“Henry Will Know”: The Pioneer Park Aspen Ghost Story

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated October 1, 2026 · How we verify

The Pioneer Park Aspen ghost story rests on two words spoken by a dying woman in 1881. Harriet Webber, who had come west to a Colorado mining camp with her husband Henry a year earlier, died of an overdose of strychnine, a substance then sold over the counter as a tranquilizer. Her last words were reported as “Henry will know”. The brick house on West Bleeker Street that local lore says she haunts was not even built yet.

Quick Orientation to the Webber-Paepcke House

Also known as the Henry Webber House or the Webber-Paepcke House, Pioneer Park stands on the north side of West Bleeker Street between North Third and North Fourth, in Aspen’s residential West End. It is a one-and-a-half-story brick structure with a shingled mansard roof, erected in the 1880s and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1987. It is the only intact Second Empire house left in Aspen, particularly on the interior. It remains a private residence.

Strychnine, a Rumored Affair, and an Accidental Verdict

Henry Webber arrived in Aspen with Harriet from the East in 1880. She was one of only 13 women who spent that winter in what was still a mining camp of log cabins slowly hardening into a town as silver came out of the surrounding mountains. The couple opened a business selling and repairing shoes and clothing, and began putting money into local mines. Both ventures made them wealthy.

Harriet did not live to enjoy it. Her death in 1881 was ruled accidental, and that is where the official record ends. What survived was the rumor: that the overdose was suicide or murder, prompted by a supposed extramarital affair between Henry and Harriet’s niece. Her last words did the rest of the work. Nothing was ever proven, and the finding of accident was never overturned.

Webber’s later career did little to quiet the gossip. He became city treasurer in 1883 and eventually served a term as mayor, elected despite revelations that he had abandoned a wife and family before he married Harriet.

The Second Empire House Webber Built Two Years Later

Aspen’s newly rich were putting up Victorian homes across the West End, and Webber, who also built the Elks Building downtown, chose Second Empire, an uncommon pick for the city at the time. The house went up two years after he took the treasurer’s office. Its front facade carries two projecting polygonal bays flanking double wooden doors, with “Pioneer Park” etched into the glass transom above them. Inside, original black walnut woodwork runs through the doors, surrounds, baseboards and stairway, and unusually it continues upstairs as well. The original iron fence still runs along the street.

When the Sherman Silver Purchase Act was repealed, Aspen’s economy collapsed. The population fell from more than 10,000 to 500 by 1930, a stretch locals call “the quiet years”, and boom-era buildings were abandoned to fire and to brutal winters at high elevation. Pioneer Park survived because after Webber died in 1911 it became home to the Prechtls, a family of local blacksmiths.

Walter Paepcke, Pink Paint, and Schweitzer Cottage

In 1944 the house was bought by Walter Paepcke, the Chicago businessman who with his wife Elizabeth financed the first development of the Aspen Mountain ski area and set out to make the town a cultural center. They are generally credited as the founders of modern Aspen. Paepcke painted the house pink; it has since been repainted light tan. The Paepckes built the summer house and garage, and may have added the marble fireplace in the living room.

In 1949, working with University of Chicago chancellor Robert Maynard Hutchins, Paepcke organized a festival marking the bicentennial of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and invited Albert Schweitzer to deliver the keynote. It was the only time Schweitzer visited the United States in 90 years of life. He stayed in the carriage house at the rear of the Pioneer Park property, which is now called Schweitzer Cottage, designated a local landmark and the only outbuilding counted as contributing to the National Register listing.

What Is Actually Claimed About Harriet’s Ghost

The haunting attached to Pioneer Park is specific and narrow: the house is said to be haunted by the ghost of Harriet Webber. That is the whole of it in the documented record. There is no catalog of phenomena here, no list of cold spots or footsteps logged by investigators, no public access that would let visitors accumulate such accounts. What exists is a persistent local attribution, anchored to a controversial death and a cryptic deathbed line, fastened to a house Harriet never lived in. Treat it as folklore about a real woman, not as evidence of anything.

Seeing Pioneer Park From West Bleeker Street

Pioneer Park is a private residence and there is no tour, no open house and no interior access. What you can do is walk West Bleeker between North Third and North Fourth and look at the exterior from the sidewalk. The mansard roof with its three pedimented dormers, the bracketed cornice, the semicircular brick steps and the original iron fence are all visible from the street. The mature evergreens and cottonwoods along the frontage have been allowed to grow in, so the house is shaded and partly screened. Main Street, State Highway 82, is a block south, with Aspen Mountain rising steeply two blocks beyond it, and downtown is several blocks east, which makes this an easy detour on foot rather than a destination of its own.

Address: West Bleeker Street, Aspen, Colorado

See Pioneer Park for Yourself

Sources

• People of the Times
• Historic Resources of Aspen Multiple Resource Area
• The Best of the West End
• West End Victorian Architecture Tour
• NPGallery Asset Detail (National Park Service)
• Wikipedia: Pioneer Park (Aspen, Colorado)

Ghost Tours Nearby

Aspen's DarkSide Ghost Tour★ 4.9 (83)from $48Private Aspen Ghosts and Haunted History Walking Tourfrom $480

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