Hotel St. Nicholas

Petey the ghost boy swipes cigarettes at the Boiler Room Tavern in the Hotel St. Nicholas, a former Sisters of Mercy hospital from 1898.

The bartenders at the Boiler Room Tavern stopped bothering to hide their cigarettes. A pack gets set on the bar, they turn to pour a drink, they turn back, pack is gone. Not pushed down the counter. Gone. This happens often enough that the staff blamed a regular named Petey years ago and never revisited the theory. Petey is the ghost of a boy who lived in the building when it was a hospital.

The Hotel St. Nicholas opened in 1898 as St. Nicholas Hospital, run by the Sisters of Mercy during Cripple Creek's gold boom. The town had more than 500 mining companies working the hills and about 50,000 people packed into a valley built for a tenth that many. Mining accidents arrived at the hospital door in volume: crushed legs, caved-in skulls, lungs full of rock dust. The Sisters stayed until 1924, then the building cycled through a nursing home, a boarding house, and years of vacancy before it reopened as a hotel in 1996.

Petey is the ghost people talk about first, but he's not the only one. Guests in Room 11 on the third floor report a man in a white nightshirt sitting at the edge of the bed, sometimes with his head in his hands. The current owners call him Thomas and describe him as a former patient who didn't make it off the ward. Room 3 has a different energy; several guests have reported waking up to something pressing on their chest and the sense that whatever it was didn't want them there. Housekeeping doesn't like Room 3.

The basement is where the Boiler Room Tavern is now, and it used to be the hospital's morgue. Current and former staff have described hearing furniture drag across the floor overhead when they're closing down, then going upstairs to find every chair pushed in. The claim gets repeated enough by different bartenders that it's harder to dismiss than a single anecdote would be. A piece in Legends of America collected several of these accounts.

Petey's attributed to a child who died of pneumonia at the hospital, though the exact name and date don't appear in any digitized record I can find. What's in the record: guests leave toys and coins in Room 9 and in the stairwell, and staff find them moved by morning. A guestbook in the lobby runs pages of handwritten Petey stories, some from skeptics, some from repeat visitors who came specifically to try to see him. The hotel keeps the book in the lobby where anyone can flip through it.

The building still runs on hospital bones. The rooms are numbered the way the wards were. The Victorian décor is sparse instead of cluttered. The Petey guestbook sits on the front desk next to the check-in cards, and staff point new arrivals at it without ceremony.

Cripple Creek itself is saturated with ghost reports, which complicates the picture. Every building on Bennett Avenue has a story. But the St. Nicholas benefits from continuity, same structure, same rooms, same walls, same basement, since 1898. If any Colorado hotel is going to have a resident ghost, it's the one that used to take in the dying.

The bartenders still put their packs under the counter now, out of habit. A few have started leaving an unopened pack on the bar when they lock up, just to see. By morning, it's usually still there. Occasionally it isn't.