In Brief
The Hotel de Paris Museum in Georgetown, Colorado smells like cooking when no one is in the kitchen. Coffee, bread, oranges, cigars. Investigators checked the scents against the founder's old receipts and found he had bought every one.
The Full Story
At the Hotel de Paris Museum in Georgetown, Colorado, the rooms keep smelling like food when nobody is cooking. Staff and visitors report odors that come from nowhere: coffee, bread, frosting, oranges, cinnamon, curry, perfume, cigars. In 2018, a team of paranormal investigators checked that list of smells against the original grocery receipts of the man who built the place, Louis Dupuy. Every scent matched something he had actually bought to run the hotel.
Dupuy ran it as a real one from 1875. The man calling himself Louis Dupuy was born in France as Adolphe François Gerard, deserted the U.S. Army, walked to Denver, and took a new name. In 1873, working a mine near Silver Plume, he was nearly blinded in an explosion saving another miner. Georgetown raised money to thank him, and he used it to open a French hotel with running hot water in every room, a wine cellar, and French cuisine he cooked himself.
He died of pneumonia in October 1900. His housekeeper and heir, Sophie Gally, inherited the place and died about four months later. The hotel became a museum in 1954, and roughly 90% of what fills it is original to the Dupuy years.
The investigators called it "a residual haunting, not an intelligent haunting" and described the building as peaceful, more like a recording playing back than spirits reacting to anyone. Indistinct movement in the Commercial Kitchen and on the second floor. Dishes and silverware clattering in the dining room. A doorknob rattling in the laundry. Velvet ropes swinging around cordoned-off corners.
Some visitors tell it differently. They say a man in 1890s dress gives them directions through the museum, and that when they thank the staff for his help, they learn no such person works there. Accounts read the figure as Dupuy. The museum's own verdict names no apparition at all.
What it names is a list of smells, and a list of receipts that match. Dupuy's handwritten grocery list, found tucked between the pages of his books, is on display in the kitchen.
