'Holy Crap!’: Skeptic Can’t Explain Voice In Cheyenne’s Cursed Hynds Building

CHEYENNE — John Ferrara didn’t go looking for a ghost. He apparently found one anyway. 

“Holy crap! What is that?” his brother-in-law said as he looked at the video Ferrara replayed from his visit to the basement of the historic 126-year-old Cheyenne's Hynds Building on the corner of Lincolnway and Capitol Avenue.

Ferrara didn’t know, and he played the tape again.

“You can’t hear it clearly at first,” said the Cheyenne videographer and musician. “But a voice whispers, ‘Don’t walk under the’ — and then I can’t make it out. It sounds to me like ‘under the ground.’”

Once Ferrara heard the whispered warning he recorded, and realized he hadn’t heard it at the time, he said he also responded, “Holy crap.”

Val Martin, whose store Emma’s Old Time Photos is above the basement where Ferrara was shooting in the dark for some eerie effects, has listened to his recording many times, and what she hears is “don’t walk on the green line.”

‘There’s No Green Line’

“There’s no green line there,” Martin said.

But she added that the basement looks much different since it was covered in waist-deep water and ice in the city’s historic 1985 flood, which killed a dozen people and did millions of dollars of damage.

The Hynds Building was shut down after the flood and sat vacant for years. Then local artists decided to raise money to renovate the stores and offices that had been located on the Capitol Avenue side in the east part of the building.

While construction work is underway on portions of the upper five floors to develop affordable apartment housing, reopening the historic building to recreate the offices and living spaces that once made the Hynds such a vibrant part of downtown Cheyenne still appears a long way off.

Ferrara still doesn’t know why he received the warning from a disembodied voice as he walked near the elevator.

He added that he could hear Martin talking to customers in her store above him as he made his way through the basement, but the message was definitely spoken near him downstairs.

Ferrara was given permission in early January to shoot videos throughout the Hynds. He told Cowboy State Daily no one had ever been granted access for such a project.

He said his initial interest in the building was to see if he could gain access to the legendary tunnels underneath the area near the Hynds Building site.

According to local folklore, the tunnels were constructed in the late 1800s as a way for Union Pacific Railroad workers to get from the train station to the Plains Hotel and the Heyman Building.

But now the tunnels have taken on an added significance. Many websites are devoted to ghost stories, and several report that people are positive they've heard eerie voices and footsteps within the Cheyenne tunnels.

The tunnels, which contain asbestos, are now closed for public safety. There was no way for Ferrara to gain access from the Hynds, so he concentrated on documenting the condition of the building.

“I’m a skeptic,” the videographer said, adding that he didn’t enter the basement looking for ghosts or expecting to find one.

Ferrara can’t explain the incident, but he said the fact that he’s always been a non-believer should give him some more credibility than ghost hunters who usually “find” what they're looking for.

See For Yourself

Ferrara put a 45-minute documentary, “Project Hynds,” on his YouTube channel. The curious and strange encounter he had with whoever or whatever whispered to him occurs at about the 41-minute mark.

Martin, who has given public and charter ghost tours in the weeks before and after Halloween aboard the city’s trolley since 1993, said she’s studied the Hynds Building’s history, which began when it was built from 1919 through 1922 and first opened in 1920.

The studio photographer said that, in addition to hearing about several incidents over the years, she’s had her own brushes with the paranormal both at the Hynds and in her personal life.

Martin said she probably wouldn’t have recognized a paranormal experience if she hadn’t been in the Atlas Theater at her original studio, across the street from the Hynds at 211 West Lincolnway.

She recalled that she was talking to a woman cleaning the theater whose daughter was right above them on the balcony.

“All of a sudden her daughter ran downstairs and said somebody upstairs is smoking,” Martin said, “Obviously no one else was there but she smelled cigarettes. I thought, well, that’s kind of hokey.”

Balls Of Smoke

Months later she was at her new studio in the Hynds with some friends, with the door locked and no one else in the building.

“The wind was blowing,” she said. “We were maybe 15 feet away from the doorway, and as I’m walking, I’m walking through a ball of smoke.”

