Hotel Jerome

A drowned boy leaves wet footprints on the third floor of Aspen's Hotel Jerome. Housekeeping dries them and moves on. They've done it for decades.

The housekeepers at the Hotel Jerome know what to do about the wet footprints. A guest calls down to report a soaking-wet little boy in the third-floor hallway, shivering, asking for a towel. By the time anyone gets up there, the boy's gone and the carpet outside the room is dark with water. Housekeeping dries it, writes it up, and moves on. They've done this for decades.

The boy is usually identified as the Aspen Water Boy, drowned sometime in the 1930s in the hotel's swimming pool when the Jerome operated more like a residential hotel than a luxury resort. The pool's long gone. The drowning story has never been nailed down in a single contemporary newspaper account, so take the biographical specifics with a grain of salt. But the encounters themselves are on the record in guest logs, staff interviews, and features that ran in the Aspen Times. Guests describe the same child in the same corridor, asking for the same thing.

The Hotel Jerome opened on Thanksgiving Day 1889, built by Macy's co-founder Jerome B. Wheeler at the height of Aspen's silver boom. It was one of the first buildings west of the Mississippi wired for electricity and it had indoor plumbing before most of Denver did. Wheeler spent about $160,000 on it, which was an absurd sum for a town of 12,000 miners. When silver collapsed in 1893, Aspen nearly folded; the Jerome stayed open on sheer inertia, renting rooms for a dollar through the Depression.

Room 310 is the other one. Staff call the ghost there Katie. She's usually described as a chambermaid from the early 1900s who died young, and guests in that room have reported faucets turning themselves on, drawers sliding open, and a woman's reflection in the bathroom mirror that doesn't belong to anyone in the room. Housekeeping says she isn't malicious. Just present.

The J Bar downstairs has its own traditions. Bartenders describe glasses that slide off the back bar without being touched, cold drafts that aren't from the door, and the occasional full-bodied figure in miner's clothes seen at the far end of the counter, then gone. Hunter S. Thompson drank there for years when he lived outside Aspen. Locals like to say he left some mess behind too, but the miner showed up first.

A 2011 piece in the Aspen Times quoted longtime staff saying the hotel doesn't hide its hauntings and doesn't play them up either. The Jerome's position has always been that if guests ask, the staff will tell them what they've seen. If guests don't ask, nobody brings it up. That restraint is part of why the reports read as credible instead of marketing.

The renovation in 2012 and a second one in 2022 restored much of the original Victorian woodwork and reopened parts of the building that had been closed for years. Paranormal activity didn't slow down during either. If anything, staff say the water-boy sightings picked up after construction wrapped both times, which tracks with a pattern that shows up at a lot of old hotels: stirring up the structure seems to stir up whatever's attached to it.

The wet footprints still appear on the third floor. Housekeeping still dries them. On the log, they call it the towel call.