In Brief
The most reliable ghost at Hotel Colorado in Glenwood Springs, Colorado isn't seen at all. He's smelled. Staff and guests report the same thing for decades: thick cigar smoke drifting through a lobby where smoking has been banned for years. They call him Walter.
The Full Story
The most reliable ghost at Hotel Colorado in Glenwood Springs, Colorado is never seen. He's smelled. Staff and guests have reported the same thing for decades: a wave of thick cigar smoke that drifts through the lobby and halls in the evening, in a hotel that hasn't allowed smoking indoors for years.
They call him Walter, after Walter Devereux, the silver magnate who built the place. It opened June 10, 1893, an Italianate palace of cream Roman brick modeled on the Villa de Medici, with a private rail spur out front where the wealthy parked their personal train cars. The hotel drew so many presidents that the papers called it the little White House of the West. Theodore Roosevelt ran a three-week bear hunt out of it in 1905. The story goes that the maids stitched him a stuffed bear from fabric scraps to cheer him up after a bad day in the field, which would make this the birthplace of the teddy bear. The hotel won't claim it. Mississippi tells a competing version, and the hotel says the truth is fuzzy and it's happy to share the credit.
The cigar smoke is harder to wave off. The hotel's own historian, Kathy Rippy Fleming, doesn't think it's Devereux at all. She suspects it's E.E. Lucas, the bookkeeper who came on in 1893, worked his way up to owner, and stayed with the building until the end.
Then the war came, and the legends thickened. From 1943 to 1946 the Navy ran the hotel as a hospital, and more than 6,500 patients passed through. The basement held a brig and a morgue, and it's still the most active part of the building. From those years comes the love-triangle lore the hotel keeps telling: a nurse named Bobbie in the dining room, trailing a gardenia perfume that stopped being made in the 1940s, and a chambermaid said to have been murdered, whose screams carry through the halls.
No record confirms any murder happened. The room where she's said to have died is sealed. They use it for storage now. It can't be rented, the story goes, because too much keeps happening inside it.
