Emma Crawford Coffin Races & Festival

In the early morning hours of race day, people carry lawn chairs down Manitou Avenue in Manitou Springs and set them along the curb to hold a place for the Emma Crawford Coffin Races. Roads close at 9 a.m., and the Fan Zone opens at 10 on the 700 block. The organizers count over 10,000 spectators, most of them in costume. Their sponsorship page puts the crowd at 10,000 to 12,000. Visitors who park at the DMV structure on Garden of the Gods Road ride a shuttle to Hiawatha Gardens, a block from downtown. Those who would rather not stand can buy a bleacher seat at the finish line, on either side of the course, with a limited first row held for ADA seating.

The 32nd Annual races fall on Saturday, October 24, 2026, in the 900 block of Manitou Avenue. The Manitou Springs Chamber of Commerce runs them, and watching is free. The day sits in the middle of a month of its own. Through October, skeletons turn up in spots around the historic downtown for the Skeleton Craze. Ballots come from the Visit Manitou Springs office at 354 Manitou Avenue, and the Best Skeleton is crowned at month’s end. On October weekends, the Manitou Springs Heritage Museum and Theatre d’Art lead evening ghost tours through the stories of former residents.

The parade starts at noon sharp. Media and sponsor teams lead, then hearses, then the coffin teams in reverse order of their registration numbers, coffin #70 ahead of #69. Each team may bring an entourage, recommended at no more than twelve people. Nothing may be thrown to the crowd on pain of disqualification, and political displays are kept off the course. Judges score coffins, entourages, and Emmas during line-up and again from the stage as they pass. When the parade ends, the coffins circle back to staging in the same order, which puts coffin #1 first at the starting line.

Five hundred eighty-five feet of Manitou Avenue

Racing begins at about 1 to 2 p.m. on a course of approximately 585 feet, run west on Manitou Avenue according to the 2024 rules. A team is four pushers and one Emma, who rides inside the coffin and must wear a helmet. Hard hats are not allowed. Racers must be 18 or older, and professional athletes are barred. Three of the four pushers must keep their hands on the coffin until it crosses the finish line and stops. With fewer, the coffin is judged “out of control” and disqualified. Two coffins run each heat, in lanes divided by a yellow line they may touch but not cross, and the faster time wins.

The coffins are built to a specification: between 2 feet and 3 feet 10 inches wide and 5 to 8 feet long, on four wheels no more than 8.25 inches in diameter. They carry handles or a push bar, with no ropes and no working steering. There is no height limit, though decorations over ten feet tall must be removable. In September 2026 the Manitou Art Center Woodshop at 515 Manitou Avenue held coffin building classes. The organizers advised newcomers: “Your coffin does NOT have to be fancy. Seriously. Wheels. Coffin-ish shape. Four of your friends. GO.” Used racers change hands ahead of the day. Ken’s Eastside Electric Bikes, sitting out 2026, sold its coffin for $250. Tech Sergeant Brennan at Peterson Space Force Base offered an old Air Force coffin racer, and Team Notorious DME claimed it.

Winning runs take less than half a minute. In 2025 R Buck took first in 25.6 seconds, Adam’s Mountain Café’s The Princess Bride second in 26.9, and Border Burger Bar’s Flying Monkey Burgers third in 27. In 2024 the Kiwanis Club and Key Club of Manitou Springs won at 27.7 seconds, the same time posted by the second-place Treble Makers of the Manitou Music Foundation. Fans follow a live leaderboard on a phone app, and the organizers say the livestream reaches more than seven countries.

After party at Soda Springs Park

From 2 to 5 p.m. the crowd moves to Soda Springs Park for live music, food, and drink. The 2026 headliner is Mighty Holler, which the organizers describe as a “couple of couples.” Brandy Ray plays mandolin, Elle Michelle banjo, and Joshua Ray guitar, and all three sing and write songs. Joe Gibb plays bass. The band plays old time, bluegrass, new twists on classic songs, and its own tunes. Anyone who bikes in and leaves the bicycle at the free valet in Memorial Park gets a drink token for the party. The 2026 shirts, in teal or white, carry a design by Logan Puente, a multimedia artist, sculptor, illustrator, and piñata maker who won the T-shirt contest.

Awards follow the last race at the Bud Ford Pavilion, for the three fastest times, Best Entourage, Best Coffin, and Best Emma. In 2025 Conjuring Emma was Best Emma, Team Pastafarian built the Best Coffin, and the Society of Women Engineers took Best Team Theme. The winning team races the Frozen Dead Guy Days champion from Estes Park for the Coffin Cup. The rules call the two events Colorado’s only coffin races. Win or lose, the winners travel to Estes Park to race there, where coffins must be carried, not wheeled, across an obstacle course. Each new Best Emma is crowned by the previous year’s Emma.

