In Brief
The Hotel St. Nicholas in Cripple Creek, Colorado opened in 1898 as a hospital run by nuns, in a gold town built on mining accidents. The ghost everyone names first is a child. They call him Petey, and he steals cigarettes off the basement bar.
The Full Story
The Hotel St. Nicholas in Cripple Creek, Colorado has a ghost the staff blame for missing cigarettes. Set a pack down on the bar in the basement tavern, look away, and the story goes that it's gone when you turn back. They say it's a boy. They call him Petey.
Which is strange, given what this building used to be. It opened in 1898 as Cripple Creek's first real hospital — a Denver architect named John J. Huddart drew it up, it cost $12,000, and it had electric lights, steam heat, and surgical rooms when most of the town did not. The Catholic Sisters of Mercy built it and ran it. People called them the walking nuns, "for their devotion to serving the sick and poor." In a gold-rush town, that meant the men the mines broke. The Sisters kept the place until 1924.
So the dying came here for almost thirty years. And the spirit people talk about first is a child — a young boy thought to have been in the Sisters' care, mischievous instead of mean. He gets blamed for objects nudged out of place overnight, and most of all for the cigarettes that vanish off the bar in the Boiler Room Tavern. That bar sits in the basement, built around the front plate of the inn's original 1895 coal boiler. They use the boiler as the barback.
He isn't alone. The staff describe a gold miner on the back stairway, sometimes sitting on a stool in the office. And there's one they call Stinky — no figure, just a sudden smell of raw sewage with no source, on one floor or another, near the back stairs.
The building has been a private hospital, a nursing home, a boarding house, and an empty shell since the Sisters left. It reopened as a hotel in the mid-1990s and runs as a 15-room inn today. Same walls since 1898. Whoever's still inside never had to move.
