After the railroads chugged into Colorado in the 1870s, luxurious hotels and grand resorts sprang up to cater to a blossoming tourist industry. Many of Colorado’s historic hostelries are still popular, including the famous Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, inspiration for the Stephen King novel, the Strater Hotel in Durango, Hotel Colorado in Glenwood Springs and the Brown Palace and Oxford hotels in Denver. These wonderful old buildings provide the perfect backdrop for great ghost stories, particularly those involving jealousy, infidelity or murder.
The Hotel Colorado in Glenwood Springs
The Hotel Colorado, reputedly the site of a bloody murder during WWII.
The Glenwood Canyon region on the Western slope became one of the state’s first resorts in the 1880s. Walter Devereaux, a mining engineer who made his fortune in Aspen, set out to create the world’s most luxurious spa in picturesque Glenwood Springs. The elegant 200-room hotel, opened in 1893, became one of the first in the country to be lit entirely by electricity, a favorite haunt of the rich and socially prominent.
During World War II, the Navy occupied the hotel and turned it into a hospital. According to local lore, a sexy young nurse named Bobbie amused herself during quiet moments by playing doctor with two Naval officers. When they discovered her duplicity, one of her lovers got cranky and bludgeoned her to death in Room 454. According to stories later told by hotel employees, the Navy hushed up the scandal, shipped the officers back to the front and buried Roberta quietly in Linwood Cemetery.
After the war, guests staying in Room 454 would report waking to a woman’s terrified screams and images of a bloody body. After one too many complaints, the hotel converted the room into storage space. Occasionally, hotel employees and visitors will smell her perfume in the hallway or trailing from a certain table at Sunday brunch, the scent of Gardenia, a perfume popular during the 1930s and ’40s.
The Delaware Hotel in Leadville
Leadville’s Delaware Hotel (far right), site of a domestic disturbance that escalated into murder.
The Delaware block in Leadville, built in 1886, included one of the town’s most elegant hotels, featuring shops at the sidewalk level and 50 attractively furnished rooms. Just three years after opening, the elegant establishment became the setting for a family spat that escalated into murder. A town not generally known for its squeamishness, even Leadville was appalled when a man named Jerry Coffey shot his wife twice in the back, presumably in front of their two children.
Ten years earlier, Boston-born Mary Gallagher had married a tall, fair-haired drifter named Jerry Coffey. In 1888, they moved to Colorado from Idaho with their two daughters. Although the Leadville community liked Mary, her husband had a reputation for drinking and troublemaking. The couple quarreled often and publicly, and in April 1889, Jerry Coffey had his wife arrested for adultery. He later retracted the accusations, but the following July, Mary had Jerry arrested for assault. When Officer John Morgan served the warrant, Jerry Coffey shot him twice, presumably without serious injury. Jerry Coffey spent several weeks in the county jail, while Mary took up residence in the Delaware Hotel. When she became ill, she unwisely requested that her husband return to help with the girls.
On Nov. 4, Mary returned to her room after visiting with a neighbor to find Jerry waiting in her room. He accused her of adultery again, they argued and he grabbed for her throat. As she pulled away and ran for the door, Jerry drew a gun (the same one he had used on the officer) and shot her twice in the back.
“I have been intending to kill you for a long time,” he said calmly, putting on his boots and calmly walking out as she screamed for help.
The captain of the police department apprehended him before he got out of the hotel. Jerry claimed that Mary had left the children alone to go with another man to Room 8, which turned out to be an office that had been locked at the time.
“The brute displayed no evidence of insanity in this cold-blooded murder and the community will not stand any sentimental fuss over him in an attempt to save his worthless, wretched life,” wrote the less than impartial Leadville Democrat. While Jerry Coffey went off to the gallows, his wife spent her last hours paralyzed from the waist down. She died just three days later, with one bullet lodged in her spine and another in her abdomen. According to local lore, she still haunts the hotel, appearing only from the waist up.
The Brown Palace Hotel
The Brown Palace Hotel as it stands today
Ohio carpenter Henry Brown built Denver’s elegant hotel on a triangular plot at Broadway, Tremont and 17th Street, where he once grazed his cow. Designed by architect Frank E. Edbrooke, the Brown featured the country’s first atrium lobby, which rose eight floors above the ground surrounded by cast iron railings with elaborate grillwork panels. Imported white onyx graced the lobby, the Grand Salon on the second floor, and the eighth floor ballroom.
Louise Hill, whose romantic escapades made her the subject of gossip and ghost stories.
In 1937 the hotel opened the Skyline Apartments, with elaborate suites for permanent residents. Society doyenne Louise Hill became a resident in the late 1940s, when failing health forced her to sell the Hill mansion at 9th and Sherman streets. She stayed virtually secluded at the hotel she died in 1955 at age 95. Louise had been quite a mover in her younger days, openly carrying on a torrid affair with a handsome mining engineer named Bulkeley Wells, despite the fact that both were married.
Decades later, the hotel featured an “Affairs of the Heart’ tour, sharing stories about Mrs. Hill’s jaded past. Almost immediately, the switchboard became inundated with calls from Room 904, where Mrs. Hill resided with her large staff of servants. As log books reported, the operators heard only static on the line. These calls were doubly perplexing since an extensive renovation had begun on two upper floors, and Louise’s room had been stripped of furniture, carpets, wallpaper, lights and a telephone. No telephone call could possibly have been made from the room, or any other on that floor, since all wiring had been removed.
The calls ceased when the details of Louise’s amorous adventures were dropped from the tour.
