One of my best friends got married on Saturday. Jen was my boss and former paramedic partner several years ago, and one of the finest people I have ever had the pleasure of working with (or for). Seeing her tie the knot was a genuine privilege. Even better was the fact that she chose the small town of Cripple Creek as the venue. I had been there a couple of times before, to conduct a paranormal investigation of the former Teller County Jail, since renamed the Outlaws and Lawmens Museum.
The museum still contains the original cell block, and has housed such personalities as Groucho Marx and boxing champion Jack Dempsey, to name just two. My friends Jason and Linda Fellon arranged for us to investigate the museum again after Jen’s nuptials were over. Who could say no to that?
We got there at nine o’clock in the evening. Under a beautiful mountain night sky, we made our way inside for a tour from resident paranormal investigator Ralph.
It’s safe to say that our last investigations there were fruitful. Colton, of the Eastern Colorado Shadow Trackers, heard and recorded a chilling EVP which sounds like somebody either hacking up a lung or getting their throat cut (either would have been possible in such a place). Catlyn and I had heard disembodied voices whispering all around us while we were upstairs on the cell block, and were never able to pin down the source satisfactorily.
Perhaps most concerning of all, Shaun saw what he is one hundred percent convinced was my doppleganger, standing on the upper cell block. His expression, when he walked into the cell in which I had been sitting for the past ten minutes, was an absolute picture — all the blood drained from his face, and he insisted that he had just seen me not a moment before taking photographs from the balcony. A fellow investigator who had been standing in the only doorway to the cell testified that it could not possibly have been me, which meant that unless Shaun was seeing things, I apparently had a doppelganger that night.
The doppelganger phenomenon is a fascinating one, daating as it does back to 17th century Germany. The legends that surround it are all distinctly creepy: some say that a doppelganger is an evil twin of sorts, whereas others consider it to be a harbinger of impending death — it is often said that to meet your own doppelganger means that your death is imminent.
I wrote about the bizarre experience in my upcoming book Trail of Terror, not only because it’s a genuinely weird occurrence, but also to set the record straight after the whole thing was dramatized on my TV show Haunted Case Files (that’s Paranormal Investigators to my British friends).
I was intrigued to hear from Ralph that mine wasn’t the only doppelganger to have been spotted at the old jail. Other eyewitnesses have given similar reports. There is no doubt that something rather odd is going on at the Outlaws and Lawmens Museum, and I am very much looking forward to going back and trying to figure out exactly what it is.
