Theodore Edward Coneys had been a drifter for most of his adult life, moving through the Depression-era West on the margins of what the economy offered men without reliable employment or family resources. By the summer of 1941 he was in Denver, thin and cold and without prospects, and he knew a house on Monroe Street where an old man named Philip Peters lived alone. He had known Peters years earlier — a loose acquaintance from better times — and he went to the house hoping for a meal or a place to sleep. Peters was not home. Coneys tried the door, found it unlocked, and went in. He was looking, he said later, for food. What he found instead, in the back of a closet, was a small trapdoor in the ceiling leading to an attic crawlspace barely large enough to lie down in. He went up. He pulled the door closed behind him. He stayed.
Philip Van Sciver Peters was seventy-three years old and in poor health. He lived at 1749 Monroe Street in the Park Hill neighborhood, and when he returned home that evening from a visit to his wife at a sanitarium, he found his house as he had left it. He found it that way again the next morning, and the morning after. The house had an occupant Coneys could observe through a small opening in the floor of his space, listening to Peters move through the rooms below, timing his own movements to Peters’s schedule, descending at night when Peters slept to take food from the kitchen in amounts too small to notice. He lived this way for months. The neighbors later recalled that during this period the properties on Monroe Street had begun to seem quieter than usual — less foot traffic, odd hours, a general stillness that no one attributed to anything specific. The Peters house showed nothing unusual from the outside.
In September 1941 Peters came home earlier than expected. He heard something move in the part of the house where nothing should have been moving. The sequence of what happened next was reconstructed from physical evidence, because Peters could not reconstruct it himself — he was found beaten with a fireplace poker and died several hours later at the hospital without recovering consciousness. Coneys had gone back into the attic. When police arrived and searched the house, they found evidence of the struggle and the body of a man who had been killed in his own home, and they found no intruder. They searched the house. They did not search the ceiling. Peters’s death was filed as a homicide by unknown persons, and the investigation proceeded on the assumption that the killer had entered and left.
Coneys remained in the attic. The investigation ran for months. Mrs. Peters stayed at the sanitarium. A friend of the family moved into the house to maintain it. Coneys continued to descend at night, continued to take food in careful amounts, continued to manage his existence in a space barely large enough to contain it. He had lost weight he could not afford to lose. He had developed the habits of a man whose primary skill had become stillness — controlling his breath, controlling his movement, controlling the acoustic signature of a living body in a dead space. He had been doing this for nine months when, on July 30, 1942, a police officer checking on the property noticed a thin figure disappearing through the front door. They searched the house again. This time they searched the ceiling.
The opening in the closet measured approximately eighteen inches square. Coneys, who weighed somewhere near seventy pounds at capture — a figure that required a moment of recalculation from the officers who heard it — was found in the crawlspace with a collection of objects he had gathered over months: clothing, small items from the kitchen, a few possessions. He had not left the house since the murder. He was taken to Denver General Hospital before he could be taken to a cell, because his condition made the ordering of those stops a medical question before it was a legal one.
He was tried for the murder of Philip Peters, convicted, and sentenced to life imprisonment. He served the sentence at the Colorado State Penitentiary at Cañon City, where his death record is maintained under the date of May 16, 1967. He was approximately eighty-five years old. The house at 1749 Monroe Street was sold, occupied by subsequent families, and eventually demolished. The neighborhood had, by that time, absorbed the story the way neighborhoods absorb stories — imperfectly, partially, with the details shifting each time someone retells them by firelight or in a bar, until the specific facts become a general atmosphere and the atmosphere becomes the only version anyone can reliably reproduce.
The Peters household had reported unexplained sounds in the months before the murder: footsteps overhead, missing food, objects displaced in rooms that had been locked. Neighbors assumed the house was haunted. It was not. The explanation, when it arrived, was more disturbing than the haunting would have been, because the haunting would have implied a world in which the dead remained interested in the living, and this implied a world in which a living man could be invisible inside your house for almost a year while you ate breakfast, read the paper, and went to sleep three feet beneath him.