Mike the Headless Chicken Is Back at Creeporado 2026

A farmer in Fruita named Lloyd Olsen went to butcher a chicken in the 1940s and botched the job so badly the bird lived for over a year. No head. Just kept going. That chicken has a name, Mike, and Mike is one of the recurring stars of the strangest night History Colorado puts on all year.

Here is the thing. Most of what a museum owns never sees a display case. It sits in storage, cataloged and quiet, because it is too weird or too grim or too plain baffling to hang on a wall next to the covered wagons. Once a year, History Colorado opens that vault. They call it Creeporado, and the third annual is now on the calendar.

When and where

Creeporado: An Evening of the Strange and Unusual runs Friday, September 25, 2026, from 6:00 to 10:00 p.m. at the History Colorado Center, 1200 Broadway, right there on the edge of the Golden Triangle in Denver. Tickets are selling now.

If you know that stretch of Broadway, you know it well. The Golden Triangle has quietly turned into one of the more interesting pockets downtown, museums and galleries and new condo product all stacked in walking distance, which is part of why an after-hours museum party actually works here. People will show up.

Millicent runs the show this year

Every year gets a theme, and 2026 belongs to Millicent the Haunted Doll. History Colorado is calling her their "morose moppet," and she is playing curator, pulling together a cabinet of curiosities for the night. So yes, the haunted doll is in charge. That tells you the tone.

The real draw is the artifacts, though. At the 2025 event they put out more than 500 bizarre items, and here is the detail people miss. Every single one was either made or used in Colorado. This is not a traveling oddities show. This is our stuff.

The stuff itself

Let me give you a sample. There are the dentures that belonged to mountain man Jim Baker in the late 1800s. No dentist within reach, so Baker just repaired them himself. Sit with that image for a second.

Then you have got bottles of strychnine, a pistol belt rigged to hold three six-shooters at once, some genuinely unsettling clown dolls, and early-1900s glass "Ghost Orbs." Rachael Storm, who heads up curatorial services and helped launch this whole thing, put the pitch about as plainly as it can be put. "We have a lot of weird stuff." That is the entire reason the event exists. They wanted one night to show off the oddities that never make the regular exhibits.

Colorado's own cryptid

Everybody knows Bigfoot. Almost nobody outside the state knows we grew something bigger and meaner. The Slide-Rock Bolter is a Colorado legend, a so-called mountain whale that supposedly waits up on the steep grades and comes barreling down to snatch unsuspecting tourists. A whale. In the mountains. Eating tourists. If you ask me that is a far better mascot than a shy forest guy, and Creeporado gives the Bolter its due.

And back to Mike. The headless chicken of Fruita earns his spot on the recurring roster every year, because a bird that outlived its own decapitation by more than twelve months is exactly the kind of homegrown weird this night is built around.

What you actually get for the ticket

This is more than staring at strychnine bottles, which, side note, is not a sentence I get to write often.

There is live music, creepy cocktails, and tintype-style portrait photography, so you can walk out with a spooky old-timey photo of yourself. There is a museum-wide scavenger hunt, and finishing it earns you an exclusive 2026 Creeporado-branded cup. Everybody who walks in also gets a mystery sweepstakes envelope. Prizes run from a Creeporado sticker or an enamel pin all the way up to a gift from the event sponsors. No purchase necessary, one per person.

For a sense of the value, past years ran general admission around