Hotel Colorado

The teddy bear was invented at the Hotel Colorado in 1905. A perfumed ghost named Bobbie visits the dining hall. Walter trails cigar smoke.

In 1993, a houseman named Dave walked out of a basement storage area at the Hotel Colorado and found an old woman pressed against the outside basement window, her hands cupped around her face, looking in. He went outside to ask what she was doing. There was no one there. The window faces a wall that nobody can easily reach from the street.

That's one of the better-sourced ghost stories at the Hotel Colorado, and it's only one of several the hotel has collected over more than a century. The most famous ghost is called Walter, named after Walter Devereux, the Aspen silver baron who completed the hotel in 1893 for $850,000 and modeled it on an Italian villa. Walter announces himself with cigar smoke in rooms and hallways where smoking hasn't been allowed in years. Some of the hotel's own staff researchers think the figure may actually be a later manager rather than Devereux himself. Either way, someone in an old suit with an old cigar still turns up on the ground floor after dinner.

The more tragic story is Bobbie, a nurse from the hotel's stint as a naval hospital. From 1943 to 1946, the U.S. Navy leased the entire building and ran roughly 6,500 convalescent sailors through its wards. The basement was converted into a morgue and crematorium. Bobbie, per the most common version of the story, was caught in a love triangle between two officers and was murdered by the jealous one. Guests and staff still smell her distinct perfume in and around the dining room, where she apparently liked to appear during meal service. A security guard named Richard once led a group past the executive housekeeper's office and heard two women talking and a typewriter clicking inside. He opened the door. The room was empty.

Room 661, the tower suite, has its own ghost. In 1993, a man and his wife checked in while he was fighting an illness. Every time his wife stepped out of the room, she came back to find the windows open. She'd close them, leave, return, and find them open again. Eventually she saw the woman doing it, a figure in a floral dress who didn't seem bothered by being noticed.

Teddy Roosevelt spent three weeks at the Hotel Colorado in 1905 on a bear hunt. He shot 10 black bears and three lynxes, and the hotel maintains he went home the day the teddy bear got its name: hotel housekeeping staff stitched together a toy bear to cheer him up after a slow day of hunting, and the press picked up the name. Most serious sources, including the Smithsonian and the Theodore Roosevelt Association, credit a different 1902 incident in Mississippi. The two stories don't have to agree. The teddy bear's birthplace is disputed. The president's three-week hunt is documented.

Add to Walter, Bobbie, the old woman in the basement window, and the floral-dress figure in 661 a handful of other ghosts the hotel keeps track of, including a housekeeper who rearranges guest luggage, a young girl who fell from a balcony and still turns up in the lobby, and a construction worker who moves around in the attic, and you get one of the most populated haunted hotels in Colorado. The hotel runs with it. They run paranormal investigations, publish room-by-room ghost guides, and book ghost-hunt packages on weekends.

Skeptical guests can ignore all of it. The smells, the footsteps, and the occasional figure in period dress will show up anyway. Ask the front desk where Walter was seen last and they'll tell you, with a straight face, down to the week.