Buckhorn Exchange

Denver's oldest restaurant, opened 1893. A short cowboy in full frontier gear moves through the dining room. The upstairs bar throws parties alone.

The upstairs bar throws parties when no one's there. Bartenders on the ground floor at the Buckhorn Exchange have walked up to the second story multiple times, convinced someone had booked it for an event, only to find the room empty and quiet. Loud music and voices one minute. Dark silence the next.

Henry H. Zietz is the man who usually turns up when something else happens. Guests describe a short cowboy in full frontier gear drifting through the dining room, the same figure who stares out of the black-and-white photographs hung on the walls. Zietz met Buffalo Bill Cody in 1875 at age ten and joined Cody's band of scouts by twelve. The Buckhorn's own history claims Sitting Bull gave him the nickname Shorty Scout for being short, and also gave him a buffalo head now mounted in the dining room. Zietz opened the restaurant on November 17, 1893, ran it for more than fifty years, and died in 1949. The Zietz family sold the business to a group of local investors led by Roi Davis and Steve Knowlton in 1978.

The second floor is the center of the activity. Chairs slide across the floor on their own. Tables shift position between service. Footsteps move across the upstairs boards when the space is locked. The bar up there is where Zietz used to hold court with his friends and hunting companions.

The walls explain a lot of it. The Buckhorn has over five hundred taxidermy pieces mounted throughout the building, plus a gun collection of about 125 pieces, many of them from the original frontier-era owners. If you believe objects hold onto the people who owned them, this building is carrying a lot of weight.

The most specific reports come from diners on quiet weeknights who've described hearing someone walking behind their table, then turning to find no one. Staff working late have said the same thing. Waitstaff who've been at the Buckhorn for more than a decade will tell you they stopped turning around years ago. It doesn't help anyway.

None of this has stopped the business from running. The Buckhorn still serves elk, rattlesnake, buffalo, and quail in the same room Teddy Roosevelt ate in, and it sits next to the light rail stop near downtown. The ghost stories aren't a marketing angle. The brand is the frontier history, the taxidermy, and the food.

The Sitting Bull buffalo head is the detail that stays with most visitors. It's mounted at eye level in the main dining room, label card intact, the gift from a chief to a scout who was eleven years old when they met. Whether the staff who report seeing Zietz upstairs are seeing the man who owned the place or a hundred years of accumulated memory inside the same four walls is a question the Buckhorn doesn't answer.