Hotel Colorado

The story

The Hotel Colorado in Glenwood Springs, Garfield County, is one of the oldest hotels in the state. It was the project of Walter Devereux, a banker who had made his fortune in silver. Construction started in 1891 and cost $850,000. The New York firm Boring & Tilton, the partnership of William A. Boring and Edward Lippincott Tilton, designed it in the Italianate style as a version of the Villa Medici. Boring was among the leading American architects of his day, who belonged to the National Academy of Design and is best remembered for his work on Ellis Island, and he later led Columbia University's architecture school. For the walls the builders turned to stone and brick from the region, Peach Blow sandstone and cream Roman brick, and brought in luxuries from far away, among them 2,000 rose bushes for the grounds and 12,000 yards of carpeting.

The hotel opened on June 10, 1893, with fireworks, an orchestra in the ballroom and a midnight supper for 300 couples. It soon became a fashionable summer resort. Theodore Roosevelt made the hotel his base for a bear hunt in 1905, and President William Howard Taft visited on September 23, 1909, which earned the hotel the nickname "the little White House of the West." According to a popular but unproven story, the teddy bear was born during Roosevelt's stay, when maids gave him a stuffed bear stitched together from scraps of fine fabric. Margaret "Molly" Brown was also a guest, and in the 1920s Chicago gangsters came too: Diamond Jack Alterie among them, and Al Capone, according to claims in the local press.

On September 16, 1925, music and speeches from the ballroom were sent by telephone line to the Denver radio station KOA and broadcast live. The Second World War gave the building a very different role. The Navy took a lease on the hotel in 1942 and opened the U.S. Naval Convalescent Hospital there on July 5, 1943. By the end of 1945 it had treated more than 6,500 patients. The basement held a brig, and part of it is remembered as the hospital's morgue area. The hospital closed in 1946 and the building went back to being a hotel.

More recent milestones include a time capsule buried in the courtyard in 2003, due to be opened in 2043, and the hotel's admission to Historic Hotels of America in April 2007. The building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The legend

The Hotel Colorado has a crowded cast of ghosts, although most of the detailed stories come from a single investigation write-up published by Legends of America. The hotel's own website does not mention them.

The best-known figure is a small girl dressed in Victorian fashion, spotted with a ball in different parts of the building. Another is a woman who is said to bend over male guests while they sleep. People also describe a male presence upstairs on the fifth floor, by the attic entrance opposite Room 551, sometimes guessed to be a worker from the 1893 construction. The two suites in the bell towers, Room 661, known as the Molly Brown Suite, and Room 662, are described as the most active rooms in the hotel.

The darkest story concerns a chambermaid said to have been murdered by a jealous lover in a love triangle; Legends of America sets the killing during the Navy hospital years. Her screams are said to echo through the hotel, and the room where she supposedly died is no longer let to guests and is used for storage. No source gives her name, a date or any record of the crime. The founder, Walter Devereux, is also said to linger: the smell of cigar smoke in the lobby is credited to him, and the basement is called one of his haunts, though this rests on a single source.

Guests and staff describe an elevator traveling between floors with no one in it, smells of cigar and perfume, the clatter of dishes in the Devereux dining room, televisions changing channels, knocking and lights switching on and off, mostly between 2 and 4 a.m. In the basement, around the former Navy morgue area, doors are said to open and lights to turn on by themselves. The earliest dated anecdote comes from 1982: after a renovation, new wallpaper in Room 551 was reportedly found rolled up on the floor morning after morning.

In September 2006, CCPI Paranormal Investigations, a group from Grand Junction, spent time at the hotel. They recorded electromagnetic readings of about 10 milligauss in the hallway outside Room 325 and 8 to 10 milligauss beside the attic entrance opposite Room 551, when background levels were low. They also took an "orb" photograph and noticed the lights in the room they were using switching off and back on. A test in Room 416, in which a ball was left out to see if the ghost girl would move it, produced nothing. No TV ghost-hunting program has been found to have investigated the hotel.

A word of caution: electromagnetic spikes and orbs in photos are not accepted as evidence of ghosts. The group's own ball test came back negative. What the stories reflect best is the building's long and varied life, from Gilded Age resort to wartime hospital.

What remains today

The 1893 building still operates as a hotel. Photographs from 2015 show its towers and a bison head mounted above the reception desk, and old photochrom postcards from the 1890s show how it looked when the resort was new. The bell-tower suites, the Devereux dining room and the basement named in the stories are all part of the working hotel. The 2003 time capsule waits in the courtyard until 2043.

Visiting

The Hotel Colorado is an operating hotel and open to the public; guests can book rooms, including, subject to availability, those named in the legends. No ghost tour run by the hotel is known, and staff-only areas should be respected. Respect other guests on the upper floors, especially at night.

Its history, from the presidential visits to the Navy hospital, is reason enough to stop by even if you don't believe in ghosts.

Sources

1. National Register nomination #77000376 (texte intégral) — U.S. National Park Service · Public record
2. National Register of Historic Places file (NRHP #77000376) — U.S. National Park Service · Public domain (U.S. government)
3. The Colorado, Glenwood Springs, Colorado : in the heart of the Rocky Mountains — Internet Archive · Hotel Colorado (Glenwood Springs, Colo.), 1894-01-01 · Public domain (pre-1929)
4. Wikimedia Commons category : Hotel Colorado — Wikimedia Commons
5. USGS 1:125000-scale Quadrangle for Glenwood Springs, CO 1927 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1927 · Public domain (USGS)
6. USGS 1:24000-scale Quadrangle for Glenwood Springs, CO 1961 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1961 · Public domain (USGS)
7. USGS 1:250000-scale Quadrangle for Leadville, CO 1959 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1959 · Public domain (USGS)
8. Hotel Colorado: Haunted / CCPI investigation — Legends of America — Legends of America
9. Our History — Hotel Colorado (official site) — Hotel Colorado (official site
10. 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.