Victor Hotel

The story

Victor, a mining town in Teller County near Cripple Creek, owes its existence to two brothers from Ohio. Frank and Harry Woods came west, went into mining and real estate promotion during the Cripple Creek boom of the early 1890s, and for $1,000 bought a placer claim known as Mount Rosa a short distance from Cripple Creek. They laid it out as a townsite and named it Victor. As the surrounding mines became the richest gold producers in Colorado, the town filled with working people. The brothers gained control of several mines, among them the Gold Coin, became millionaires at least on paper, and moved into banking, opening a bank at the corner of Fourth Street and Victor Avenue.

In August 1899 fire swept through Victor, where many buildings were made of materials that burned easily, and the town was almost entirely destroyed. The Woods brothers used the rebuilding to put up the largest building in town, the four-story brick Bank Block, finished on Christmas Eve 1899. Their First National Bank of Victor operated on the ground floor until it failed and closed in November 1903, after which the City Bank and other firms took over the space. Shops, consulting offices and rooms let by the night filled the rest. A hospital had taken over the top floor by 1906, and according to Wikipedia it was used as a morgue during one hard winter. The brothers' fortunes faded with the Gold Coin mine, and they died poor, though a street in Colorado Springs still carries their name.

Later the building served for a time as a boarding house for miners. Its businesses closed in the 1960s and it stood empty and decaying for years. The National Register of Historic Places added it in April 1980, the nomination praising it as a typical Italianate commercial block of the period and the building that dominates Victor's streetscape. After a sale in October 1991, a renovation completed in August 1992 turned it into the hotel that operates today.

The legend

The Victor Hotel's ghost story centers on one man, known only as Eddy. As the tale is told in Colorado's Historic Hotels, a guidebook by Clark cited on Wikipedia, Eddy was a miner who rented room 301 in the years when the building housed miners. One day he left his room and pressed the call button for the elevator. The iron gates slid back, yet no car stood behind them, and Eddy walked straight into the empty shaft and fell to his death. Because of reported visits from him, ghost hunters ask to spend the night in his room.

That is essentially the whole of the documented legend. The story gives no surname and no date, and no newspaper report or death record has been found to confirm the accident, so Eddy should be regarded as a hotel tradition rather than a known historical person. The hotel itself speaks more vaguely, describing the building as reportedly haunted and mentioning a few unnamed ghostly residents.

The building's past as a hospital, with its reputed winter use as a morgue, is often brought up as an explanation for strange activity, but no specific sightings connected with the fourth floor have been reported. No television investigation or skeptical study of the hotel has come to light. For visitors, the old birdcage elevator that features in Eddy's story is the main tangible link to the legend.

What remains today

The Bank Block still stands at the corner of Fourth Street and Victor Avenue. The 1979 nomination describes a rectangular, flat-roofed brick building of four stories over a basement that once held the bank's safe. The two street fronts are in tan, hard-burned brick, while the back walls use plainer sand brick, and the four chimneys are tucked into the rear walls so they cannot be seen from the street. Arched brick openings, a recessed corner entrance typical of the district, and a deep bracketed cornice give it its turn-of-the-century look. The 1992 renovation kept the birdcage elevator, the bank vault and the old woodwork.

Visiting

The Victor Hotel is a working hotel with a restaurant, so the legal way to experience it is simply to stay or dine there. The hotel promotes its historic birdcage elevator, and room 301 is the one associated with Eddy; ask the hotel directly about booking it. The exterior can be admired from the street at any time as part of a walk around Victor's historic downtown. Respect other guests and staff: corridors and rooms are private spaces for people who have paid to sleep there, not a venue for uninvited investigations.

The nearby gold camp of Cripple Creek makes a natural pairing for a day of mining history.

Sources

1. National Register nomination #80000929 (texte intégral) — U.S. National Park Service · Public record
2. National Register of Historic Places file (NRHP #80000929) — U.S. National Park Service · Public domain (U.S. government)
3. Wikimedia Commons category : Victor Hotel (Victor, Colorado) — Wikimedia Commons
4. USGS 1:125000-scale Quadrangle for Pikes Peak, CO 1894 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1894 · Public domain (USGS)
5. USGS 1:24000-scale Quadrangle for Cripple Creek South, CO 1951 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1951 · Public domain (USGS)
6. USGS 1:250000-scale Quadrangle for Pueblo, CO 1958 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1958 · Public domain (USGS)
7. National Register of Historic Places nomination form: Victor Hotel / Bank Block (1979–80) — U.S. National Park Service — U.S. National Park Service
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.