Brown Palace Hotel

The Brown Palace Hotel in Denver has a room that calls the front desk on its own. During a renovation of the top floors, the switchboard started lighting up with calls from Room 904 while the room sat stripped to bare walls, the furniture, lights, wallpaper, carpet, and telephone lines all torn out. Operators who picked up heard only static.

Room 904 had belonged to Louise Crawford Hill, who lived there from 1940 to 1955 and, by the accounts that follow the place, ruled over Denver society from inside it. What's attached to her is a tale of heartbreak over a lost love, though where and when she died isn't something the records settle. The hotel had been telling it on its ghost tour. The calls, the story goes, stopped only after the historian pulled it out of the script, as if the woman who didn't want to be gossiped about in life felt the same way dead.

She isn't the only one staff report. In the dining room, the former San Marco Room now called Ellyngton's, a string quartet in formal dress has been seen rehearsing on nights with no music scheduled. When an employee once walked toward them, one is said to have answered, "Don't worry about us. We live here." A figure in an old train conductor's uniform turns up at the corner of the building, where the Rock Island Railroad once kept a ticket office, and drifts to the ground floor before vanishing through the wall.

The building has held its darkness from the start. It opened in 1892 on a triangular lot at 17th, Broadway, and Tremont, eight stories of cast-iron railings ringing an atrium under a stained-glass ceiling. In 1911, a love triangle ended in the Marble Bar when Frank Henwood shot Tony von Phul dead and killed a bystander by accident.

In 2025, Historic Hotels of America named the Brown Palace one of the most haunted hotels in the country. Staff say the ghost tours fill up faster than they can schedule them. One of them, Shannon Dexheimer, put it plainly: "We can't provide enough days for these tours!"