumping forward. Maybe something happened then, 10 years later, there's something else and not
really gathering it with any degree of high sentience. It's interesting, it's a movie also

(32:30):
that just got adapted out of that by, not by, but it's with Tom Hanks and I haven't seen him in a
long time. I'm sure that it will be interesting and good. I still don't know if I'd like to see a
home movie that just takes place in one shot. I get very claustrophobic when it's just kind of
like a play-form and like, ah, can we go somewhere? Can we get out of this room? I wouldn't want to be

(32:55):
haunted or hunt a ghost, really, if that's the deal. If that probably is nothing but the main
reasons. So back, sorry for the tangent, but back to the house. It did stay in the name of the

(33:15):
Wolffords and passed down to what must have been a daughter named Catherine Henderson,
Wolpert. So she didn't hyphenate the name, but it's sort of mentioned there right in the deep
records as both these names. So Henderson's interesting because it's a little town about,

(33:35):
ah, 20 something, 30 miles from here. It's not much to look at. I think it's a claim to fame for
me at least. It's on the way to something else and I think a sanctuary zoo. But it's interesting
that there's a history there and then now I kind of can tie these real people to this tragic house.

(33:57):
So it was in her name until 1913. Until it goes to Charles Faden in the same year, 1937.
I'm sorry. Until it goes to Charles Weisser or Weisser. It looks very German. A lot of Germans

(34:18):
started to immigrate in the late 1800s, 1900s, particularly to Colorado. So we've got a lot
of German population. But from here, from there, the house changes ownership two more times in
1918, in 1937. Notable dates, a little bit 1913. I like dates like World War history

(34:44):
right one year before World War I. And 1918 is just about the time that we enter the war,
for the first war, the Great War as it was called. Not thinking there was going to be a second one
to it. But yes, so in 1918, then 1937 is Antebellum, if you could call that or interbellum, more like

(35:11):
it right before the next war until it goes to Charles Faden in the same year. So 1937 is a big
year for this house. It sort of gives you a real kind of a little snapshot of what was going on with
this house that likely was towards its downfall, towards the very last that it could give. And

(35:36):
maybe there were some speculators and just getting passed on for a quick profit or maybe someone
bought it, worse news that you can get as you buy a house. And then it turns out that, well,
maybe it doesn't have ghost or whether it does, it doesn't, but the plumbing is terrible,
or the water is not going to come on, or the roof, or if you own a home, it is a little bit

(36:02):
scary. Although things in back then probably no insurance and not even now, right? Insurance is
out the window from a lot of regions of the United States. So it finally goes, it stays in this
fadening for a long, well, yeah, a long time until around 1969. So 1937 to 1969, stays in this

(36:28):
Baden family or Baden. I'm not sure, also looks a little German, Baden, Baden. And then it goes
into the very last owner, Joseph V. Famularo, very Italian sounding, who owned it for about
only six years until January 2nd, 1975. So what happened in 1975? At around 1 a.m. on November 28,

(37:03):
1975, a home located at 9190 Riverdale Road, namely the Wolford House, became engulfed in flames.
The two-story brick home believed to have been built in the 1860s was severely damaged. On December
4th, the Denver Post reported, the flames Friday left only remains of walls of the main building,

(37:26):
plus a small structure in the rear. No fatalities or injuries were reported as the home had not
been inhabited at the time of the fire, according to the forgotten past of Adams County, volume one.
And boy, volume two, you should read, it's really good. Okay, I'm making fun of it a little bit.
I'm sorry about that. I got a little bit loopy because I've gone into so many records and

(37:48):
arcane things, so forgive me for that one. But anyway, it goes on to say that there was good
reason for this, that there were no fatalities or injuries reported. Of course, that's a monumental
thing, because now we know that in 1995, nothing really happened. In May 1975, when the chicken
house burned down, the fire department came in, extinguished the fire and put in a report to

(38:11):
county health authorities stating that the house was a fire hazard and a danger to the community.
The health department got blessed them, ordered the owner to dismiss the tenants.
When they moved, heavy vandalism started. Hmm, I wonder if any squatters moved in and created
the fire. Total speculation, but I need something in the stories and given me very much. Like I said,

(38:34):
you bump into these, these hints and these intervals and you have to almost read between
the lines, but of course you don't want to conjecture in such a way that you're just
confabulating things and creating fiction and, you know, there's a distinction between those two.
I love fiction, I write fiction, but when I want to get my history, I want to make sure that I

(38:56):
understand the context. So what happened? Just a few months prior in January 1975, interestingly,
or well tragically, Dr. Hugo Rodick had submitted a national register of historic places nomination
form for 9190 Riverdale Road. Okay, so we got to say just wow, there was a tragedy. This poor

(39:21):
doctor Hugo Rodick didn't get to have this place registered in some historical archive.
You know, who knows how many hours the reviewer doctor put in, you know, put all that together,
you know, the writing of it, the application, the pictures and the descriptions of
any of those back in the days of the typewriters and carbon copy triplicates, if you please.

