Haunted Longmont by Richard Estep

Author:Richard Estep
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
Published: 2015-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

FIREHOUSE PHANTOMS

LONGMONT FIRE STATION NUMBER ONE—1070 TERRY STREET

For many years, the citizens of Longmont were protected by engine and truck companies based out of five fire stations strategically located across the city. But it soon became apparent that the rapid growth and expansion of twenty-first-century Longmont was stretching the resources of the Fire Department a little thin, and so a sixth station was planned to cover the bustling downtown area. What was once Fire Station One became Station Six, and an eighty-year-old public service building at 1070 Terry Street (facing the sprawling Mountain View cemetery) was subsequently converted into the new Longmont Fire Station One, which opened its doors for service in May 2009.

“Ones,” as the firefighters and EMS crew members refer to it, is by far the city’s largest station, housing an assistant chief, a fire engine, a ladder truck, an ambulance and a hazardous materials decontamination unit. It is a busy place. Whereas most Longmont fire stations are staffed with four or five responders, Ones has twice that many.

During the modernization and upgrade process, all but two of the original masonry walls and half of the barrel roof were destroyed and replaced. Construction workers added a bay capable of holding six trucks comfortably, twelve dormitories and seven bathrooms.

As a paramedic student still wet behind the ears, I was assigned to Ones during my clinical internship between the years 2009 and 2010. The firefighters and ambulance crews made me most welcome and impressed me with their professionalism and ethic of service to the citizens of Longmont. The station still had that brand-new building smell in the wake of the recent remodel, and so I was surprised to learn from one of the firefighters that Ones had quite the colorful history before the fire department ever came into the picture.

The building was originally constructed in 1938 and served as the Boulder County Highway Department garage. When the United States entered the Second World War, German prisoners of war were shipped to Longmont. City officials ordered that the building be converted into a barracks, resulting in some two hundred POWs being housed there. With vast armies of fighting men deployed overseas and in need of sustenance, it was soon determined that the Germans would be put to useful work in support of the war effort: working on behalf of the Great Western Sugar Company, helping to bring in the sugar beet harvest under the watchful eyes of U.S. Army Military Police officers. Despite the occasional escape and manhunt, the situation was largely peaceful and free of trouble. When the prisoners were repatriated after the war, the building served various storage functions on behalf of the Longmont Department of Public Works until it gained a new lease of life as Fire Station One.

Can the ghosts that sometimes make their presence known to the first responders based at Station One be attributed to the presence of those German prisoners of war, shipped thousands of miles from home to work in a foreign

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