Hotel Colorado

A grand Italianate hotel built in 1893, modeled after the Villa de Medici in Rome. During the late 1800s, it hosted presidents, celebrities, and the wealthy elite who came for the natural hot springs. The basement reportedly served as a crematorium for World War II military personnel.

The Hotel Colorado was built in 1891 by Walter Devereux, an English-born financier who modeled the grand sandstone structure after the sixteenth-century Villa de Medici in Rome. When it opened in 1893, the hotel boasted 191 rooms, a courtyard fountain that sprayed water 180 feet into the air, and hot springs-fed pools that drew the wealthy and powerful to Glenwood Springs. President Theodore Roosevelt used the hotel as his headquarters during a three-week bear hunting trip in 1905, and the Unsinkable Molly Brown was among its regular guests. During the 1920s, Chicago gangsters including Diamond Jack Alterie and Al Capone frequented the hotel. In World War II, the Navy converted it into a convalescent hospital for sailors and Marines, a chapter that left its darkest mark on the building.

The most famous ghost is Walter, believed by some to be the spirit of founder Walter Devereux, though researcher Kathy Rippy Fleming has theorized the presence may actually be E.E. Lucas, who managed and later owned the hotel from 1905 to 1927. Walter announces himself through the unmistakable smell of cigar smoke drifting through hallways where smoking has been prohibited for decades. On the main floor, a spirit known as Bobbie haunts the dining area. She was a Navy nurse stationed at the hotel during its World War II hospital years who became entangled in a love triangle with two officers. According to the story, one of the jealous lovers bludgeoned her to death. Guests seated in the dining room have reported catching the scent of Gardenia perfume -- a popular 1930s and 1940s fragrance -- trailing from Bobbie's favorite table toward the buffet line.

The hotel's two bell tower suites are among its most active paranormal locations. Room 661, dedicated to Molly Brown, generates the most reports of spirit activity, with guests describing a woman in a floral dress standing over their bed at night. One couple staying in the tower suite during a three-day illness reported the window opening and closing repeatedly on its own. In the basement, a houseman named Dave reported in 1993 seeing an elderly woman peering through a basement window with her hands cupped around her face, but when he went outside to help her, she had vanished. Security guard Richard once brought a tour group past the executive housekeeper's office where they all heard the sound of two women talking and a typewriter clicking, though the room was empty and no typewriter had ever been stored there. Some local accounts trace the hotel's paranormal energy to a curse placed by the Ute people when they were displaced from the Glenwood Springs area in 1880, before the hotel was built on the land.