(39:45):
Ah, apologies again for the fit of sarcasm, but as I said, this is what can happen when you go
down the paranormal rabbit hole. You end up whether you want to or not trying to explain one mystery
with yet another mystery. So what happened to that crazed man? I picture some wild-eyed Jack

(40:09):
Nicholson and Stanley Kubrick's, the shining chasing his demure wife and children with an axe
and tabooed a torch to set fire to the house and trap them all ablaze in a fire death trap while
he somehow slips away, never to be seen or heard of again. Uh, when that didn't really happen,

(40:31):
now did it or did it? Well, apparently not. According to history, I doubt very much that by 1975
such huge details would have been omitted. I mean, I doubt that they would have been omitted in 1875.
Things were of great note, you know, people had to get their gossip, they had to get their news,

(40:52):
you know, if something, oh, you know what we heard about the, the Wilpert fire and the guzzle crazy and
and it all or is a damn shame. I don't know. I mean, who would know this? Who would have witnessed
that? I don't know that I got to the root of of this legend or in fact, maybe I did. And this is

(41:13):
where it sort of just ends in terms of that. But I have something interesting to sort of
tease you with and he'll comment more maybe towards the end. And it's about that premise
that I started out with not just my premise, but I derived it from what I heard from what I listened
from what I imagine. Obviously, somebody mentions, oh, man, I think I heard about that whole house.

(41:36):
I think there was an old house in those haunted grounds, you know, it burned down. It was a crazy
man burn his family. And he just started to think, okay, so I want to know as an investigator or
anybody delves into this, if you're kind of a guy that or a person that delves into these kinds of
things, he just wants to go down the rabbit hole, you want to know what is what is the frame the

(41:58):
historical frame around all of this and what's the relevance and can you find something more can
you get out of a nugget of truth in the the premise being okay, so if there was a real family and a
real man and they burned in this fire and I found some newspaper clippings and all this other stuff.
Whoa, decades later, I'm still getting we're still getting stories of apparitions of a haunted woman

(42:26):
and dressed in white and she's disfigured or she's not disfigured and what about the children then
they become ghost poor little things and on and on and on and on. So no, there isn't that connection.
But I want to stop teasing you and say, does there have to be. See, we started with a premise and

(42:48):
it's interesting. And that not only was it our premise, my premise here. It was like I said,
derived from what I read most of the things, you know, that were either trying to get into the story
or even debunking the story, you just won't. You can't debunk these kinds of things because the
stories are based on what people experience without any connection to the historical facts.

(43:13):
So it's not trying to cheat and say, well, if there wasn't a dead person here that died in
these tragic circumstances, there couldn't have been a ghost. But in a way, yes, I'm saying that
because I'm saying kind of the inversion of that because you don't really need that. Maybe that's
not the ghost. Maybe that's something else or maybe that's a completely different trick,

(43:37):
a completely different kind of apparition, a completely entity. Did you ever think about that?
Probably not until now. I thought I told myself. So it's not that I'm trying to go in a loop and
trying to really make this fit and this these stories have to be real. They don't have to be
they don't have to be real, but they do have a real effect. And one after another person has

(44:02):
come forward and I've spoken with some to about their experiences. And even I will share that I
felt a weird feeling without knowing any of these details. I really didn't. I just thought, oh,
yes, Riverdale Road supposed to weird things. So maybe it didn't know a little bit. But I felt
it is genuinely somewhat creepy. It has a thing I'll get into a little bit later. And the whole

(44:29):
notion of a family killer, it's just horrendous. In a way, I'm glad that it didn't that I couldn't
find anything about it. It's just so heart wrenching. You have to ask yourself what drives that kind
of person, a family killer, a person that typically it's a man. But regardless of the

(44:51):
accounted for historical evidence that we know about, you know, a tale of insanity, grief,
evil somehow got woven into the legend of Riverdale Road. But we couldn't find any solid
corroboration. So what's going on with these 1970s newspaper reporters? Why didn't they dig up
into this rumors of a murdered doctor? Reference the good doctor, right? I mean, at least that's

