NEDERLAND - Many of the buildings in the heart of Nederland date back to the turn of the 20th century and may be haunted.

Much of downtown Nederland was destroyed by a series of fires from 1912 to 1913, and little of the early downtown survived. Ten or twelve new buildings were erected during the winter of 1915-16, and many still stand today.

The demand for high-temperature steel during World War I led to the Nederland area becoming overrun with tungsten prospectors during the summer of 1915. Nederland’s population rose from a few hundred to over three thousand.

“The woman in white” is the most notorious ghost in Nederland. She haunts the lower floors of what is known today as Wolf Tongue Square.

The McRae hotel was erected in 1915 on the site of the Pickel/McKensie hardware store, and it became the Silver Dollar Tavern (the site of the New Moon Café today). The Mint pool hall next door was demolished, and the furniture store behind it became Dicks Corner Service Station (Silver Stem Cannabis Store today).

A beautiful long-haired young woman wearing a white lace dress was often seen floating across the hallway near an old stone wall by the bathrooms of the old Neapolitan’s Italian restaurant that used to occupy the ground floor on the northwest corner of Wolf Tongue Square.

The prevailing rumor was that she was a lady of the night who worked in the back of one of the taverns that used to occupy the buildings. I have always wondered if the white lace dress may have been a wedding dress. 

When Silver Stem Cannabis Dispensary first opened, a motion detection alarm system kept going off at night and had to be removed due to frequent false alarms. Doors in the dispensary are reported to mysteriously open and close.

Employees have heard voices in the back of the New Moon Café when no one was there. Chairs would be rearranged overnight at a restaurant that used to be upstairs in the building, and some mornings spare change from the register would be placed on the bar in stacks.

An old miner with a beard was known to appear in the back room of the old Whistle Stop Cafe (the Mountain Peak Cafe today). He seemed friendly, and waitresses would sometimes even pour him a cup of coffee.

The building was remodeled after a fire, and the ghost never returned, but a waitress said she sometimes felt a strange, “sometimes scary,” presence when she opened the restaurant in the morning.

When Crosscut Pizza was an antique store, a terrified Hispanic child was scared by an old woman with stringy grey hair he called a “bruja” that he saw in the back of the store when nobody was there. Bruja is the Spanish name for a witch.

Cabinets would sometimes open and close in the store at closing time. The “bruja” has not reappeared since the antique store was remodeled to become Crosscut, but dark shapes have reportedly been seen near the back of the building. 

The Nature’s Own building on First Street used to be a market, and some of the old market employees refused to go downstairs to the basement due to strange sounds, objects falling from shelves, and a general “creepy feeling.” Some people say they get the same creepy feeling from the back rooms today. 

Late at night, pots and pans would sometimes fly off of the top shelves in the back of the kitchen at the old Pioneer Inn, now the Covered Wagon. 

In 1895, the 29 residents of the original cemetery in Nederland were moved to the cemetery’s present location on the northwest side of town to make room for a new road and construction of the Antlers Hotel.

The hotel was built in 1897, and was then replaced by St. Rita's Catholic Church in 1961. A study sponsored by the Nederland Area Historical Society in 2025 located 313 grave sites in the cemetery and 198 headstones dating back to 1873.

Specters don't confine themselves to town limits. A longtime resident and his son swear they saw an apparition of a cowboy a few years back, by the side of the road on Lazy Z off Magnolia Road on a foggy evening. And floating white orbs were filmed a few years ago overnight in the Stage Stop in Rollinsville.

Hope you had a Happy Halloween!