Emma Crawford and the Coffin Race
Near Manitou Springs, Colorado
Every October, coffins go racing down Manitou Avenue on wheels, each carrying a costumed rider and pushed by a team of runners. It sounds absurd, and it is, but it commemorates a real and rather sad story. In eighteen eighty-nine, a young woman named Emma Crawford came to Manitou Springs hoping the mineral waters and mountain air would cure her tuberculosis.
She fell in love with the town, and she fell in love with a man, a civil engineer working on the cog railway. Her health did not improve. Emma died in eighteen ninety-one, and her dying wish was to be buried at the top of Red Mountain, overlooking the town she loved.
Her fiance and eleven other townspeople carried her coffin up the steep slope and laid her to rest near the summit. She might have stayed there in peace, except that Red Mountain would not keep her. After decades of harsh winters and spring rains eroded the grave, in nineteen twenty-nine Emma's coffin came sliding and tumbling back down the mountainside.
Children found only the casket handles, a nameplate, and a few of her bones. In nineteen ninety-five the town turned her strange journey into a celebration, launching what is billed as the nation's first coffin races. Every year Emma Crawford rides down the mountain one more time, in tribute to a young woman who only wanted to rest with a view.
