Hotel Boulderado

Rooms 302 and 304 at the Hotel Boulderado trace back to a half-completed 1900s suicide pact. A woman in white still walks the fifth floor.

A couple checked into the Hotel Boulderado not long after it opened and made a double suicide pact. The husband went through with it. The wife was hospitalized and survived. The fuller version, retold for decades on ghost tours, puts the rooms at 302 and 304. Both rooms still take bookings, and guests staying in them have described flickering lights, disembodied voices, and the sense of someone else being in the room when no one is.

The phenomena aren't confined to those rooms. On the top floor, guests and staff have reported a woman in white drifting through the hallway, electrical glitches, and an unattached perfume passing through empty corridors. The Hotel Boulderado does not market its ghosts. If you ask the front desk about them, the clerk will usually answer honestly. If you don't ask, nobody volunteers.

The hotel opened New Year's Day 1909 after a New Year's Eve gala on December 31, 1908. Italian Renaissance and Spanish Colonial Revival on the outside, and on the inside the lobby ceiling that everyone remembers: a stained-glass canopy deliberately designed to echo the one at San Francisco's Palace Hotel. An original 1908 Otis elevator still runs. The guest list across the hotel's first century includes Theodore Roosevelt, Louis Armstrong, and Helen Keller, which is why Stephen King also put the Boulderado in his fictional Colorado. The Shining and Misery both name-drop it. King's actual haunted-hotel inspiration was the Stanley, up in Estes Park, where he spent a single night in 1974. The Boulderado just gets the cameos.

The other ghost the hotel has to account for is Beautrice "Honey Bee" Lennartz, born in Boulder in 1904 and a regular at the dining room through most of the twentieth century until she died in 1998. She willed a life-sized portrait of herself to the hotel, which still hangs on the fifth floor. Staff and guests say they've felt her around it, mostly at mealtimes, which tracks with where she spent her evenings when she was alive. The Boulder Public Library's Carnegie oral history collection has her in it. She was real. She ate there often enough that the hotel knew her by name, and she left them a portrait so they couldn't forget her.

What's worth sitting with about the Boulderado is how reluctant its own staff is to call it haunted. The phenomena they'll acknowledge are small and specific. Lightbulbs that don't stay screwed in. Electrical glitches concentrated on the upper floors. A scent in a hallway that has no source. It reads less like a single angry ghost and more like a building that hosted over a century of births, deaths, weddings, funerals, and at least one confirmed suicide, and retained a little of each. The suicide is the famous story. Honey Bee is the affectionate one. The rest is quieter, low-amplitude stuff you'd miss on a single-night stay.

If you want to stay in a room with a story, ask for 302 or 304 at booking. If you want to eat where a regular still shows up, ask where Honey Bee's portrait is and grab a table nearby. If you just want to see the stained-glass ceiling, walk into the lobby. Nobody will stop you, and the building is worth the visit for the ceiling alone.