The Baldpate Inn

Gordon and Ethel Mace opened this Estes Park inn in 1917. He hated smokers, she hated drinkers. Both still enforce those rules from beyond.

Light a cigarette in the Baldpate Inn and something will knock it out of your hand. Smash it. Or take the whole pack. Gordon Mace has been dead for close to a century, but his pet peeve outlived him, and he still enforces his no-smoking rule on guests who try their luck.

His wife Ethel handles the mixed drinks. She was a prohibitionist in life, and in death she prefers her hotel dry. Cocktails get spilled for no reason. Glasses slide off tables. Staff have watched it happen and stopped trying to explain it.

Gordon and Ethel Mace were newlyweds when they homesteaded the property seven miles south of Estes Park in 1911. They built a log cabin first, then opened the Baldpate Inn in 1917. The name comes from Earl Derr Biggers's 1913 novel "Seven Keys to Baldpate," a mystery about a fictional inn where every regular guest held their own key to the place. The Maces ran with the idea and gave real keys to their regulars.

Then World War I hit, metal got expensive, and they had to stop. The guests didn't. They started bringing keys from home instead, leaving them at the inn as a kind of arrival ritual. The ritual never stopped. The Key Room now holds more than 20,000 keys, including ones from Westminster Abbey, Mozart's wine cellar, the Pentagon, and the castle used to film Frankenstein. It's a room that exists because guests kept showing up with a piece of their lives in their pocket and handing it over.

Ethel's favorite spot is the Key Room. Her other favorite is a storage room with a wing-backed rocker and a fireplace, where she gets comfortable with her feet up and reads the Bible. If you believe the accounts, she doesn't haunt the inn so much as keep living in it.

The 12-room lodge is open from Memorial Day to mid-October. The Smith family bought it from the Maces' successors in 1986 and has run it as a seasonal inn ever since. Nothing about the building is trying to be scary. It's a mountain lodge with good porches, good views, and a couple who never really left because they didn't particularly want to.

The charm of the Baldpate story is that the Maces aren't angry. They're not unresolved. They're just stubborn. Gordon is still mad about the cigarettes. Ethel is still mad about the cocktails. The dead can be petty too, and in the Baldpate Inn they're allowed to be.