TPA - About Us - House History

		The most famous house in the Wyman District is a block south of Colfax at 1410 High Street, the House of a Thousand Candles. Designed by architect Frederick J. Sterner, it was built in 1897 for Reverend Richard E. Sykes of the First Universalist Church. To note it was a clergyman’s house, the moldings on the doors were shaped as crosses. The mansion also had heavy Masonic symbolism while there were secret passages, notably under the main staircase. An inscription of Ralph Waldo Emerson, engraved over the main fireplace, declares, “Ye ornament of ye house is ye guests who frequent it.”
Despite such a proclamation of hospitality, Sykes was in a dispute with the church over his pay and financing of the house. The upshot was that he sold the mansion in 1899, moving to 1320 Franklin Street.

The next owner was a promising Indiana novelist, Merdith Nicholson. Unable to write about his home state while living in Indianapolis, he headed to Omaha in the mid-1890s. There he met and married Eugina Kountze, the niece of the owners of the Colorado National Bank. Her family insisted that Nicholson get a job worthy of the husband of a banker’s daughter, and arranged for him to serve as treasurer of the Northern Coal Company in Denver.

Fiction flowed from Nicholson’s pen in 1410 High Street. There he completed the great Indiana novel, The Hoosier. Its success lured him back to Indianapolis in 1904. No sooner had he returned there than his hand demanded that he write. Claiming no inspiration of his own, he rapidly jotted down his major work, The House of a Thousand Candles.

Complete with an Uncle Gaylord and the ghost of a Grandfather Glenarm, the novel was based on the strange happenings i a rural mansion. The structure was so designed so that candles could be lit in all of its many windows and reflected by mirrors so it looked as if a thousand candles were illuminating the house. For all intents and purposes, Nicholson admitted, the mansion in the novel was based on the layout of 1410 High Street. The latter, consequently, was labeled “The House of a Thousand Candles.”

Harold Moore, of the Benjamin Moore Paint Company, bought the house from Nicholson. After the new owner’s death in 1926 and that of his wife in November 1936, the mansion was vacant for a couple of years. During that time, passersby claimed that they witnessed candle lights flickering in the windows. Allegedly a ghost, known as Mrs. Richardson, would carefully light the candles each night in the hope of attracting a curious, attractive young man into it who would become her consort.

Allen Dearhammer, a builder from Beloit, Wisconsin, purchased the house in 1938 for $11,000. It was his home until his death in 1946. His wife died there in 1949, and his daughter remained in the house until she passed away in 1952. Transformed into apartments, it was the site of the gruesome kidnapping and murder of a trombonist of the Denver Symphony Orchestra who lived in the house in 1955. The mansion was renovated as the Unity Truth Center in 1956. This was another of the heterodox Capitol Hill congregations. It held services at the Aladdin Theater on Sunday mornings. In the late 1950s, the church seriously pondered demolishing the House of a Thousand Candles for a chapel.

Nothing came of this. By the mid-1960s, the mansion was a halfway house for mental patients. This did not work out well. Residents claimed to hear footsteps late at night and haunting trombone music in addition to seeing the lights of flickering candles. The owner allowed the building to decay. A big sign, declaring it to be “The House of a Thousand Candles” was stolen, and the white picket fence which surrounded the huge lawn south of the mansion was torn down.

The Guru Maharaj Ji gained possession of the house when it was quarter for activists of his Divine Light Mission, including 1960s radical leader Rennie Davis. During this epoch, the yard was turned into an intently cultivated vegetable garden. As the Divine Light Mission faded, so did the House of a Thousand Candles. By 1977, it was vacant when efforts got underway to transform it into offices. Different owners tried and failed to keep the place occupied. It was often empty for more than a year at a stretch.

The most successful venture was the Starkey International Institute for Household Management which occupied the mansion in late 1989. Having small classes with students living in the house, it taught people how to be American butlers, i.e., experts who could run expensive residential properties. The school promised that students would carefully learn how to prepare meals, maintain furniture, and take care of mansions.

Mary Starkey, the head of the school, observed that the 8,000-square-foot house, with its rich history and legends, was the ideal spot for her academy. By observing candle rites each evening, the residents hoped to keep Mrs. Richardson at peace. Despite this, sometimes all the light sand appliances in the house would suddenly go on or off as if some supernatural force were controlling the electrical system. A dispute with the landlord let the school to leave the mansion in the spring of 1994.

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