The Weeping Lady of Colfax

A friend and I were driving from the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado, to our summer jobs at Philmont in New Mexico, when we left I-25 in Colfax County for a rest stop to get out and stretch. We found ourselves in the town of Colfax, which was a ghost town of burned-out adobe buildings and a large one-room schoolhouse-church with a steeple on top. We climbed around the adobe ruins, and walked up to the schoolhouse.

The frame was fairly solid, and the roof looked dilapidated but intact, but inside the flooring was either rotted away or carried off. Old slate chalkboards and other school and church items were still hanging loosely from the walls. We wondered what might have happened there, how come the people had moved away, and where they had gone. As we left, I could hear a low noise behind us in the schoolhouse, but I didn't think anything of it.

It wasn't until weeks later, at a campfire, that an older ranger who had been away from Philmont for twenty years told a story that gave the visit to Colfax new meaning. He told local tales, and one of them was this:

"A long, long time ago, there was a man and his family living in Colfax. His favorite son grew ill and died at the tender age of ten, at the turn of the century. The boy had attended the one-room school, but that building was also the church, so the funeral was held there too. The mother sat in the back during the service and wept and wailed with uncontrollable grief.

"For weeks after, day in and day out, the grieving mother would go to the school and sit in the back on a bench and mourn and cry.

"She was so sad and morose that she just pined away, and within a month, she also passed away. The dozen or so families of the community held services for her in the school-house-church, and she, too, was buried, beside her son, in the graveyard.

"In the months ahead, every Sunday, in the evening or at night, the ghost of the grieving mother would reappear in the back row of benches at the church, wailing and weeping. She became known as the Weeping Lady of Colfax.

"The sight and above all the sound of the Weeping Lady was so unnerving that one by one the families moved away and abandoned the schoolhouse, and the sight of the Weeping Lady so alarmed drifters and other passers-by who sought refuge in the structure that someone tore out the flooring to discourage visitors from staying at dusk.

"Since Colfax was halfway between Cimarron and Raton, wagons often stopped at Colfax for water or rest, and many travellers who reached Raton told of seeing the Weeping Lady. Many of those who saw her never knew she was a ghost, she looked and sounded so real."

Then I knew why the floorboards were gone..and what I had heard in the old schoolhouse-church at Colfax.