(45:13):
something I know that there's something there's prostitution and there's gambling and there's
probably fights and maybe a shootout or something, you know, something Wild West. But no, none of that.
It just kind of I have to maybe dig even deeper. I don't know how at this point. But I'll see

(45:34):
what I can come up with for the moment. It just is a mystery of kind of a door shut on that for
the moment. But back to this psychology of family kids reminds me of something else, the rehatch
of unsolved mysteries that came on Newflix on Netflix. Hey, Newflix, that's a good name. Hey,

(45:55):
Newflix, I'm gonna steal that name. Copyright, Newflix. No, Netflix in season one, Netflix in
season one had this one story about and just check it out and you'll see I don't want to spoil too
much of it. But this basically one about a man who kills his family. He never is seen or heard of

(46:19):
again. I mean, it's the complete perfect crime.
Horrendous situation. And you just it's, you know, what could be more haunting than that for
relatives that survive for the community? You know, it doesn't even me as a stranger, I feel

(46:40):
something for for that. You know, just totally innocent people always thought about the guys
like that. And I my knee jerk reaction was like, why don't you just, you know, you can just be a
deadbeat dad and just leave. I mean, that's better than killing us all. What are you doing?
But that's not the way the psychology works. And of course, I'm not a psychologist. No,

(47:02):
do I play one on TV? But from what I dug into, and I think the show goes into it, but I'm not
100%. I might have gone on my own investigation on that when I saw that. And according to
psychologists and clinicians, there is a kind of a personality profile for the kind of person,
usually a man, as I said before, who tends to take these drastic steps to end his own family.

(47:28):
And this kind of act tends to take, tends to be tethered or linked to a person, a kind of person
that is so, you know, inconscrutable, you know, you really don't know what what they're up to.
And they play a very kind of like all is good type of person, you know, like that guy that's always

(47:50):
just, hey, neighbor, how do you do it? Yeah, you know, kind of Midwestern type person,
that everything's just a facade, you know, poser. But if you dig into them or more, if you could,
you then realize that they, you know, all the while they were boiling with all kinds of emotions
and thoughts and created this just perpetrated this protracted preplanned brutality. But to those

(48:18):
who study this and earn those PhDs, the phenomenon is rooted in a breakdown in what has to mean in
in a person who has to maintain the appearance of success. And that's kind of it in an actual,
the kind of family who gets laid off from his six figured banker job. But months afterwards,

(48:40):
still gets ready in the morning because his wife pretends to go to work. It's the kind of individual
who after building a house of card and cards and lies, finally has to come to terms with the whole
pretense collapsing. You can't come to term with this. And the weight of his lies is complex,

(49:01):
so complex, and so protracted over even, you know, months and months, maybe even a year or I don't
know how long can go like, like that, eventually reality has to, it has to hit. And it becomes
that becomes just strangely intermingled or tied to their self esteem, their sense of worth, their

(49:23):
reason for existing for being. And most strange of all is that there's an emotional bind to
his family. I want to say his because really don't have any examples of women doing this. I mean,
possible and but it's at least the cases that we have have been predominantly male unfortunately.

(49:48):
And he just cannot abide the kind of person leaving the family behind. It's too much of a loose end.
And so he schemes to send them all to the afterlife in short order while he hightails it,
I guess he just kind of runs off. And that's how it goes. Obviously this reeks of a tragic and

(50:09):
profound psychotic breakdown in metaphoric and perhaps real terms true descent into hell.

(50:39):
You'll find Sage in Apple books or Amazon and Barnes and Novel.

(51:10):
Check out Sage and other titles. You can also go to phenomenoncasefiles.com.
Back to the case and back to the big picture of Riverdale Road. There is a strange correlation
here a high incident of fatal car crashes. This is corroborated by above normal statistics for

(51:32):
serial serious and fatal crashes when compared to the rest of the state. Speaking to that a little
or actually directly Sheriff Barnes interviewed in the same Denver nine local news feature aired
in 2019 said at night, it can be treacherous to drive with numerous curves and few street lights.