She said the smoke wasn’t visible “but it almost knocked me over, it was so strong.”

“I’m looking to see where the smoke is coming from, and these people who were with me are not smiling. I thought, ‘Whoa!’ and I instantly regretted telling myself that this girl’s story was a little hokey.”

About three years later, Martin said, she was walking through her studio toward her computer.

“I walked through this ball of smoke, too far from the door to be anything from outside,” she said. “It was contained to a small area, maybe three feet across. I walked back and forth through it until it completely dissipated.

"There was no source. It was a ball of smoke; it didn’t have a trail that went off in another direction.”

If any former occupants of the Hynds could still be in this world as ghosts, Martin said there are some likely candidates.

Hynds History

To understand what the Hynds Building means to Cheyenne, it’s worth exploring some of its history. If the land it’s on isn’t cursed, it's definitely proven to be bad luck for a series of owners and some occupants and workers.

A fire claimed a hotel where the Hynds Building now stands in the early 1870s. Barney Ford, a former Georgia slave who escaped to Chicago via the Underground Railroad, was a well-known entrepreneur by the time he came to Cheyenne.

In 1873, Ford built the opulent Inter-Ocean Hotel, which a Paris reviewer called the best between Chicago and San Francisco along the Union Pacific line.

Ford, who built the hotel for $65,000, the equivalent of $2 million today, fell victim to a real estate crash as panicked bankers foreclosed.

The Inter-Ocean remained the best hotel in the capital city, but the Plains Hotel, built in 1910, gave it competition.

The Inter-Ocean was severely damaged by fire on Dec. 17, 1916. Martin said a six-member family perished in the blaze.

“A man jumped out of the window and executed himself when he landed on the electric wires outside,” Martin said. “His wife and four children didn’t make it out of the third floor.”

Could they be haunting the Hynds?

“I don’t know if they’re here or not,” Martin said. “I’ve not felt anyone. Please understand that I chase ghosts away; it’s not intentional. But I’ve also had experiences I can’t explain.”

The city of Cheyenne inspected what remained of the Inter-Ocean and decided it was uninhabitable.

Officials wouldn’t let owner Ed Chase make repairs. They asked him to raze the Inter-Ocean and replace it with a building that would meet modern fire-safety codes.

Chase refused. The land reverted back to its owner, U.S. Sen. Francis E. Warren, who sold it to Cheyenne businessman and philanthropist Harry P. Hynds, a partner in the Plains Hotel.

Hynds built the five-story office building that now stands at 1602 Capitol Avenue. He ordered his contractor not to use any wood, so the building would be virtually fireproof.

So the Hynds Building was made with steel and concrete. All doors, casing, windows and frames are metal. Some metal was painted with a wood grain so realistic that many visitors over the years commented on the Hynds’ “beautiful woodwork.”

There was no fire at the Hynds Building, but another type of disaster struck a 40-man work crew during construction.

Crushed To Death

“They were having a lot of flooding in the basement, and they were using the foundation of the original Inter-Ocean Hotel,” Martin said. “The foundation gave way, and there was a man who couldn’t get out of the way in time.

“The other workers couldn’t get to him quick enough, and the stone just crushed him,” she said.

So, there’s a new ghost story at the allegedly “haunted Hynds” this year, and Ferrara’s video footage should start some spooky conversations about whether it was a ghost who talked to him or not. 

The Hynds Building has been rumored to be haunted for years, and it’s a must-see stop on most ghost tours of the various companies that drive around town scaring their passengers.

Martin said she takes most ghost stories — and she hears a lot as a tour guide —with a healthy dose of skepticism.

“I can’t say if your story is correct or not, I don’t know,” she said. “But it's how you tell them. Do I believe you? If I believe you, I am going to tell the story.”

She has no qualms about retelling the skeptical Ferrara’s ghost tale. After all, she’s heard the whispered warning on tape, and listened to what the videographer said about the experience.

“I also saw that he had no reaction to it at all when it happened, and it wasn’t until he got home and started editing the video that he heard it,” Martin said. “That’s good enough for me — and I’m never going to listen to that tape in the basement.”