Investigation Report

Location: Fortune Club, Victor, Colorado
Date: 28 January 2006
Personnel Participating: Cody, Dave, Kat, Kristin, Ashley, Lori, Carrie, Becky
Weather Conditions: Partly Cloudy
Humidity: 80%
Geomagnetic Storm Activity: Quiet
Temperature: 16
Number of Photos taken: 237
Number with possible targets: 0
Average EM Readings: 2 nt
Average M fields Readings: 1 nt
Average E Field Readings: 1 vpm
Cold Spots detected: None
Hot Spots Detected: None
Olfactory Phenomena: None
Visual Phenomena: None
Type of Investigation: Ghost Hunt

All information and photos Copyright 2006 by Cody Polston, Bob Carter and SGHA. All Rights Reserved.

The Fortune club, during Victor’s golden years, was one of the West’s most famous gambling houses and home to one of the area’s most talked about light social clubs. Harry Lang built the famous Fortune Club in 1899 and it continued in operation until 1916. That year Prohibition came to Colorado and Harry Land disappeared.

A plague on the second floor of the building describes some of it's former occupants and where they stayed in the old club.

Hattie May Jordon (Room 10) was the hard-nosed madam boss lady of the Fortune Club. Loved and respected by some of Victor’s leading citizens, her funeral in 1918 attracted hundreds of mourners from all over the West. Her epitaph in Victor’s Daily Record read:

“Lift your glasses high for Hattie
And your eye upon a star,
She was always a first class lady
At the old Fortune Club Bar.”

Violet Long (Room 6) was the toast of the Fortune Club. A native of St. Louis, she arrived in Victor to sell her wares for the Fortune Club’s opening night, January 19, 1900. She was still hosting in Room 6 when the Fortune Club closed in 1916. She later opened a café in Cripple Creek.

Cleo and Hattie Fay (upper left photograph) were star attractions in the hottest burlesque in the West in 1901, at the Union Theater on Third Street, Victor. After the show, they hosted in Rooms 3 and 4 of the Fortune Club.

They were later run out of town, as their act was “so indecent as to shock the hardened men who composed the audience of this infamous theater”
(The Victor Daily News, November 16, 1902)

The Chicago Rose was said to be the favorite of Harry Lang. She hosted in Room 5 for several years and worked the “21” table in the Fortune Club. She died during the flu epidemic of 1906 and is buried in Victor’s Sunnyside Cemetery.

Red Stocking Lee (Room 9) was moved to Victor from Myer’s Avenue in Cripple Creek . After having an affair with Harry Clayton, Victor’s Mayor, she was given a one way ticket to Kansas City in 1903. There she opened the famous Red Stocking Lee Saloon.

Goldfield Lil (lower left photo) came to Victor from Goldfield, Nevada and soon became one of the Fortune Club’s lovely ladies, hosting in Room 8. In 1907 she was killed in a brawl at the Senate Bar.

Reported Phenomena

The Investigation

Location map

We arrived at the location at 6:00pm. For this ghost hunt we were limited to two hours of investigation time.The sidekick camera was set up in room 10 while another IR camera was positioned above the entry to the kitchen.

A team of three was dispatched around the location to obtain instrument readings and photographs. During this initial part of the hunt, "orbs" were noticed leaving Room 8 whenever an investigator got near that area.

The sidekick was repositioned in room 8 and a different set of investigators swept the building for unusual EM fields.

A few interesting EM spikes were measured by Room 8 but nothing was captured on any of the investigators cameras. The IR camera above the door captured a few faint "orbs" but they are too faint to reproduce into a mpg format.

The investigation was terminated at 9:00pm.

Initial Conclusions