(51:55):
Barnes said there have been 33 property damage and injury accidents on Riverdale Road in 2019.
There have also been numerous fatal crashes in recent memory according to Barnes who has
been 30 years with Thornton police. And I quote him now. There have been several fatal crashes on

(52:18):
the roadway during my tenure here basically due to its winding nature and excessive speed
these drivers attempt on the roadway. Barnes said then the TV spot switched to a paranormal
I don't know the enthusiasts I don't want to say investigator didn't get that sense from her

(52:41):
and her last name Smith and she said that she doesn't know too much about the urban legends.
So that gives me a hint that maybe she's not a paranormal investigator because that's one of
the first things you probably want to be acquainted with. She might be more of a sensitive I think
and maybe that's what she was. She wasn't introduced like that in the article or I miss something but

(53:02):
she's actually definitely has a feeling on this road. And she says if you stand in the right spot
you experience these moments of dread. She said believe it or not Riverdale Road remains a source
of fascination for ghost hunters. Smith's advice if you're doing your own investigation be careful
driving or walking on the road especially at night due to its winding nature and blind curves.

(53:31):
So very very good sound advice they're like how they sort of sort of like every time you get these
sheriffs and talk about any kind of the lore supernatural anything there was they always play
the the practical man you know well it's all this bad driving and you know guess what they're
they're usually right. You can be really afraid of a lot of paranormal activity supernatural

(53:55):
things scary things and really the banal truth of it all is that most people meet if they do meet
a terrible and it's you know on driving usually so watch out watch out don't be distracted it's
very tempting to just kind of wag your finger like as a as an authority that like these guys

(54:18):
and just at least leave a bit of a a bit of a of a warning and we should heed that warning.
I want to move a little bit to to a different part of Colorado that's
it I would say pretty far away from this but since we're already down in the rabbit hole
in Colorado I want to make a quick left turn to yet another road that while it doesn't intersect

(54:43):
with Riverdale Road it is thought of as one of the most haunted roads in Colorado. In fact
County Line Road is often referred to as cursed as a cursed stretch and no more so than at Third Bridge.
County Line Road just out of the sprawling eastern Denver metro area follow the road east of Aurora

(55:08):
and you're on your way to the high plains all the way to a small town about 14 miles out named
Bennett. Just before you get to the town you're on an unpaid stretch and then an overpass over the
dried up Kiowa Creek. This overpass is also known as the Third Bridge. If Kiowa sounds to you like

(55:30):
an American Indian word that's because it is. More than that this dried up creek is none other than
the side of the infamous Sand Creek Massacre. According to the National Park Service the morning
of November 29th 1864 and I want to stop right there before I go on because this is a factoid

(55:55):
blurb it's true and yet to me this is a very impactful thing about the state a very shameful
thing about this territory this western land and this United States. There is a great deal of love
of course for many of the things that we've accomplished but I wonder how well do they

(56:17):
counterbalance against the things that we've done wrong and the decades that we spent romanticizing
the colonization of the west or the expansion the pioneering spirit and those are all good things.
If you are back in that time period you think you know you don't think in terms of imperialism and

(56:40):
and you do think of the people that were here as just wasting the land you know they're just living
on it and they're moving around but they're not farming it they're not living like we are they're
not building houses they're not like Wolford you know and it's mansion that burned down later on.
So I want to I want people to think about the story if you're coming across this

(57:04):
you know it's a weird intersection I think but all these inlays in history are important
and they become part of the culture and even if you want to deny it and even if you don't know
anything about it they're there they happen they existed. So this goes like this the morning of

(57:25):
November 29th 1864 the chiefs blackheadl white antelope one eye yellow wolf big man bear man
war bonnet spotted crow bear robe and wolf gray and little bear were encamped by the big sandy
creek some 40 miles north of fort lion when colonel shivington endelments of the first call

(57:51):
Colorado infantry regiment of volunteers USA and third regiment of Colorado calorie
volunteers US arrived just southwest of the Cheyenne and Arapaho encampment.
Colonel Shivington was never given orders to leave Denver and at around 630 the soldiers

(58:12):
would open fire amongst the lodges of the innocent and unaware of Arapaho and Cheyenne people.
Over the course of eight hours the American troops killed around 230 Cheyenne and Arapaho
people composed mostly of women children and the elderly during the afternoon and following day

(58:36):
the soldiers wandered over the field committing atrocities on the dead before departing the scene
on December 1st. So I have to swallow hard there because my mouth is dry but it's also dry because
I'm it's stressful for me to read these things and be a matter of fact about it. Even after all

(58:58):
these years this is so hard to read. Now 1864 that was the same year that the old David Wolbert
builder of the Wolbert house was married incidentally just 12 years or so years before this
territory became the state of Colorado in 1876 and we call that blurb on Dr. Rodick's application

(59:19):
about old Wolbert and his excursions to the mountain to make his fortune quote unquote with
a band of at least 16 other men in the Colorado mountains and having some run-ins with Indians.
How did old Wolbert make his fortune anyway? Is this all coincidence? Well yes most likely

(59:43):
but it does give us pause. Makes us wonder if there ever was a curse upon this land
that could have been cast in the aftermath of one atrocity after another perpetrated against
the peoples who roamed this land for over 30,000 years. If so this haunting has long arms

(01:00:06):
stretching all the way to the wretched modern day. It's said that at the third bridge on some nights
visitors to these haunted grounds still hear the sounds of screams the wail of women haunted
battle cries and drums as well as the occasional sighting of a ghost rider who can't seem to rest in peace.

