Flashlight tours planned for downtown Colfax

Ghosts may be thought of as a Halloween event, but Colfax will soon play host to year-long ghost hunting. The Colfax Downtown Association is organizing flashlight tours of the upstairs of downtown buildings each month for people to get their frights in throughout the year.

“We’ll basically do creepy ghost tours of some of our upstairs buildings,” said Valoree Gregory, Colfax’s unified executive director. “We thought it would be kind of a fun way to keep people downtown.”

The flashlight tours will correlate with the First Thursday event each month in Colfax and will take patrons through three downtown buildings, including the Ellis-Waite building, the upstairs over Dr. Allen Kirkpatrick’s dental office and the Masonic Temple.

“The Masonic Temple: it’s really creepy,” Gregory commented.

Gregory said she can’t say for sure that the buildings are actually haunted or not.

“I’ve never seen anything in there, but they’re creepy. We’re going to focus on the history of the buildings because they’re some of our oldest buildings in town.”

Gregory added the tour sites might be changed as the year continues.

“We might switch those up,” she said.

The location for October will likely be at St. Ignatius.

“We’re calling it ‘Creepy Colfax’,” Gregory said. “If nothing’s been done with the hospital, we’re going to see if we can do ghost hunts again. As long as the building’s still sitting there, we want to use it.”

Gregory said the ghost hunts at St. Ignatius would likely run throughout the month and definitely be on the first Thursday of the month.

“They have 10 buildings on the list,” Gregory said.

Each tour will start at 8 p.m., and participants are asked to meet in front of the library and bring a flashlight or two. An “Explore Colfax” banner will indicate the meeting place at the library. As of right now, tickets are available for the June 2, July 7 and Aug. 4 tours.

The cost to attend the flashlight tours will be $20. Tickets must be purchased in advance: http://www.explorecolfax.com