Throughout the year, you’ll find a number of festivals all across the state of Colorado , and, for first-timers, some of them are likely surprisingly bizarre. What’s more bizarre is that the odd festivals like Mike the Headless Chicken Festival, Frozen Dead Guy Days, and the Emma Crawford Coffin Races and Parade all came about because of true events.
Today, the name Emma Crawford is synonymous with her namesake festival, but the events that led to its creation are what many would consider to be stranger than fiction.
Who Was Colorado’s Emma Crawford?
Emma Crawford was born on March 24, 1863 , in Massachusetts but relocated to Manitou Springs with her mother in an attempt to recover from an illness now speculated to have been tuberculosis.
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Crawford was known as a talented pianist with a love of the outdoors and, against her mother’s will and knowledge at the time, climbed Manitou Springs’s Red Mountain despite her failing health, even leaving a scarf tied to a tree to prove it…