Hotel de Paris Museum

Paranormal investigators call the Hotel de Paris residually haunted. Founder Louis Dupuy and housekeeper Sophie Gally still loop through old routines.

Nobody in the building is cooking, but the Hotel de Paris Museum smells like Louis Dupuy's grocery list. Coffee. Bread. Frosting. Oranges. Cinnamon. Curry. Cigar smoke. The investigators who catalogued the odors in 2018 cross-referenced them against Dupuy's original receipts and found that every scent matched something he'd actually bought for the hotel when he was alive. You can stand in a cordoned-off room, breathe in, and be in the 1890s.

Dupuy was a Frenchman, an ex-soldier, a cook, a journalist, and briefly a miner who was nearly blinded in an 1873 explosion while saving another miner's life. The community took up a reward for his bravery. He used it to rent the old Delmonico Bakery and reopen it under a new name in 1875, at 409 6th Street, as an elegant Norman-style French hotel with a first-rate restaurant, gas chandeliers, running water, and a wine list most Denver establishments couldn't match. He ran the place until he died of pneumonia in 1900. His longtime housekeeper and sole heir, Sophie Gally, died a year later, in 1901.

Both of them, visitors and staff say, never really left.

Tour guides describe seeing a man in turn-of-the-century dress directing confused visitors toward the next room on the self-guided route. The museum does not employ costumed docents, which makes the figure distinctive every time someone reports him. Guests and staff also hear voices and movement on the unoccupied second floor, the clatter of dishes and silverware in a dining room that hasn't served a meal in over a century, and a doorknob in the old laundry that rattles when no one is there to rattle it. In the cordoned-off rooms, the velvet ropes sometimes swing wildly with no one near them.

A paranormal team led by investigators Alan Megargle and Anna Meyer Evans visited in 2018 and came back with a verdict most places don't get. They called the building peaceful. They described it as a "residual haunting," not an intelligent one, meaning the phenomena play back like a recording of activity, not spirits reacting to the living. That matches the site's overall mood. Nothing at the Hotel de Paris is trying to frighten anyone. If anything, the ghosts are working.

The Silver Panic of 1893 ended the Hotel de Paris's run as a profitable business, the same way it ended much of Georgetown. Dupuy died seven years after the crash, and the hotel passed through a few hands before the Colonial Dames of America bought it in 1954 and turned it into a museum. Most of Dupuy's original fixtures are still in place. The walnut bar he had shipped in from France is still there. The silver service is still there. The kitchen still looks like a kitchen that hasn't served a meal since 1900, because that's exactly what it is. The fact that it still smells like a working hotel is the part that gets investigators.

Go during museum hours and ask about Sophie. Every docent has a Sophie story. If you want the full picture, book the evening paranormal tour, where the guides take their time walking you through each room and telling you who saw what, when, and what they were doing at the time. Don't expect a jump scare. Expect a doorknob, a footstep, and a faint smell of oranges and cigars.