Hotel Jerome

On the third floor of the Hotel Jerome in Aspen, Colorado, guests keep meeting a small boy who is soaking wet. He stands in the hallway in a towel, shivering, and when someone speaks to him he's gone. What he leaves behind is a trail of wet footprints on the carpet, sometimes a dark wet stain. The staff call him the Water Boy.

The room tied to him is 310, which looks out over the spot where the hotel's swimming pool used to be. The story says a ten-year-old drowned in that pool, and it usually dates the drowning to the 1930s. The pool is gone now; a garden terrace sits where the water was. But the towel call, as housekeeping is said to log it, keeps coming in.

Here's the honest part of the legend. The man who tells it doesn't believe the drowning is real. Dean Weiler, who runs Aspen's "Ghosts, Murder & Mayhem" walking tour, says it plainly: "There's no record of the incident." No newspaper, no death record, no name. A child everyone describes the same way, drowned in a pool nobody can prove took a life.

The hotel itself is real and old. It opened the night before Thanksgiving in 1889, built by Jerome B. Wheeler, a co-owner of Macy's, and it was one of the first buildings west of the Mississippi wired for electric light. The silver crash of 1893 ended Aspen's boom, Wheeler went bankrupt and lost the place to back taxes, and the Jerome limped through the quiet years as a boardinghouse.

Other names get attached to the halls. The staff tell of Katie Kerrigan, a chambermaid who they say turns down beds before housekeeping arrives, and Henry O'Callister, a broke prospector heard sobbing at night. But it's the wet child they keep coming back to.

A local historian once shrugged the whole thing off: "Any historic hotel with a good PR department has a haunting or two." Then a guest checks into a room above the old pool, and the wet child shows up in the hallway again.