People & Places

Comments (0) Best Historic Colorado Prank - 2010

Stealing Alfred Packer's Gravestone

Readers' Choice: Grandpa Bredo Morstoel (Nederland's Frozen Dead Guy)

It wasn't that funny in 1873, when Alfred Packer killed and ate his fellow prospectors after they became stranded in a snowstorm near Lake City. But, as they say, pain plus time equals humor. Today, Alfred (the historically accurate spelling) Packer is a macabre local celebrity, remembered in song and film and at the Alferd G. Packer Memorial Grill in Boulder. His actual gravesite is in the Littleton Cemetery, where teens regularly stole it in the 1960s and '70s. Eventually, the U.S. Department of Defense got tired of replacing the marble marker (since Packer was a veteran, the agency paid for it), so the cemetery encased the marker in cement. The current stone is chipped from the last time someone tried to take it, but the cemetery has one remaining replacement, just in case anyone decides to resurrect this prank.

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Legend says that when Packer entered an occupied cabin at the end of his "survival trek one of the occupants, a Ute Indian, looked at Al and declared "Him too fat."

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