Site of Alferd Packer's 1883 Lake City jailing · Holds the world's largest collection of Alferd Packer primary artifacts · Victim remains confirmed by National Geographic-funded archaeological analysis
Alferd Packer — who spelled his own name 'Alferd' rather than 'Alfred,' supposedly after a tattoo misspelled at enlistment — was a prospector and self-described mountain guide who had served briefly in the Union Army before heading west. By 1873 he was in Utah, where he attached himself to a party of prospectors near Salt Lake City.
In early 1874, Packer led five men — Shannon Bell, Israel Swan, George Noon, Frank Miller, and James Humphrey — into the San Juan Mountains in the dead of winter, departing against the advice of the Ute chief Ouray, who warned that the mountain passes were impassable in February. The party carried insufficient supplies.
When Packer appeared alone at the Los Pinos Indian Agency in southwestern Colorado in April 1874 carrying money and a rifle belonging to the others, agency employees and government officials became suspicious. Packer gave several conflicting accounts: he had been abandoned, he had become snowblind, his companions had died one by one of cold and starvation.
In August 1874, a Harper's Weekly illustrator named John Randolph discovered five sets of human remains on a hillside near the Lake Fork of the Gunnison River. The bodies showed evidence of traumatic head wounds and, according to the coroner's account, cut marks consistent with the removal of flesh. Packer had already disappeared by the time the remains were found.
He was not located until 1883, when a former member of the 1874 party recognized him under an assumed name in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Packer was returned to Lake City — then the Hinsdale County seat — and held in the county jail in shackles now preserved at the museum. He was tried and convicted of manslaughter in 1886. Hinsdale County Judge Melville Gerry reportedly told Packer at sentencing that he had 'slain the five Democrats in Hinsdale County,' a quote of disputed authenticity that became part of local lore.
Packer served time at the Colorado State Penitentiary and was paroled in 1901 after a campaign by journalist Polly Pry. He died in 1907. The National Geographic Society funded archaeological work at the campsite in the 1980s and 2000s, confirming the skeletal findings. The Hinsdale County Museum assembled its collection — including the shackles and one victim's skull fragment — over subsequent decades.
Sources
- https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/alferd-packer
- https://www.uncovercolorado.com/museums/hinsdale-county-museum/
- https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/colorado-cannibal-companions-wilderness-survival-archaeology
No documented paranormal phenomena at museum
The Alferd Packer case is one of the most written-about frontier true crime stories in American history, but it has not accumulated a significant paranormal tradition. The Hinsdale County Museum and the nearby sites associated with the 1874 incident — Cannibal Plateau and the Lake Fork of the Gunnison — appear in regional ghost lore compilations primarily by association rather than through documented firsthand reports.
The isolation and ruggedness of the San Juan Mountains, combined with the nature of what occurred there, give the landscape an inherent gravity. But published accounts of ghost sightings or recurring paranormal phenomena at the museum, the former jail site, or Cannibal Plateau are not well-attested. The museum's draw is primarily historical: the shackles, the skull fragment, and the guided tours connect visitors to a documented and archaeologically verified event in Colorado's frontier history.
This entry is included for the significance of the primary artifact collection and the guided tour program rather than for an active haunting tradition. Visitors interested in the darker supernatural associations of the case should ask museum staff about local oral tradition, which may point toward the Cannibal Plateau area outside town.
Media Appearances
- Cannibal! The Musical (film, 1993)
Where this legend is told
