Tabor Opera House

A grand Victorian theater built in 1879 by silver king Horace Tabor, who spent $60,000 on its construction during Leadville's mining boom. The opera house hosted acts including Oscar Wilde, Harry Houdini, and the Metropolitan Opera. One of the best-preserved Victorian theaters in the West.

The Tabor Opera House was built in 1879 by Horace Austin Warner Tabor, a storekeeper-turned-mining magnate who struck it spectacularly rich when he grubstaked two miners who discovered the Matchless Mine in Leadville. Tabor built the opera house in just one hundred days, and at its opening it was said to be the grandest theater between St. Louis and San Francisco. The interior featured frescoes, custom carpets, hand-painted stage curtains, and the first gas lighting in Leadville. Over the years, luminaries including Oscar Wilde, John Philip Sousa, and Buffalo Bill Cody graced its stage. Legend holds that the trap door at center stage was cut for the famous magician Harry Houdini, though evidence of his appearance at the Tabor has, fittingly, disappeared.

The Tabor family's story is one of the great American tragedies of the Gilded Age. Horace left his first wife Augusta for the young and beautiful Elizabeth "Baby Doe" McCourt, and the two had a lavish wedding with invitations fashioned from solid silver. But when the price of silver collapsed in the Panic of 1893, Tabor was financially devastated. He lost the Matchless Mine, the opera house, and nearly everything he owned. He spent his final years laboring in the mines he once owned and died in 1899, reportedly telling Baby Doe with his last breath to hold on to the Matchless Mine. She took his words literally, spending the next thirty-six years living in a shack at the mine entrance in increasingly dire poverty and deteriorating mental health. In February 1935, during a severe blizzard, neighbors noticed no smoke coming from the cabin's stack. They found Baby Doe's frozen body inside -- a devastating end for a woman who had once been one of the wealthiest people in America.

The opera house staff have reported unexplainable happenings over the years. The spirits that inhabit the building are described as mischievous rather than malevolent, seemingly eager to speak of the exciting past that once filled the theater. Some believe Horace Tabor himself lingers in the opera house he built at the peak of his fortune, and others suggest Baby Doe's spirit may visit the place that represents the height of the life she lost. The Tabor Opera House offers History Can Be Haunting Tours where visitors explore the building and learn about both its illustrious past and its resident spirits. The opera house was restored by the Tabor Opera House Preservation Foundation and continues to host performances, connecting the living audience to the ghosts of Leadville's silver bonanza era.