Layers of Denver

Denver hides its age well. The gleaming towers, the polished hotel lobbies, the renovated warehouses of LoDo — all of it suggests a city that began yesterday. It didn't. And what it built over is still down there.

Layers of Denver: Beneath the Mile High City digs into the buried history under one of America's fastest-growing cities — and the ghost stories that grew up wherever the official record went quiet. There is a park where thousands of bodies were never moved. A luxury hotel where the switchboard took calls from a stripped and empty room. Two severed heads that may have ended their journey in the basement of the State Capitol. A flood that swallowed the city's first six years of records, and an airport that became the conspiracy capital of America.

This is not a ghost-story book. It is a buried-history book, and the hauntings are the doors. Each chapter starts with the legend Denver loves to tell, then follows it down into newspapers, archives, and public records to find what actually happened — because in Denver, the documented history is almost always worse than the folklore.

Moving from the Arapaho camps at the confluence of Cherry Creek and the South Platte to Sand Creek, Larimer Square, the Oxford and Brown Palace hotels, Cheesman Park, the Capitol, DIA, and the forgotten cemetery where the city's founders actually lie, Layers of Denver separates fact from legend with sourced endnotes in every chapter — and shows why the legends survive anyway.

For readers of Colorado history, true crime, and the strange places where the two meet. If you have ever picnicked in Cheesman Park, ordered a martini in the Cruise Room, or wondered what the horse at DIA is really about, this book is about the ground you were standing on.

The city forgets. The ground remembers.