(01:00:37):
My final and concluding thoughts on Riverdale Road and even this other road County Line 1
and even the tale the legend whether true and apparently not much to back it historically at
least not in this location is it's interesting to me the the link between grief and the link to

(01:01:04):
hauntings you know when we think of a tremendously traumatic thing happening happening to a person
such as losing their lives tragically and way before they should and there's a familiar trope
and if we speak of fiction we say trope but if we speak of of this as historians as

(01:01:30):
folklorists as people investigating this as paranormal phenomena researchers we might call
it patterns incidents we might call it a feature of of of a haunting so at any rate we go from
tragedy at least in this pattern here to myth creation which are the urban legends and then

(01:01:58):
the ghosts tether to a part of this world somehow they can't move on because they're
trapped in this loop of pain and sorrow and and and and in between that it doesn't seem to dissipate
for at least a long time you know that's another thing I wonder how long will a place remain haunted

(01:02:22):
is it haunted forever is there a variation is there there's a scale strong or at some point
weaker or a bell curve kind of pattern where it just is a crescendo and then you know a peak and
then it falls down dissipates you know it makes me think of entropy does physics have anything to do

(01:02:46):
with the way that hauntings go do they start off strong and become less and less coherent and
and finally vanish what drives it what energy is needed so thinking about physics the strange
thing or might seem a strange thing but that's one of the measurements that we have to
to experience the world even the other worldly phenomena that we might encounter

(01:03:13):
but I want to I want to talk a little bit more I'm sort of going to mix this usually have an
outro I put the music on and there's an outro section where I talk about things and encourage
people to just kind of do it after the music because it'll be a little bit housekeeping a
little bit about what we're doing in the show it was a difficult 2024 2025 is a good reset it's

(01:03:38):
looking better we're moving forward with these kinds of stories and these kinds of features and
this podcast that's at the moment it in its infancy it's going to depend on you if you're
finding this at this moment and you want to reach out to me and you will have some stories to tell me
or you want to be part of it somehow this is an exciting time for you so and the show notes I'll

(01:04:01):
have how to contact me which is basically at this point an email and I gave me instructions I think
later before another episode it's about putting something in the subject of glowing the phenomena
case files dot com with an X or something like that so I don't get a lot of a lot of basically
just junk mail where we're headed in 2024 2025 is a variety of stories this is the main vein

(01:04:27):
as I've explained before of the of the show of the show episodes that focus on on phenomena really
on unexplained phenomena and this can be ranging from ghosts hauntings to UFOs to cryptids to

(01:04:48):
any number of things and as a bonus here and there or maybe two times or maybe three at the most
kind of a travel log experience where I go to to some place or to carry on an investigation this
place is third bridge road gave me a little bit of pause because I thought that is a place that I
need to go and do an investigation and do some measurements and do some trying to do some

(01:05:14):
interviews and maybe even bring them into the show people are really a little bit shy when it
comes to them but I'll see how I can overcome that barrier so if you've listened this far it's
after the music and it's me talking about what's coming up next and thanking you for having listened
so far and for being patient with my learning curve I'm still gonna get better I promise

(01:05:40):
I work full time to know I'm I'm invested in what I do and I in my free time I do dedicate
my time to to creating this show it is we call it a love of labor a labor of love
because it doesn't it's not I'm not doing it to try to one day throw a bunch of ads at you and all

(01:06:05):
that crap I hate those kinds of shows and or get up too much on a high horse of some kind and start
ranting about causes and things you know I want to just be in a kind of communion with all of you
and certain in the terms of we come together by listening to story the way we used to when we

(01:06:27):
used to gather in a campfire and in your old grandfather or somebody would just tell you a
story just out of nowhere because the moon was right because the the fire was crackling because
it felt good and that was cold and dark and we can go back to that now and again hopefully in the

(01:06:47):
real sense but at least in this way in a digital sense so until next time we'll keep the fire here
burning at the phenomena case files podcast and have a great night

(01:07:24):
so

(01:07:54):
so