Dead Man's Hand

This happened in 1983 in Denver Colorado.

We moved into the top floor of a row house at 18th Street and Lafayette Ave. Not long after we rented the apartment someone told us that a murder had been committed in it. A gay woman named Rosalea had been stabbed 27 times by her lover, another woman named Linda. This had happened 3 years before on Christmas Day. We also found out that the landlord had trouble keeping the apartment rented.

While we were living there one friend claimed to have heard singing in his ear. Myself, and several other people heard a crashing noise in the kitchen but could not find anything that had fallen in the house. Once, there was a loud bounding bouncing noise all up and down the narrow hallway, into which our room opened out. My husband was awake and heard it come up the hallway and go back down and start to come back up. He felt that he recognized the sound from an old gothic horror movie called "The Haunting", and that his brain had been picked for a sound that would scare him. He woke me up. I had apparently heard the sound but not been frightened. I remember sleepily assuring him that it was "only King Kong, playing basketball in the courtyard"!

But the I think the thing that scared me most was the night we woke up and heard our six-year old daughter, yelling in her sleep, over and over--"I've got Aces and Eights, I've got Aces and Eights!"-- Now, some of you may be familiar with the fact that Aces and Eights were the cards held by Wyatt Earp --the famous gunslinger- when he was shot in the back through a window while playing poker. And that is refered to as 'The Dead Man's Hand'. I don't believe that is a term that my daughter would have known.

We did not stay long after that. But while we were still there there was a news item that Rosalea's killer had escaped front Fort Logan, the local mental health institution with the help of a psychiatric nurse. Thank goodness she didn't make it back to the scene of the crime!

We were in this apartment for Christmas, and we were expecting spooky things to happen, but all was quiet. Not long after that we moved.