The Legend of the Hatchet Lady: The Ghost Story That Wasn’t

I was about five years old when my brother first told me about the Hatchet Lady. He was twelve years older than I was, and he told the story with all the certainty of someone passing along a secret every kid in Golden seemed to know about Morrison and Red Rocks.

Later that same summer, my parents asked him to babysit me. He wasn’t thrilled. He and his friends planned to sneak into a concert at Red Rocks, then climb the rocks behind the stage afterward. I was expected to tag along.

Standing at the bottom of those towering rocks as dusk settled in, I looked up and decided there was no way I was climbing them. They looked impossible. But if I’m honest, it wasn’t the climb that scared me most.

It was the Hatchet Lady.

They said a woman had been murdered one night at Red Rocks, her head severed by a hatchet. Now her ghost rode through the park on a black horse, cloaked in black and carrying a hatchet, emerging from the Morrison Cemetery as she searched endlessly for her missing head.

Teenagers whispered that if you happened to be sitting in the 13th Row, 13th Seat, especially on Friday the 13th, she was coming for your head to replace her own.

Whether the tale was meant to discourage young couples from parking along the roads at night or simply to frighten children, it worked. The Hatchet Lady became one of Colorado’s enduring ghost stories.

As I grew older, I filed it away as just another campfire tale.

Then, in the fall of 1981, something unexpected happened.

After a vehicle rolled off the sharp curve near the upper entrance to Red Rocks, I was walking a nearby trail when a flash of sunlight caught my eye. Lying in the grass was a MasterCard that had apparently been thrown from the vehicle during the accident. Wanting to return it to its owner, I called the Denver Mountain Parks Police.

Officer Gruninger answered.

After explaining where I had found the card, he asked where I lived so an officer could stop by and pick it up.

When I gave him my address, there was a pause.

“Oh,” he said.

“You live in the Hatchet Lady’s house.”

I honestly thought he was joking.

He wasn’t.

Officer Gruninger explained that he and other Parks Police officers knew the woman who lived there—Mrs. Rockefeller (no relation to the famous family). According to him, she admitted that she sometimes rode her black mare at night wearing a cape pulled high around her shoulders and carrying a hatchet. Her purpose, he said, was to frighten people away from the ranch property she watched over. At the time, the ranch remained agricultural land, and she wanted to discourage late-night visitors from wandering onto the property.

As Officer Gruninger told it, the Parks Police had received enough reports over the years that they eventually connected the stories with the woman on horseback. As he jokingly put it, they had “put two and two together and came up with five.”

Whether every telling of the Hatchet Lady legend can be traced to those nighttime rides, I cannot say. Legends have a way of growing beyond their beginnings. Every storyteller adds another detail. Every generation reshapes the tale.

Years later, word spread that I knew another side of the Hatchet Lady story. A member of a local paranormal society even invited me to breakfast, hoping to hear what I knew. I suspect he was expecting a ghost story. Instead, I told him about Officer Gruninger, Mrs. Rockefeller, a black mare, and one unforgettable telephone conversation.

It wasn’t quite the ending he had hoped for.

Personally…

I like the story even better this way.

Ghosts are common.

Real people who inspire legends are rare.

Whether you believe the Hatchet Lady still rides the roads of Red Rocks is entirely up to you.

As for me, I’ve always found the true stories behind our local legends every bit as fascinating as the legends themselves.

Author’s Note

This account is based on my childhood memories, a conversation with Denver Mountain Parks Police Officer Gruninger in 1981, and my later experiences living in the house associated with Mrs. Rockefeller. Like many local legends, the Hatchet Lady story exists in several versions. This article presents a remembered account of how the legend may have grown from real events.

— Timothy Q. Johnson