HauntBound archive · catalog record
Reported phenomena, as catalogued
Elizabeth 'Baby Doe' Tabor was found frozen on the floor of this one-room cabin on March 7, 1935, having lived alone in poverty at the Matchless Mine for 30 years — her ghost is reported to linger here still.
414 E 7th St, Leadville, CO 80461
Research updated September 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
$
Guided tours offered seasonally; admission fee applies. Check website for current schedule.
Access
Limited Access
Historic mine site on uneven terrain east of Leadville; cabin is a small one-room structure
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1880 · Death site of Elizabeth 'Baby Doe' Tabor, March 7, 1935 · Tabor family silver mining property · Colorado Encyclopedia-documented historic site · Lake County, Colorado landmark
Horace Austin Warner Tabor opened the Matchless Mine east of Leadville in the early 1880s, and at its peak the mine was producing a million dollars' worth of silver annually. When Tabor died in 1899, ruined by the 1893 silver crash, he reportedly told his second wife Elizabeth — known as Baby Doe — to 'hold onto the Matchless; it will make millions again.' She kept that promise for the rest of her life.
Elizabeth McCourt 'Baby Doe' Tabor had been one of the most celebrated women in Colorado in the 1880s, the subject of newspapers' social columns across the West. After Horace's death, she retreated to the Matchless Mine and lived in its one-room timber cabin with virtually no income. She was known to wrap her feet in newspapers and burlap for warmth in the high-altitude winters and subsisted largely on charity from neighbors and townspeople who remembered her former status.
On March 7, 1935, a neighbor checking on her found Baby Doe frozen to death on the cabin floor. She was approximately 81 years old and had lived alone at the mine for 36 years. The Colorado Encyclopedia, which draws on state historical records, documents the death at the mine site.
The Matchless Mine is now a historic site offering guided tours. The rocking chair in the cabin has attracted paranormal accounts — visitors describe photographs showing the chair apparently occupied, and unexplained light malfunctions have been documented on the property.
Sources
The paranormal accounts at the Matchless Mine center on the cabin where Baby Doe Tabor died in 1935. Her ghost is reportedly one of the more frequently reported apparitions in the Leadville area, tied directly to the extreme circumstances of her death — alone, frozen, in the place she had refused to leave for 36 years.
The most specific physical claim involves the rocking chair in the cabin. Multiple visitors over the years have described photographing the chair and finding the images show the chair appearing occupied by a translucent or partial figure. The photographs are not independently verified through primary sources, but the account is consistent and specific enough to appear in multiple records of the site's paranormal history.
Light malfunctions — cameras and flashlights failing, lights in the small structure behaving erratically — are a secondary documented phenomenon. Hauntedcolorado.net, which documents Colorado's paranormal sites with historical corroboration, includes both the occupied rocking chair photographs and the light malfunctions in its account of the Matchless Mine.
The combination of Baby Doe's documented biography — one of the great American decline narratives — and the physical evidence of her death make the Matchless Mine among the more viscerally affecting historic sites in central Colorado, independent of the paranormal claims.
Notable Entities
Where this legend is told
Guided tours of the historic Matchless Mine property include the one-room cabin where Elizabeth 'Baby Doe' Tabor was found frozen to death on March 7, 1935. The tour covers the silver mining history of the site and the story of Baby Doe's 30 years of solitary decline at the mine after Horace Tabor's death.
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