In the wintry stillness of a January night in 1879, a potato farmer living along the South Platte River, a few miles from Denver, was spooked by the sight of a tall figure clad in white roaming his property. Winds rattled the wooden siding of his farmhouse as snow puffed beneath the steps of the ghostly presence traversing his yard. Then it disappeared.
Night after night, the gauzy specter returned. A weedy old graveyard at the edge of the farmer’s land seemed to be its point of origin. Seeing as the ghost had no discernible purpose but to walk the grounds with harmless curiosity, the farmer decided not to interfere. “There was an air of solemn and impressive dignity about the spook,” he explained to a reporter from The Rocky Mountain News. “It was honest but eccentric.”
This went on for nearly a month. An examination of the property by the farmer the morning after each visit failed to reveal anything amiss. He concluded the celestial apparition had risen from the grave to look after him and his family. This belief solidified his decision to not take the trouble to follow the ghost as it traveled from the graveyard to his premises and back again.
A strange event that occurred before dawn one morning prompted the farmer to take a closer look at the motivations of the ghost. His dogs had started barking around two in the morning, rousing one of his boys from sleep. When the boy looked out the window, he discovered the ghost lurking in suspicious proximity to the hen house. A feeling that all was not right overcame him. This sensation was confirmed when he heard the suppressed squawks of a chicken’s neck being squeezed.
At once, the boy alerted the farmer to the noise. The man grabbed his shotgun and ran out into the yard to deliver the ghostly chicken thief a load of birdshot. His aim was poor, but the cracking of his rifle startled the thief, who shrugged off the white bedsheet wrapped around himself and fled with two dead chickens in hand. Unbeknownst to the farmer, the thief had been slowly pilfering chickens from his coop, disguised as a ghost in a bedsheet stolen from his clothesline a month earlier.
Continuing to pose as a ghost, the sneaky chicken thief struck again in the farming areas around Denver. When he was eventually caught, authorities found at his residence another white bedsheet and a white tablecloth lifted from the clotheslines of different homes. They found chickens too.
A reporter from The Denver Daily Times covering the story declared the city was infested with chicken thieves. He called them the most miserable of all thieves and concluded that allowing them to intermingle with common criminals in jail was a bad idea. “Rascals will feel disgraced by the contamination of the chicken thief and believe themselves justified in breaking from jail to get out of such company,” he wrote. “A better punishment is to fill the thieves with grape shot fired from a cannon.”
