For my birthday my friend Judy surprised me with an adventure to the Molly Brown House. It’s great being an almost Halloween baby.
This year’s spooky entertainment: Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera; H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man; Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper; Sarah Orne Jewitt’s Lady Ferry; and Edgar Allen Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado.
I wish I could have taken pictures of the actors and decorations but no pictures allowed.
The three story house is over 100 years old and many people have lived there. Margaret Brown (who became known as the “Unsinkable Molly Brown,” after surviving the sinking of the Titanic in 1912) would rent her house to wealthy families when she was out of town and she also had boarders during the lean times. After her death the house was briefly a gentlemen’s boarding house and a home for wayward girls.
Walking through this home filled with thousands of vintage treasures you are able to lose yourself in the Victorian love of macabre and celebration of the chilling stories told this night. The floorboards creaked during the readings and narrow steep stairways threatened to pull you down. Faded wallpaper caress shoulders and banisters touched by hundreds now gone send shivers to your core.
I was able to take this picture of my favorite ghoul Emma. She silently slinked around the edges of the group keeping us all herded together.
But not all was grisly as the ghosts of the Molly Brown house only laughed at our foolishness on holding our breaths during the story telling. The real ghosts of the Molly Brown house are former inhabitants that love the house and don’t want to leave. They made the experience pleasantly spooky but did nothing to truly terrorize us!
I felt a warm connection with Margaret Brown and was an amazed to discover the source of that connection is that she helped found the Denver Dumb Friends League and thus my search for my next rescue puppy, Henry!
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