Walk down Manitou Avenue on a Friday night in October and you will likely be offered more than one ghost tour before you reach Memorial Park. That is not an accident of tourist season. It is two separate organizations, with two different missions, both selling the same town's haunted reputation on the same six or seven blocks. Most visitors treat them as interchangeable. Residents who have lived here a while know they are not, and the difference is worth understanding before you decide where an October evening's ticket money actually goes.
The tour that started as a fundraiser
The older of the two is Ghost Stories of Old Manitou, a walking tour the Manitou Springs Heritage Museum has run since 1995. It is not a side business. It is the museum's primary annual fundraiser, and the museum uses the proceeds to keep its own doors free to the public year round. The tours bring in performers from Theatre d'Art who act as "Spirit Guides," leading small groups to specific points around town to tell the historical stories tied to each location. In 2025 the tour marked its 30th anniversary, which puts the 2026 season at 31 years running. This is a nonprofit doing what nonprofits do: turning a good story into an operating budget, one ticket at a time.
The tour that came later and looks different
Haunted Manitou is a separate, privately run operation with its own website and its own booking system. It was co-founded by Julia Becker, who has spent close to three decades in theater and picked up mentorship along the way from Steppenwolf Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company, and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Her tours run about 75 minutes and cover roughly a mile of downtown Manitou, built around a mix of local history, humor, and multimedia elements rather than the more historically grounded format of the museum's version. It is a business, not a fundraiser, and there is nothing wrong with that. It just means the money is going somewhere different than the Heritage Museum's operating fund.
Here is how the two actually compare, based on what each organization publishes about its own tour:
| Ghost Stories of Old Manitou | Haunted Manitou | |
|---|---|---|
| Run by | Manitou Springs Heritage Museum | Independent operator, founded by Julia Becker |
| Started | 1995 | Separate, more recent launch |
| Structure | Guided walk led by Theatre d'Art "Spirit Guides" | 75-minute guided walk, roughly 1 mile |
| Where the money goes | Funds free admission to the Heritage Museum | Operates as a standalone business |
| Focus | Documented local history tied to specific sites | History blended with humor and multimedia |
Neither tour is better than the other. They are answering different questions. If you want the version that keeps the town's only free museum solvent, you know which one to book. If you want a produced show built by someone with a professional theater background, you know that too.
Same Emma, different show
Both tours lean on the same foundational story, because there is really only one ghost story Manitou Springs is famous for. Emma Crawford moved to town in 1889 hoping the mineral springs would cure her tuberculosis. She died two years later and was buried near the top of Red Mountain at her own request. Decades of hard rain eventually worked her casket loose, and it slid back down toward downtown, which is the origin of both the ghost tours and the town's other headline October event: the Emma Crawford Coffin Races.
The Coffin Races started the same year as the museum's ghost walk, in 1995, when the Manitou Springs Chamber of Commerce launched what is generally credited as the first coffin race in the country. Thirty-one years later, the 2026 race runs on Saturday, October 24, down Manitou Avenue, and draws more than 10,000 spectators to a town whose year-round population is a fraction of that. The after-party at Soda Springs Park alone pulls in over 3,000 people. There is even a rivalry built into the format now: the fastest team from Manitou races the previous year's champion from Estes Park's Frozen Dead Guy Days for a trophy called the Coffin Cup.
That means 1995 was the year Manitou Springs effectively built its entire October identity around one story, and it has been running two parallel businesses off that same legend ever since. One keeps a museum free. One employs a professional theater company. Both exist because the same rainstorm, a century ago, gave the town something no other Colorado mountain town has.
The money question worth asking before Halloween
If you are the kind of resident who thinks about where a ticket dollar lands, October gives you more than one chance to make that choice on purpose. The Heritage Museum does not rely solely on the ghost tours. The Heritage Brew Festival, scheduled for September 26, 2026, is another fundraiser that channels proceeds to the same museum, this time through local breweries pouring in the park instead of guided walks after dark. Between the two events, the museum is largely funding its free admission model through residents choosing to either get a little spooked or have a beer in the name of local history.
That is not a criticism of Haunted Manitou or any other commercial tour operating downtown. Private ghost-tour businesses are part of what keeps a town this small able to support two separate paranormal industries in the same six weeks. It is just useful to know that if keeping the museum's doors open matters to you, the Chamber-born, museum-run walk is the one doing that work directly.
October doesn't wait for the Coffin Races
The two ghost tours and the big race on the 24th tend to dominate how outsiders picture Manitou Springs every fall, but residents know the month runs on more than one calendar. The Manitou Art Center's Gallery 515 has a student and emerging-artist exhibit running from September 9 through October 30, with a soft opening on September 4 and a proper reception with the artists on October 2. It is the kind of event that never makes an outsider's list of things to do in Manitou Springs, because it is built for people who are already here and already paying attention.
Layer that against the Heritage Brew Festival on the 26th, the ghost tours running most nights through the month, and the Coffin Races closing everything out on the 24th, and October in Manitou Springs looks less like a single spooky weekend and more like a month-long rotation between a museum trying to stay free, an art center introducing new work, and a downtown that has figured out how to make one 19th-century tragedy support several different local institutions at once.
None of that requires a costume or a ticket. It just requires knowing which door on Manitou Avenue leads to which kind of October, and which one, if you're the type who likes to know where your money goes, keeps the museum's lights on for the rest of the year.
If Manitou Springs is more than a season to you and you're ever curious about what a home here is actually worth, or what it takes to buy or sell in a town this small and this specific, the team at Colorado's Choice Homes lives in these neighborhoods too and is always glad to talk through it, no ghost tour ticket required.
