In Brief
At the Grand Imperial Hotel in Silverton, Colorado, the staff are uneasy about Room 314. The story traces to one dateable night: November 1, 1890, when a 42-year-old named Luigi Regalia shot himself there and died by morning.
The Full Story
At the Grand Imperial Hotel in Silverton, Colorado, the room the staff don't like is 314. The reason has a date on it. On November 1, 1890, a 42-year-old man named Luigi Regalia shot himself in that room around 10:30 at night. He died early the next morning.
The records hold that much. A doctor was staying in a nearby room and tried to save him, and failed. The story goes that the doctor never quite left either, and that the unexplained noises along the second floor are his.
The hotel went up in 1882, the largest of three in town during the silver boom. A perfume importer named Thomson built it, English by most accounts, though the sources can't agree on his initials or even the spelling of his name. It started as something other than a hotel, with the third floor turned into guest rooms the next year. Under one roof the building held the post office, the town bank, the Bureau of Mines, a newspaper, a doctor's office, and the county courtrooms.
The reports got loud again in 2015, during a third-floor remodel. The owner, Jim Harper, told the Durango Herald that contractors "have inexplicably had nails thrown at them and chunks of drywall chucked at them." Construction noise came at 3 a.m. when no one was working. A room turned up dead-bolted from the inside with no one in it. Beds made up by housekeeping were found sat upon.
The rest of the cast is the kind that one overnight stay collects. Guests have told of a woman who hums and sings, trailing a scent of honeysuckle or vanilla; staff call her Miss Mary. Others tell of a sheriff tied to the old tunnels under Blair Street's red-light row, and a miner who orders a drink at the bar and is gone before it lands.
But none of those has a date. Room 314 does. November 1, 1890, and a man who didn't make it to morning.
