🏚️ S05E43 – The Peabody-Whitehead Mansion

⚠️ Content Advisory⚠️

This episode includes an extended discussion of a televised paranormal investigation in which a crew treated an alleged spirit-box recording about a sexual assault as cause for celebration. The hosts address the claim and the ethics of its presentation directly. Please consider another episode if this topic would be traumatic for you.

Blake and Karen are joined by paranormal investigator Matt Baxter for a live MonsterTalk recording about Denver’s Peabody-Whitehead Mansion – the red sandstone pile on Capitol Hill’s old Millionaire Row that ghost tour operators like to call the most haunted building in Colorado, if not the country. The three of them had walked the place the night before at the invitation of author and paranormal researcher Richard Estep, who is writing a book about the mansion and wanted skeptical voices in it alongside the believer accounts he had already collected.

What they found was a genuinely beautiful 1889 Frank Edbrooke house with a well-documented history – a Crimean War surgeon, a strikebreaking governor, a second life as restaurants, nightclubs, and recently as apartments. But what does it mean if the haunting reputation does not show up anywhere in the record until the restaurant era of the 1950s? From there the episode turns to the 2012 Ghost Adventures visit, the spirit box sessions it produced, and the moment that earns this episode a content warning.

🕯️ In This Episode

🏛️ The real history of 1128 Grant Street – built in 1889 for Dr. William Riddick Whitehead, a surgeon who served in both the Crimean War and the American Civil War, and later home to Colorado Governor James Hamilton Peabody
📐 Architect Frank E. Edbrooke (Wikipedia), who also gave Denver The Brown Palace Hotel (Wikipedia), the Oxford Hotel and the state capitol
⛏️ Governor James Hamilton Peabody (Wikipedia), The Colorado Labor Wars and the Cripple Creek strike (Wikipedia), and how a genuinely brutal labor record gets recycled as a ghost motif
🍽️ Why the ghost stories start in the 1950s – when the house became a restaurant and bar – and not during the sixty years people actually lived in it
👥 The “Peabody Dozen”: soldier spirits, a young woman on the second floor, a phantom chandelier, a Lady in Black, a crotchety old man, crying babies, and the usual poltergeist furniture
🏠 What the current residents report experiencing: nothing
📻 The 2005 Peter Boyles Halloween radio broadcast from the mansion, and Matt’s front-row seat to a spirit box being sold as “Thomas Edison’s Telephone to the Dead”
🫧 Ghost hunters teaching paying customers how to cup their hands near a camera flash to manufacture orb photographs
👻 A brand new ghost story introduced in 2005 that simply failed to take hold – folklore caught in the act of being made
📺 A close reading of the 2012 Ghost Adventures episode: the spirit box sessions, the “unsuspecting workers” experiment, the ball of light, the prop skull, and the on-screen claim that police opened an investigation
🧠 Auditory pareidolia, apophenia, priming, and why the on-screen subtitle is doing most of the work
🏗️ Whether odd rooms, steep staircases, infrasound and EMF actually contribute to unease – or whether the stories we are told beforehand are doing the real work

🔗 Episode Links

Peabody-Whitehead Mansion (Wikipedia)
The Peabody Mansion – official site
Westword: “Haunted” Denver Mansion Turned Into Luxury Apartments (2026)
Alan Berg (Wikipedia)
Ghost Adventures (Wikipedia)
Electronic voice phenomenon (Wikipedia)
Pareidolia (Wikipedia)
Apophenia (Wikipedia)
Infrasound (Wikipedia)
Prof. Chris French, anomalistic psychology (Wikipedia)
Denver Public Library, Western History Collection
Colorado State Archives

🖋️ Our Guest

Matt Baxter is a paranormal investigator and a longtime friend of the show. He was present at the mansion during the 2005 Halloween radio broadcast and returned with Blake and Karen for this visit.

Thanked but not appearing – Richard Estep, who arranged the visit, is a paramedic and paranormal investigator who has written more than thirty books and appeared on Haunted Hospitals, Paranormal 911 and Haunted Case Files. His book on the mansion is in progress, and he has an open invitation to come on the show when it is finished.

📚 Suggested Reading

Denver history and Capitol Hill
Denver Landmarks & Historic Districts by Tom Noel and Wellington Webb 💵
Colorado’s War on Militant Unionism: James H. Peabody and the Western Federation of Miners – George G. Suggs Jr. 💵
Ghosts of Denver’s Capitol Hill – Phil Goodstein (out of print – look for Library copy) 💵
Talked to Death: The Life and Murder of Alan Berg – Stephen Singular 💵

Hauntings, folklore and belief
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark – Carl Sagan 💵
Paranormal America – Christopher Bader, F. Carson Mencken and Joseph Baker 💵

📣 Promotions

Beyond Words by Karen Stollznow 💵 is out now

Richard Estep’s book on the Peabody-Whitehead Mansion is forthcoming. We will link it here when it is out.

🎙️ Credits

MonsterTalk theme music is by Peach Stealing Monkeys.
MonsterTalk is produced by Blake Smith and co-hosted by Karen Stollznow. If you enjoy the show, you can support it directly at patreon.com/monstertalk. Thank you – sincerely – to everyone who does.