In Brief
At the Baldpate Inn above Estes Park, Colorado, the founders Gordon and Ethel Mace are said to still run the place. Gordon hated smoking, so cigarettes get smacked from hands. Ethel was a prohibitionist, so drinks get spilled and bottles knocked off the bar.
The Full Story
At the Baldpate Inn, the log lodge above Estes Park, Colorado, the two people who built it are said to still be running it. Gordon and Ethel Mace are long gone now, but by the accounts staff and guests tell, neither one ever moved out, and neither one loosened up.
Gordon hated smoking. The inn has a no-smoking policy, and the story goes that he still enforces it personally: lit cigarettes get smacked out of hands, and packs go missing. Ethel was a prohibitionist who didn't want a drop of liquor in her inn. So her spirit gets blamed for spilling mixed drinks and knocking bottles off the bar shelf, with accounts of glasses sliding off tables on their own. They're not tragic and they're not vengeful. They're just two stubborn founders still keeping their house rules from the other side.
The Maces were newlyweds when they honeymooned in Estes Park, fell for it, and homesteaded the property; Gordon's homestead patent closed in 1917, the year they opened the inn. Gordon's brothers Charles and Stuart helped build and run it. They named it after a 1913 mystery novel, *Seven Keys to Baldpate*, in which regular guests each held their own key, and the author Earl Derr Biggers later visited and crowned the real lodge the true Baldpate.
Following the book, the Maces handed every guest a key, until the price of metal in World War I made giving them away impossible. So the guests flipped it: they started bringing their own keys to leave behind. A century of that left a room holding more than 20,000 keys, growing toward 30,000, donated from around the world. Among them are keys said to come from Westminster Abbey, Mozart's wine cellar, the Pentagon, and Edgar Allan Poe's old university room.
Ethel sits in that Key Room. By the sightings she has gray hair and a high-collared dress, a Bible in her lap, settled in a wing-backed rocker before the fireplace, watching over the keys. The inn changed hands in 2020 and goes by Seven Keys Lodge now. By the accounts, the woman in the rocker stayed.
