Buckhorn Exchange

The Buckhorn Exchange in Denver, Colorado is the oldest restaurant in the city, and the men who drank there a hundred years ago are the ones the staff still hear moving around after close.

It opened on November 17, 1893, in a brick building at 1000 Osage Street that had been thrown up a few years earlier by a brewing company. The man behind the bar was Henry Zietz. As a boy he'd met Buffalo Bill Cody and ridden with his band of scouts, and Sitting Bull, the story goes, gave him his nickname: Shorty Scout. The crowd he served was the last of the frontier — miners off the claims, cattlemen, railroad hands, traders. They came in, ate, drank, and a good many of them lived and died in the rough quarter around the place.

The lore says they kept their seats. "Many old traders, miners, scouts, and cowboys continue to lurk about this historic steakhouse," is how one account of the haunting puts it. Staff and patrons report the same handful of things: footsteps when the floor is empty, voices and bits of conversation with no one talking, and tables that shift on their own. Ghost-tour accounts go further and describe figures near the upstairs bar after the lights are off, though that part rests on thinner ground than the rest.

The room they keep turning up in hasn't changed much. More than 500 mounted animals and trophy heads cover the walls — a two-headed calf among them, an African Cape buffalo tied to Teddy Roosevelt, who ate here in 1905. Glass cases hold antique rifles. Framed on the wall is Colorado Liquor License No. 1, applied for the moment Prohibition lifted in 1933.

Roosevelt came. So did Eisenhower, Carter, and Reagan. Zietz died in 1949, and his family sold the place in 1978.

The dead, by every account, stayed on — eating where they always ate, under 500 glass eyes that never blinked.