Time to get spooky: Haunted History talks and why we see more paranormal activity in October

Editor’s Note: “Time to get spooky” is a series in the Vail Daily exploring the spooky, strange and supernatural events experienced in Eagle County.

‘Tis the season for everything wicked, ghoulish and freaky. Going even beyond the Halloween costumes you’ll see out and about on Oct. 31, it’s the prime time to delve into ghost sightings and connect with the former Eagle County residents who once roamed the valley and still do roam, just from a different realm.

It’s for these reasons that Kathy Heicher of the Eagle County Historical Society hosts cemetery tours this time of year. Earlier this week she led groups through the cemeteries in Red Cliff and Gypsum. She will also host a talk on Wednesday, Oct. 26 entitled “Haunted History: Eagle County’s Dark Side” at the Eagle Public Library at 6 p.m.

“There are several reports of ghosts or monster-like creatures in Eagle County over the decades. Many are likely imagined, but some cannot be explained. The earliest stories date back to the days of the mining camps, in the 1880s,” Heicher said.

The mining days yielded stories that exemplified the Wild West era, with a hint of lawlessness and tragedy overshadowing the occasional and rare bonanza. Many of the early settlers of what have now become ghost towns lived hard lives and sometimes tragic deaths.

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“Newspapers were pretty flamboyant back in the day and reported with great gusto odd occurrences such as ghost or monster sightings,” Heicher said.

Sometimes people report seeing ghosts in places where tragedies, usually deaths, occurred. 

“A couple of ghosts were seen over a period of several decades in the same house, but by different tenants,” Heicher said.

The occurrence of people seeing the same ghost over an extended period of time is not odd to Sheila Seppi, a shamanic practitioner and founder of SpiritWay Wellness in Eagle-Vail.

“Those are called energetic imprints because what happens is when you have a person that has an attachment to a certain area, a certain piece of land, part of their energy will be left behind and can stay in that place and then other people can see and feel it,” Seppi said.

Seppi gave an example of when people traveling down an abandoned piece of highway will report seeing a woman walking in the middle of the road trying to wave someone down and once they stop they find that nobody is there.

“Everyone will see the exact same actions or gestures that she does, whether she is waving them down to stop or how her mouth will move in a certain pattern, whatever it is that they do, everyone sees the same thing and the reason people see that action consistently is that it is the energetic imprint that the person has left behind in that space,” Seppi said.

Heicher recalls a time, back in the 1980s, when some paranormal experts documented a mischievous ghost at an old house north of Avon, which has since been torn down.

“The experts said the ghost revealed that its name was John. Interestingly, there was a single grave up on the hillside behind the house — which the paranormal people did not know about — for a guy named John,” Heicher said.

“Everything is consciousness,” Seppi said. “Whether we are talking about ghosts, extraterrestrials or a family member that passed away and comes back to visit, everything is consciousness and what I have found is within the Earth’s plane, we have that astral plane and that’s where most of the people are, still within the astral plane of the Earth. So, sometimes those will merge with each other or cross over with each other and that’s why we might look up and we see people that we know because our dimensions have merged with each other.”

Seppi added it’s no coincidence that people may experience sightings around Halloween.

“There are many times, especially in March and October, which are prime times that the veil between the two worlds is really, really thin, and so sometimes people who typically would not see into these other realms, have the ability to do so. And there are other people who are clairvoyant or claircognizant that have these abilities to just know or to see when these energies are in their proximity, they can just see them, they can hear them, they know that they are there,” Seppi said.

“It’s really funny because when we see these things, we always think, ‘Oh my gosh, they’re ghosts, they’re apparitions.’ And on the other side, when they see us, they think the same thing, because there’s a bleeding together,” Seppi said.

“Having an experience with a spirit doesn’t mean a person is crazy. Some things just cannot be explained, like feeling the spiritual presence of a loved one who is deceased. That is what makes life interesting,” Heicher said. “And the reality is that at this time of year, it is fun to hear a story of a ghost or monster and be a little scared.”