Y’all ever seen a ghost?: A Q&A with Fort Collins Ghost Tour manager
Lori Juszak is one of the managers at her family owned Fort Collins Ghost Tours, along with her sons and daughter-in-law. Fort Collins ghost Tours is located at 100 Remington Street, right off of Mountain Ave. They have been in business since 2011 and are a spooky FoCo staple.
Maddie Wright: What’s it like to give a ghost tour?
Lori Juszak: Well, it’s a lot of fun, it’s the most fun job I could ever think of. I don’t actually give the tours anymore. We have a whole bunch of tour guides who are just wonderful and been with us for ever, and they do a much better job than I do but I did them for about three or four years and it was a lot of fun…sometimes unexplicable things happen and that’s when it gets really fun and a little scary.
MW: What is your role now in the ghost tour world?
LJ: We own it as a family; my son and daughter-in-law, and me and my role is mainly managment.
MW: Who is the typical ghost tour audience?
LJ: It’s all over the map. Generally they’re adults, we don’t allow children under 12 on the tour, we do have tours for children under 12 but we don’t on the regular tour. We also have people from out of town. I’d love to give you statistics, I don’t have anything recent but I know at one point about 60% of our people who go on tours were from within 50 miles and 40% from outside the 50 mile mark.
MW: You said sometimes inexplicable things will happen on tours, can you give me an example?
LJ: Yeah, we used to do tours in the old Armadillo garage and at one point a rock was thrown out of the closet at us and there was nobody in the closet. So, that was kinda an interesting thing we just don’t know how to explain that. In the same garage, I had chairs behind me move sideways with no one there and we’ve had a lot of things happen in the tunnel area with the old bunker, including people saying they’re being touched, young ladies saying their ankle is being grabbed by a cold hand — that’s a fairly common thing. There’s a lot of things that happen.
MW: What initially drew you to this?
LJ: Well, it’s kind of a funny story. We moved to Fort Collins in 2009 and I looked for a history tour and there was none. So, on New Years Eve of 2010 my sons and daughter in law were talking about new businesses and they wanted to start a sort of an outfiting business for hiking and I said “can I jump in on your insurance and do a history tour?” and they said “sure.” And well it turned out the hiking thing wasn’t possible…so they said well let’s just put all our effort behind this tour well I spent six months putting togehter a history tour, getting together all the information and interviewing the business owners and the building owners and everywhere I went they would say “and did you know it’s haunted?” when they were telling me about the building and I thought well that’s kinda weird so I kept collecting the haunting stories and then I saw a pattern that a lot of them were having the same kinda things were happening and they weren’t talking to each other so they weren’t in kahoots so something was really going on. So we put on a ghost tour and we opened in May of 2011 and the history tour never took off and the ghost tour went crazy imediatley. But it’s like putting broccoli in the mashed pataoes, you still get a lot of history across. People come for the ghosts but they walk away with a lot of Fort Collins history.
MW: What’s your favorite part of this job?
LJ: The people, by far. You meet so many people that go on it and our tour guides are wonderful and they’re like family.
MW: Do you believe the places that are featured on the tour are haunted?
LJ: Yes. I was not a real ghosty person before this and when I heard the stories I thought “oh those are cool stories, we’ll tell these stories like it’s around the campfire, it’ll be really fun” and about two months into it so much had happened I didn’t want to do the tours anymore. I had a real big case of being a chicken and it got a little too real for me. But yes, we have had enough happen over the years and it was fairly regular sometimes we’ll have a lot happen that we can’t explain and sometimes we’ll go for several months where nothing happens. But when these things happen there’s something going on. I don’t know what it is but I have become a believer that there’s something going on that we just don’t understand.
MW: On the tour, do you find you get more skeptics or more ghost hunter type people?
LJ: I think we get a good mix. We have our ghost hunters who go on a regular basis and they take EVPs and they take photos and they post them up on our haunted Fort Collins Facebook and we just love these people and we love the skeptics too because you always need somebody on the other side of the table saying it could be this or that. We have engineers come on the tour and we want them to do that because we want to say ‘“this is what has been hapening what could cause that?” and they see if they come up with an idea.
MW: What do you think draws people to this? Why do we want to be scared?
LJ: You know, I think there’s that old campfire feeling of when you’re standing around a campfire telling ghost stories and being scared and I think we all go back to our childhood when we do this sometimes I think. I also think part of it is seeing a part of Fort Collins that you would never see otherwise, seeing the old under ground jail, seeing the old underground morgue, the underground tunnels and bunker, you just get to see a lot of things that you wouldn’t get to see otherwise and I think people are really drawn to that.
