Hotel St. Nicholas

Started as a miners' hospital during the Cripple Creek gold rush in 1898, then shifted to caring for the mentally ill before becoming a hotel. The Victorian bones are still very much intact.

The Hotel St. Nicholas began its life in 1898 as a hospital established by the Sisters of Mercy, a Catholic nursing order. Sister Mary Claver Coleman arrived in Cripple Creek in 1894 to bring medical care to the booming gold mining district, initially operating out of a wooden building on East Eaton Street. The permanent hospital was named for and dedicated by Colorado's Bishop Nicholas Matz. Its first patient, Elijah Ayers, a miner injured in a fall at the Specimen Mine, arrived on March 12, 1898. For nearly three decades, the Sisters of Mercy provided medical care to miners, their families, and patients with mental health challenges until they left Cripple Creek in 1924. The building subsequently served as the Hilltop Nursing Home from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s, then as a boarding house, before sitting vacant for years. In 1995, it was purchased and meticulously restored, reopening as The Hotel St. Nicholas.

With its long history as a hospital and nursing home -- places where people suffered, died, and were mourned -- the building has developed a reputation as one of the most haunted hotels in Colorado. The spirits are thought to include nuns, children, and former patients from the hospital's mental ward. The most well-known resident ghost is Petey, thought to be the spirit of a young boy once cared for by the Sisters of Mercy. Petey's playful nature manifests through small objects being moved around the hotel and cigarettes mysteriously hidden in the Boiler Room Tavern, as if a child were playing keep-away with the adult guests.

Another frequent ghost is The Miner, a gold miner who has been observed on the back stairway and occasionally seen sitting on a stool in the hotel office, as if waiting to be seen by the doctor. Guests have reported flickering lights throughout the building, whispers heard outside guest room doors, objects moving on their own, and the unmistakable feeling of a presence in rooms that should be empty. The hotel embraces its haunted history, and the combination of the Sisters of Mercy's legacy, the suffering of the mining-era patients, and the building's decades of vacancy before restoration make the Hotel St. Nicholas one of the most atmospheric lodgings in the Cripple Creek district.