If you go What: Haunted Happy Hour When: 6 to 8 p.m. Thursday Where: McCarthy’s Pub, 30 S. Main St., Longmont Cost: Free, drinks not included Contact: McCarthy’s Pub at 303-772-9797 What: Banjo Billy’s Ghost Tours When: Thursday through Sundays Where: Hotel Boulderado, 2115 13th St., Boulder Cost: $22, adults; $20, adults ages 60 and older; $14, kids ages 6 to 12; kids under 6 are free Contact: banjobilly.com/ghost-tours Related • User’s guide to Halloween entertainment. • Don’t limit your options to haunted houses. Here’s some alternative Halloween fun. • Take part in the inaugural Loveland Zombie Crawl. • Watch a scary video taken at Creepy Walk in the Woods. • Looking for something more mellow? Click here.

A dozen tense lurkers anxiously peer in the window of Longmont’s Elite Barber Shop hoping to catch a glimpse of the business’ rumored ghost, Shorty.

The group listens breathless as Dori Spence stands near the shop door in her large black hat, black cardigan and long black skirt telling the story of Shorty, the long-gone retired barber.

“Shorty is my favorite ghost,” said Spence, who calls herself Longmont’s weirdest historian. “People have described seeing a man, just under 6-feet-tall, standing between two of the barber chairs at night wearing an apron with something in his pocket.”

A framed black and white photograph of Shorty hangs on the shop wall near the front door, an homage to the former barber, Spence said.

October brings out the curiosity in local residents who seek out ghost stories and haunted tales told by Boulder County’s historians, tour guides and storytellers, like Spence. But some locals and area organizations do not wait for Halloween to delve into Boulder County’s paranormal.

Spence is president of the Society for the Prevention of the Ostracization or Obliteration of Kindred Spirits (Spooks) Inc. The group hosts Haunted History tours of Boulder County and Loveland and performs paranormal investigations on historic buildings in the area year round.

“We’re on the side of the ghosts,” Spence said.

Longmont’s paranormal presence

During the tours, Spence shares stories about 11 locations in downtown Longmont that have an active presence. Some she has experienced for herself, like the ghost that hovers in the office of Brown’s Shoe Fit Company. Others come from stories shared with her, like the ghost of the Sun Rose Cafe.

“They say it looks like she’s arranging things on a shelf that you can’t see anymore along the side of that one wall,” Spence said. “She’s in a colorful skirt… and she’s wearing an apron. They don’t have a name for her but more than one person has seen her.”

Most Longmont residents have heard about the numerous ghost sightings at the Dickens Opera House. But less familiar mysteries hang on the back wall of the attached restaurant, The Dickens Tavern.

Antique pictures cover the restaurant’s back room, east of the front door on Main Street and Third Avenue, including a black and white photograph of a former bartender with his arm around a headless woman wearing an apron. Another image on the same wall includes the silhouette of a transparent “ghost dog,” as Spence calls it.

Longmont is not the only town in Colorado known for its haunted history.

Boulder Hauntings

The University of Colorado, Boulder’s Macky Auditorium has one of the more familiar ghost stories in the county, based on the death of student Elaura Jaquette, whose body was found in room 304 of the western tower in the summer of 1966.

Police eventually charged school janitor Joseph Dyre Morse in Jaquette’s murder and it is said that organ music can be heard late at night from room 304, which no longer contains an organ and is used primarily for storage.

Macky’s mystery is one of several stories that enticed John Georgis to launch Banjo Billy’s Bus Tours. The company offers tours that include ghost stories of Denver and Boulder year round and expanded ghost tours in October.

Georgis took dozens of tours around the world as research before starting the company and found that people worldwide were intrigued by dark history and stories of the paranormal.

“We like to know that what we see is not what we get,” Georgis said. “There’s a core group that’s saying ‘life is not finite,’ and these stories give us some hope that when we die there’s something more.”

The story of Boulder’s only lynching victim makes up one of Georgis’ favorite stories on the October tours.

As the story goes, William Tull was arrested for stealing his employer’s horses in 1867 and detained in a blacksmith shop near, what is now, Ninth Avenue and Pearl Street. After being beaten and tormented for days, Tull was hanged on Pearl Street.

It was later discovered that Tull’s employer sold him the two horses and that the town hanged an innocent man, which is likely why Tull’s ghost has been spotted on Pearl Street and occasionally near Boulder Creek late at night, Georgis said.

“People have claimed to see a man with a dark black tote and a dark hat on with his head down,” Georgis said. “But when they start to get closer, he has no face.”

The experience

Every town has an urban legend or ghost story, usually based on a historical figure or horrific incident that occurred there, Spence said. It’s the nature of people to connect with the past and wonder about the history of the spaces around them, she said.

Spence also gives tours in Erie, Frederick and Loveland where she has seen, first-hand, the presence of a man leaning against the wall at Loveland Feed and Grain.

Another story on the Loveland tour is of an anti-smoking ghost at the former Java Lounge, now Henry’s Pub, that would knock things out of people’s hands if someone in the building was smoking.

Despite the glaring lights in Spence’s photographs, investigations and historical relevance skeptics remain. But Spence does not let their doubts shake her relationship with the paranormal. She just sits back and waits for them to experience it for themselves.

“I’m an avid believer, that there’s no such thing as a non-believer,” Spence said. “There are just people that nothing has happened to, yet.”

Contact Times-Call community reporter Whitney Bryen at 303-684-5274 or wbryen@times-call.com