Every October, a quiet mountain town at the foot of Pikes Peak hands its main street over to a spectacle that would be hard to explain anywhere else: costumed teams pushing decorated coffins on wheels down Manitou Avenue, one rider dressed as a long-dead concert pianist bouncing along inside. The Emma Crawford Coffin Races and Festival returns for its 32nd edition on Saturday, Oct. 24, 2026, in downtown Manitou Springs. It is free to attend, and it is almost certainly the strangest civic tradition in Colorado — which is saying something.
The day begins at 10 a.m., when the Fan Zone opens and teams stage their coffins for inspection and spectators get their first look at the year's entries. At noon comes the parade, in which the teams show off their coffins and costumes before the racing starts. Then the coffins go down the street in pairs, each pushed by four "mourners" with an "Emma" riding inside, competing for the fastest time as well as for honors like Best Emma, Best Coffin and Best Entourage. The event runs into the afternoon; the published schedule lists it from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
To understand why a town races coffins, you have to go back to a woman who came to Manitou Springs to live and ended up, in a sense, never leaving.
Emma Crawford was born on March 24, 1863, in South Royalston, Massachusetts, the daughter of a pianist and music teacher. She was a prodigy. According to the Manitou Springs Heritage Center, she was giving piano lessons and public recitals at twelve, and at fifteen played the piano parts in a series of Boston concerts alongside a renowned violinist and cellist in the winter of 1878. She favored Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann and Wagner, and one contemporary description of her playing praised "a most delicate touch, a soulful expression, and a power which seemed almost incredible by hands so tender and delicate." She also played violin, viola, cello and mandolin. Her obituary in the Colorado City Iris reported, apparently without irony, that she was said to have acquired her remarkable mastery of the piano from spirit instruction and to have never taken a lesson at mortal hands.
In her mid-twenties she contracted tuberculosis. Like many patients of the era, she came to the Pikes Peak region hoping the mineral springs, dry air and sunshine would save her. She arrived in 1888 or 1889 — accounts differ — with her mother and sister, took up residence, and supported the family by giving lessons. In Manitou she grew close to Wilhelm Hildenbrand, a civil engineer who worked on the Pikes Peak Cog Railway. On a walk up Red Mountain, which rises directly over downtown Manitou, Emma was so taken with the view that she asked to be buried at the summit.
She died on Dec. 4, 1891, at 28. Hildenbrand carried out her wish. With eleven townspeople, he hauled her coffin up the slope to a gravesite near the summit, roughly 7,200 feet up, overlooking the town she had come to love.
That should have been the end of it. It was not. When the Red Mountain Incline was built, her grave was found to sit in the project's right of way, and her remains were moved to the mountain's southern summit. Then came 1929, and years of harsh winters and heavy spring rains. Emma and her coffin came racing down the mountainside. The children who happened upon the wreckage found only the casket handles, a silver nameplate bearing her name, and a few bones. Her remains sat in storage for two years while the city tried without success to find surviving relatives, until one of her original pallbearers, Bill Crosby, took responsibility for them. She was buried in an unmarked grave at Crystal Valley Cemetery; a headstone was finally placed there in 2004.
The legend of the ghost of Red Mountain outlived the facts of her life, and by the early 1990s Manitou Springs had a tourism problem to solve. In 1994, looking for ways to draw visitors, town officials hit on the local legend and the idea of a race commemorating Emma's unintended slide down the mountain. The Manitou Springs Chamber of Commerce staged the first coffin races in the nation in 1995. The concept has since been copied by towns across the country — the event's own organizers describe it as "often-copied-but-never-equaled" — and the races have drawn international attention, including coverage on the Travel Channel and a European broadcast.
What has grown up around the race is a full-blown street festival. Roughly 10,000 people are estimated to turn out in a town of about 5,000, filling Manitou Avenue with hearses, Halloween costumes and spectators. The coffin rules are strict: three of the four pushers must keep hands on the coffin until it has crossed the finish line and stopped completely, and any coffin with fewer than three pushers in contact is deemed out of control and disqualified. Teams cannot swap pushers or Emmas after check-in. Coffins must be built to specification, and the chamber has in past years run coffin-building classes for newcomers.
For all the macabre staging, the tone is closer to Mardi Gras than to a funeral. Visitors describe it as a family-friendly Halloween tradition, an adorable tiny town throwing a party with a slightly morbid theme. Manitou Springs has a slogan — "Keep Manitou Weird" — and this is the weekend it earns it.
Practical notes for anyone going: downtown Manitou Springs is a tight grid, and the event closes streets along Manitou Avenue, so organizers publish a road closure map and direct visitors to shuttle and parking options rather than driving into the core. The event is free and open to the public, with no ticket required to watch the parade or the races. The Fan Zone opens at 10 a.m., the parade steps off at noon, and racing follows immediately after. Merchandise is sold at the Visitors Center and at the Fan Zone. Accessibility is limited along the race route, so plan accordingly.
And if you go, spare a thought for Emma Crawford — the pianist from Massachusetts who asked to be buried on a mountaintop, got her wish, lost it to a rainstorm, and ended up memorialized by a few thousand people in costumes pushing coffins down a Colorado street. She has been, as the organizers put it, much more celebrated in her death than in her life.