Time to get spooky: Who is the Dotsero volcano ghost?

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

On a summer night in June of 2013, Brenden Lopez, a resident of Gypsum, was in the back of a car with a group of friends, driving up the Dotsero volcano for a bonfire at the top. Around five minutes into the drive, Lopez said that he heard a noise that made him look out the window.

“I could hear – it sounded like chains, dragging, which was really weird because there was music going on in the car, so it was loud,” Lopez said.

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When he looked out the window towards the noise, he said that he saw the vague image of a girl, appearing to be in her late teens or early twenties, in a white gown, her arms dragging alongside her as if weighed down by the chains that he could hear dragging on the ground.

He said that when he pointed it out to his friends in the car, nobody could see or hear what he was experiencing. He felt “freaked out” at first, and tried to write it off as an effect of alcohol, though he had only had one drink. But as the car continued up the path, the image of the girl remained in sight, around 50 feet away on the right side of the road, where Lopez said that nobody would be walking at that time of night.

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“If I had just seen her once, that’d be one thing, but going up, up the way… I could see her for miles, separated apart,” Lopez said.

Lopez said that he continued to see the girl throughout the drive until they reached the bonfire, where she was nowhere to be seen. But coming down the volcano around three hours later there she was again, moving along the same area as when they were driving up.

Although he was the only one seeing the ghost, he said he did not feel any fear or threat from the girl. Instead, the primary emotion that he felt was sadness.

“It seemed like a very sad girl, just kind of walking aimlessly,” Lopez said. “I felt sad. It was the chains, hearing the chains and then watching her walk… I’ve always wondered what could possibly have been or what happened back in the day, if there is a record of a girl that went missing or something like that.”

Escaping abduction

Lopez had never heard of a ghost in the area before that night, but the description that he gave of the young woman in chains precisely matched those seen by visitors to the site before him.

Tracy Kimball, the creator of the Eagle Vail Paranormal Society, said that three other people have attested to seeing the young girl in chains through email and the society’s Facebook page. In a survey she posted, the Dotsero volcano ghost garnered the majority of interest from page members, and led Kimball to begin her own research into the ghost and how she may have come to wander the volcano in chains.

Kimball brought Lady Perpetua, a psychic medium and spiritual guide based in the valley, to drive up the volcano with her and do a reading of the spiritual presence at the site. The two drove up the road until Perpetua felt that they should stop, at which point they spent over two hours walking around the site.

While she did not see the ghost directly, Perpetua said that she felt the presence of a girl, likely aged 18-20, and that she had the distinct sense that the girl had been abducted and was being taken a great distance against her will. She said that oftentimes in readings, she will be shown glimpses of a scene that the spirits are sharing with her, and while on the volcano she saw pieces of what transpired there.

“I did see a scene where she was being taken by a man through that location, and then she had somehow escaped that man and was backtracking through the volcano and had slipped on loose gravel,” Perpetua said. “Because her wrists were bound, that slip was — I don’t know, I think maybe she broke her neck or something in that fall.”

Perpetua said that traumatic deaths like this are often the reason that a spirit will become trapped in the world as a ghost. In the case of the Dotsero ghost, she said that the transient nature of her life at the time of her death would contribute to her behavior in wandering the area, searching for escape in death as she did in life.

“It’s possible that it isn’t all in one exact same spot because it’s very traumatic to be abducted, and so I almost feel like that whole area while she was trying to escape, she probably could roam, not just the location of where the body would be,” Perpetua said.

This reading aligns exactly with what Lopez observed in her behavior, that she was in constant movement throughout the volcano area as he traveled up the road.

Perpetua also had the sense that the young girl was of Native American or Mexican descent, though the man that she saw walking with the girl was too unclear to discern. She said that often during her readings, she will be made aware of years, dates and numbers, and that the year 1835 was revealed to her as the time of her movement through the area.

Kimball has spent over a dozen hours at local libraries in Eagle County and Denver looking through historic records about human trafficking, abduction and slavery during the 19th century that might shed light on who the young woman was. Through her research, she learned about a widespread slave trade of Native Americans by Spanish colonists in the territory of New Mexico, which in the year 1835 encompassed much of Colorado.

This slave trade could explain why the young girl was bound in chains and being taken over a distance against her will in an unknown area. At this time, not enough information is known about the history of that trade in our area to make conclusive statements, but it is a narrative that aligns with much of what Perpetua saw in her readings.

Energy lasts forever

Kimball did not see the ghost of the girl during the reading, but she said that she felt a deep sadness in her presence, just as Lopez had when he saw her through the car window.

“It just felt to me like a lost soul,” Kimball said. “She must have gone through something so traumatic and brutal, and once you start thinking about that, you take on those emotions. To be chained up, walking up and down a volcano… that is just upsetting.”

Perpetua said that souls that become trapped and fated to wander the earth can be released through counseling with a spiritual guide that resembles therapy for human beings. She said that she has helped a number of souls move onto the next realm, but that the soul has to trust her and be ready to work through the traumatic experience that trapped them there.

She said that the Dotsero volcano ghost is very timid, and doesn’t appear to be ready to move on from what happened to her at that spot.

“I could try, but it’s not something I typically force if they’re not causing a disturbance,” Perpetua said. “Some ghosts like being ghosts. It’s sad to say, but when you see somebody in a situation that you might not agree with their lifestyle, sometimes the best way to support them and respect them is to let them figure that out themselves.”

The Dotsero volcano ghost has shown herself, to this point, to be harmless, but represents a wrenchingly sad remnant of abuse and mistreatment that has been carried out too many times in too many communities in our country’s history. In time, she may be able to move on from the site of her death after centuries of suffering, but it seems that she wanders the volcano to this day, unable to escape from the haunting of her past.

Despite widespread skepticism about the existence of ghosts, Kimball said that she believes strongly in the power and persistence of the energy that we all bring to this world, and urges people to practice kindness instead of cruelty, as its mark can remain far beyond a single human lifetime.

“That’s why you have to be nice to people: the energy you put out there lasts for eternity,” Kimball said. “That’s one of the biggest lessons we need to be taking, is to prevent this from happening again. Put more good energy into the world, rather than bad energy that lingers.”