Cheyenne Canon Inn

Originally Sunnycrest, built 1918-1921 by Lillian Casey. Bordello, Dixieland Casino, WWII nurses' refuge, now a B&B. Doors lead nowhere.

The Cheyenne Cañon Inn has doors that lead nowhere. Actual interior doors set into walls that open onto blank plaster or a framed-over cavity, left behind as the building's floor plan was remade for each of its previous lives. It also has trapdoors, which are harder to explain away as renovation leftovers, and they are the feature visitors tend to remember longest.

The house was originally called Sunnycrest. Lillian Casey started building it in 1918 on a quiet road above Colorado Springs, near the mouth of North Cheyenne Cañon, and finished in 1921. It was a Mission-style mansion with stucco walls and a red tile roof, designed as a resort home to take advantage of the canyon and the falls nearby. The less respectable version is what Sunnycrest did for the next seven decades.

At various points the house operated as an upscale bordello catering to wealthy men staying at the Broadmoor Hotel a few minutes away, as a Prohibition-era gambling operation known as the Dixieland Casino, and as a sanctuary for army nurses during World War II. Each of those incarnations left physical fingerprints on the structure, which is why the floor plan doesn't make sense. Rooms that used to connect don't connect. Staircases end in blank walls. The trapdoors are almost certainly where liquor moved in and out during the casino years. In 1993, John and Barbara Starr bought the property, restored it, renamed it the Cheyenne Cañon Inn, and reopened it as a bed and breakfast.

That layered history is the scaffolding the hauntings are built on. Guests coming back to their rooms late at night describe strange lights on the stairs and in the upstairs hallways, lights that fade when anyone walks toward them. Women in long dresses and men in dark suits turn up in the corridors often enough that staff stop trying to reassure guests they're imagining it. Objects move in unoccupied rooms. Doors open and close on their own.

A 1995 account from a couple staying at the inn describes an intensely watched feeling in one room, attributed by both guests to a female presence. The sensation lasted close to an hour, and ended with the bathroom faucet turning itself on. That's as specific as any of the named hauntings get. The Cheyenne Cañon doesn't have a clean cast of spirits, no single Maggie or Louise at the center of the story. It has a pile of anecdotes from different guests in different rooms describing different women in long dresses and different men in suits, with no obvious thread connecting them.

That is probably correct. A building that has been a resort, a brothel, a casino, an army facility, and a B&B is not going to produce a coherent haunting. It's going to produce a mess, because the different eras left different kinds of people behind. The architecture reflects it. The hauntings reflect it.

The other thing to know about the inn is that the owners over the years have been unusually careful not to embellish. In a haunted B&B, that's rare. Most properties that market themselves on ghost stories invent a named Victorian tragedy to anchor the brand. The Cheyenne Cañon doesn't. Staff will tell you the building does things, and they won't always tell you which era of the building is doing them.

The restraint does the work. You can stand in the front hall at dusk, look at a door that opens onto nothing, and feel the weight of every version of the house stacked on top of the current one, without anyone at the front desk trying to sell you a story. The building is already the story.