Colfax
Colfax is a ghost town in Colfax, New Mexico. Historic settlement and ghost-town heritage. It sits in the archive under ghost towns. The dossier holds 1 documented fact — the record is history-forward, no paranormal claims on file. Access details are unverified — research before visiting. For HauntHunt it is exactly the kind of file the archive exists for: a real place, a real record, and a story still being told.
· in your passport — stamped · open it
Is Colfax haunted?
No claims are filed here — the record keeps this place for its documented history, not for a haunting on file.
The record — long form
Colfax began as Vermejo Junction, a railroad stop in Colfax County's coal country, and was renamed for Schuyler Colfax — Grant's vice president — during the era when western promoters sold towns to easterners who would never see them. The pitch here was farming, not mining, which made it the anomaly beside Dawson's booming collieries a few miles away.
The promotion outran the land. The account preserved in the file describes crooked lot sales — parcels of twenty-five by one hundred forty feet marketed to buyers who found the 'farms' were speculation, not soil. Colfax never approached its billing; what growth it had rode the neighbor's coalfield, and when that went, Colfax went with it.
A borrowed ghost
The haunting tradition attached to Colfax is borrowed as openly as its economy was: the weeping lady reported here is La Llorona, the territory's most durable legend, associated in the retelling with Dawson next door — a ghost story migrating along the coal seam.
The physical record is thinner still. Standing buildings were burned off by the ranch that owns the ground — the file records a bullet-riddled car left among them — and what remains is adobe wall and foundation on private land. The research notes set the boundary: no haunting claim is implied by inclusion, and the parcel is not open; what survives is a junction name, a vice president's honor, and the lesson that a farming utopia advertised on a coal map was always speculation.
Documented history
The settlement developed alongside neighboring Dawson’s coal boom. A ghost town's file is unusual: the emptiness itself is documented, and this entry is part of that record. Media accounts document it — reported history rather than legend. The detail is preserved in 'New Mexico Ghost Towns'. It's the sort of fact that gives the haunting reports their context.
Media reportedNew Mexico Tourism Department
Sources on file
- 01New Mexico Ghost TownsNew Mexico Tourism Department · tourism · A3
Field notes & open questions
Pass 1 discovery. Inclusion is for ghost-town heritage; no haunting claim is implied. Parcel access and coordinates remain unverified.