A pianist from South Royalston

The chamber began the races in 1995 and calls them the first coffin races in the nation. They take their name from a woman whom the Manitou Springs Heritage Museum describes as better known as the ghost of Red Mountain than for the facts of her life. Emma Crawford was born March 24, 1863, in South Royalston, Massachusetts. Her mother, Madame Jeanette Crawford, was a pianist and music teacher. It is said that at three Emma “liked no plaything better than to sit on the piano cover and to listen to her mother practicing Beethoven’s sonatas.” She gave lessons and public recitals at twelve. In the winter of 1878, at fifteen, she played the piano parts in a series of Boston concerts given with a violinist and a cellist. She favored Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann, and Wagner, and she also played violin, viola, cello, and mandolin. Her obituary in the Colorado City Iris reported that she “is said to have acquired her remarkable masterly control of the piano from spirit instruction.”

Emma had been ill since age seven, presumably with tuberculosis. She came west with her mother around 1889, hoping the mineral springs and mountain air would cure her. William “Bill” S. Crosby, a longtime Manitou resident, recalled in 1947 that they first rented a two-story frame house with bay windows on Capitol Hill. The house has since been identified as 104 Capitol Hill Avenue, though the museum notes it does not appear in city directories. Emma was reportedly engaged to Wilhelm Hildenbrand, an engineer from New York said to be working on the Pikes Peak Cog Railroad.

A scarf on Red Mountain

It is said she could be seen climbing Red Mountain in a red dress, and that she called the mountain “Red Chief.” A 1969 Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph article by Rufus Porter held that the Crawfords were spiritualists. Probably drawing on Crosby, Porter told of Emma seeing an Indian spirit guide beckoning from the summit. Against the pleas of her mother and her lover, she slipped away while her mother was teaching a neighbor and climbed to the top. When she returned, she said, “I tied my scarf to a little pinon pine tree on the summit, and I have decided that I will be buried beneath that tree.” Crosby said he climbed the mountain the next day and found the scarf and her footprints.

Emma died at 10:30 p.m. on December 4, 1891. The Manitou Springs Journal reported a white cape hung on the door of a cottage on Ute Avenue. The funeral was held at the family residence there on Tuesday afternoon, December 8. Reverend A. R. Kieffer of Grace Episcopal Church led it, and Jeanette Crawford played piano pieces of “peculiarly sweet melody and weird harmony.” The Journal found the service “unusual, but very impressive.” Her obituary said she “had a horror of cemeteries, formalities and anything low or gloomy” and wished “to be carried high to sunshine and pure air.”

Crosby recalled that Hildenbrand could not get a deed to the summit, but the burial went ahead. A hearse carried the gray casket, with its silver handles and engraved silver nameplate, four blocks up Ruxton Avenue. From there, twelve pallbearers working in two shifts carried it to the top. H. H. Gosling, J. G. Hiestand, David Jones, Peter Mistler, and Howard Jones were among them. Crosby, then a teenager, went along with his grandfather, Gosling. He remembered: “They buried Emma on the mountain top, beneath an ugly wind-swept tree, and they covered the grave with rocks. Hildenbrand stood like a stricken man beside that grave. The mother and other mourners only went as far as the cañon.” In the chamber’s version, Hildenbrand and eleven other townspeople carried the coffin up the 7,200-foot slope.

Bones behind the Colorado House

Crosby said the grave was moved when the Red Mountain Incline put a powerhouse and depot on the summit. It went to the west side of the mountain, into loose gravel under a concrete slab. He placed this in 1924. Newspapers date the Incline’s construction to 1912.

The chamber tells what came next in a few lines. In 1929, after years of harsh winters and spring rains, Emma and her coffin came racing down the mountainside, and children found only the casket handles, a nameplate, and a few bones. The organizers say the races were born from this slide. The museum’s account, drawn from newspapers, runs longer. On August 4, 1929, two boys found a human skull on Red Mountain and were questioned by police. Marshal David S. Banks of Manitou then found human bones and a coffin handle wrapped in a bundle behind the Colorado House, a boarding house whose property ran between Manitou and Waltham avenues. The museum reasons that the remains had been carried there from where they were first found. A casket nameplate identified them as those of Emma L. Crawford. The El Paso County coroner, Dr. G. B. Gilmore, said the matter was outside his jurisdiction, since people outside an incorporated town could bury their dead where they wished.

The remains stayed in storage for two years while the city searched in vain for relatives. Crosby then took responsibility for them, and Emma was buried in an unmarked grave in Crystal Valley Cemetery. In 2004, nine years after the races began, Historic Manitou Springs, Inc. set a memorial stone near the approximate place where her bones lie.