Dumas Brothel

The story

The Dumas Brothel stands in uptown Butte, Montana, in what was once one of the busiest red-light districts in the American West. Two French-Canadian brothers, Joseph and Arthur Nadeau, opened it in 1890. They named it after Joseph's wife, Delia Nadeau, born Dumas, who was listed as the owner on paper.

Little is documented about its first decade. Census takers found two early boarders who gave their trades as "gambler" and "saloon man." By 1900 the house was run by Madam Grace McGinnis, who employed a Chinese servant who also worked as a prostitute. Around the turn of the century a visit cost fifty cents, and the women kept roughly 40 percent. Even in a building that size, McGinnis had only five women and a musician on her payroll in 1902.

Business boomed with the copper mines. Butte's miners, many of them employed by the Anaconda Copper Mining Company, kept the district crowded, and in 1903 the owners built "cribs" in the basement: tiny rooms where the women received clients. Customers could slip in from the back door on Pleasant Alley, the heart of the district, or take a stair down from the front sidewalk. The house ran around the clock in three shifts, yet by 1910 only two women actually lived there; most rented rooms elsewhere in the alley and came in for their hours. A one-story addition in 1913 added eight more cribs, four of them opening straight onto the alley, which by then was known as Venus Alley.

The trade drew fierce criticism. The visiting evangelist William Biederwolf branded Butte "the lowest sinkhole of vice in the west." City officials, however, preferred regulation to closure. The women paid regular five-dollar "fines" to the police, and the mayor ordered longer skirts and high-necked blouses rather than shutting anything down. Local merchants, dressmakers, dry cleaners and Chinese herbalists all depended on their custom, and the district fed about two thousand dollars a month into city coffers, so a 1910 petition to close it went nowhere.

Prostitution was eventually outlawed, but the Dumas kept going under a succession of madams and growing pressure from authorities. The last madam was robbed and pistol-whipped in 1981, and the house closed in 1982. It is often billed as the longest-running brothel in the United States, though houses in Idaho, Nevada and Louisiana make similar claims. Afterward the building passed through several Butte owners who opened it to visitors, and in December 2018 a couple from Forsyth, Montana, bought it at a tax sale (reports give the price as $25,000 or $29,000) with plans to restore it.

The legend

The ghost most often linked to the Dumas is Elinore, a former madam who later owned the house. Born in Colorado in 1912, she may have started working at the Dumas very young. She was found dead in her room on February 7, 1955.

The story told on tours is a sad one. Elinore had packed a suitcase to leave Butte with a lover, in some versions a married businessman, but he never showed up and she died that night. Tellers disagree on whether it was suicide, murder, or a mix of alcohol and sleeping pills. The paper trail does not settle it. Police recorded a suicide, yet the death certificate gives coronary occlusion, a heart attack, and the coroner's report says nothing about suicide. A January 1955 letter shows she planned to sell the Dumas and leave town in February; no one knows if the sale went through. When she died, her possessions were recorded as forty dollars plus a worn suitcase of clothes; the red Cadillac, motorcycle, furs and jewelry people said she owned were never traced, and the boyfriend was never identified. These loose ends are the soil the legend grows in, and readers should treat the romantic version as folklore.

The signature sighting is a woman carrying a suitcase who walks from the madam's quarters toward the stairs. The earliest dated account in our sources comes from the 1970s, when an employee alone in the building watched a woman pass the upstairs bathroom and go down the stairs, then could find nobody. A regional tourism office also tells of an artist who felt compelled to paint an unknown woman of about forty wearing a hat, then gave up the canvases; one portrait stayed with the building's owner. Some have suggested it shows the madam who ran the house after Elinore, but that rests on a single source.

Former owner Rudy Giecek, author of the local history Venus Alley, has said Elinore is only one of several spirits in the house, and writer Karen Stevens has described her own experiences there. More recent visitors talk about sudden unease or nausea, having their hair patted and being pinched. Betsy Gaines Quammen, researching a book of ghost stories, said she felt a finger curl around a strand of her hair in a hallway. One of the current owners says that on roughly four occasions over the years a pleasant woman's voice has replied when she said "hello."

Television raised the stakes. Ghost Adventures filmed season 13, episode 9, "Dumas Brothel," which aired on Travel Channel on December 3, 2016. The episode framed the house as home to hostile spirits, including one nicknamed "The Judge." During the lockdown Zak Bagans showed an unexplained scratch on his neck and said he lost track of time.

A note of caution: no formal skeptical investigation of the Dumas has been published, and even a sympathetic 2025 Cowboy State Daily feature remarked that the spirits' supposed answers are inconsistent. The house's history of exploitation and hardship is well documented; its ghosts are not.

What remains today

The building survives as a contributing property in a National Register of Historic Places district, and it was described at closing as a rare, intact record of social history. Its madam's quarters, upstairs hallways and basement cribs, the last of which once included rooms opening onto the alley, are central to both its history and its stories. The current owners are working to restore it while preserving its historic character.

Visiting

The Dumas is open to the public on guided tours of about an hour and fifteen minutes, usually from Memorial Day to Labor Day and sometimes into October, offered every other weekend. Private overnight ghost hunts can also be booked. Schedules change, so check dumasbrothel.com before you go. Outside tour hours the building is closed and private; do not try to enter or peer into the basement from the alley. Remember that real women lived difficult lives here, and treat the rooms with respect.

Sources

1. Wikimedia Commons category : Dumas Brothel — Wikimedia Commons
2. USGS 1:250000-scale Quadrangle for Helena, MT 1889 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1889 · Public domain (USGS)
3. USGS 1:62500-scale Quadrangle for Butte North, MT 1959 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1959 · Public domain (USGS)
4. "Dumas Brothel" — Southwest Montana (regional tourism office) — Southwest Montana (regional tourism office
5. "Elinore Knott" — MTGenWeb, Butte-Silver Bow County (Suzanne Andrews) — Silver Bow County (Suzanne Andrews
6. "Ghost Adventures 13x09: Dumas Brothel" — TVmaze — TVmaze
7. "Longest Continuously Operating Brothel In U.S. Was In Montana (And It's Haunted)" — Cowboy State Daily (David Madison, Aug 2025) — Cowboy State Daily (David Madison, Aug 2025
8. Official website
9. Wikipedia article — Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Text written by AI from the sources above and checked by a separate AI fact-check (how we work). Images: credits and licenses under each picture.