Ghost Story: The ring and the mysterious trade

It began with a wedding ring that vanished one night. Adrianne, a longtime Niwot resident, had followed the same bedtime routine for over 40 years. She would remove her ring and place it carefully on her bedside table.

One morning she woke and her ring was gone. In its place was a child's toy ring, the kind of ring you might find as a prize in a Cracker Jack box. It was small and plastic, and gleaming in the morning light.

Despite searching the entire house, her wedding ring was nowhere to be found. No one in Adrianne's family could explain how the toy ring had appeared, and more importantly, where her wedding ring had gone. There were no children in the house, nor were there any toys. To her knowledge, she had never owned a plastic ring.

For years, the family had encountered unexplained phenomena in their home. It started with Adrianne's mother, who was reading in the basement one quiet afternoon when a young boy appeared. He was dressed in jeans and a t-shirt, standing motionless at the foot of the stairs. Startled, she assumed he was one of her granddaughters' friends. But before she could speak, her son-in-law entered the room, and the boy vanished.

Whispers of these strange occurrences spread through the neighborhood, prompting other residents to share their own stories. Families recounted similar sightings of the boy–always the same age, always wearing the same clothes.

Rumors that it might be the young boy who died with his sister and cousin in a tractor accident many years ago circulated in the neighborhood. In fact, a tragic tractor accident was reported in the Longmont Times-Call on Oct. 28, 1963, about a mile south of the Niwot neighborhood.

It seemed sightings of the boy had been commonplace over the years. Neighbors reported seeing him late at night, sometimes near the house, other times at the edge of their property. A neighbor once claimed to have walked downstairs in the middle of the night to see the boy playing with the family's puppy in its crate, crouching beside the puppy as it wagged its tail in excitement.

When Adrianne's wedding ring disappeared, it suggested that the boy might not just be a figment of their imaginations. A couple of weeks earlier, Adrianne's water bottle vanished from the kitchen counter while she was alone in the house. Despite tearing the house apart in search of it and her ring, the items were never found.

To this day, Adrianne's wedding ring remains missing, along with her water bottle. Both items have joined the growing list of mysteries surrounding Niwot Meadow Farm. As Halloween approaches, the legend of the boy continues to haunt those who live nearby, serving as a reminder of the spirits that linger just out of sight.

And in a town as old and storied as Niwot, it's easy to wonder what else might still be watching, waiting, and wandering.