The Broadmoor

Spencer Penrose's widow Julie ran the Broadmoor after 1939 and died there in spirit if not in fact. Room 408 still drags furniture at night.

A guest in an upper-floor suite woke up in the middle of the night to find the covers being peeled back, then the feeling of someone pulling her by the foot toward the edge of the mattress. Staff call that the foot-pull, and it's the Julie Penrose account they reach for first when anyone asks whether the Broadmoor has a ghost.

She wore black for fifteen years after Spencer died. Julie Villiers Lewis McMillan Penrose, widow of the Broadmoor's founder Spencer Penrose, took over as the hotel's vice president after his death in 1939 and ran the property alongside the El Pomar Foundation until she died in January 1956 at 85. The hotel opened June 29, 1918, but the ghost story is about the years after Spencer, when Julie became the center of gravity at the resort. She gave the Penrose Hospital a $3 million donation in the 1950s, at the time the largest single philanthropic gift in Colorado history. She outlived him by seventeen years. When guests describe a woman in 1920s or 1930s attire near the Penthouse Suite, they're describing her in her prime, not at 85.

Room 408 is the other fixture. Guests booked in the rooms directly below it have complained at the front desk about furniture being dragged across the floor overhead when 408 was empty. The lights up there flicker on their own. A staff member gets sent up to check, finds the room exactly as housekeeping left it, and the noises start again forty minutes later. It's the same loop year after year.

Most of the activity clusters in the penthouse. Objects that move between when housekeeping leaves and when the next guest walks in. Lights that cycle without anyone touching a switch. A ten-degree drop near the suite door that some guests have described as a short, sharp gust, not ambient. The hotel does not publish any of this on its website.

The older layer of the story is about the casino that used to sit on the property. Prussian Count James Pourtales built the original Broadmoor Casino in 1891 on a 2,400-acre tract he'd bought to sell residential lots. A kitchen fire took it out in 1897. Spencer Penrose bought the site in 1916 and opened his Italian Renaissance resort, designed by Warren and Wetmore. The casino ghosts, the theory goes, are the carryover from the 1897 fire, not the 1918 hotel.

There's also a tunnel system under the main building and down toward Cheyenne Lake. Staff describe it as the most uniformly creepy part of the property. The Broadmoor doesn't advertise the tunnels, either.

Hotels at this tier usually pick a side. Deny the ghost or build a brand around her. The Broadmoor does neither. The covers peel back. The door goes cold. And whoever wakes up pulling her foot out from under a hand she can't see usually checks out in the morning.