The Oxford Hotel

Florence Montague shot her husband and herself in Room 320 in 1898. Solo male guests still wake to covers pulled off and unseen hands on their arms.

Single men who book Room 320 at The Oxford Hotel wake up to the covers yanked off the bed and the feeling that somebody has been pulling at their arms. The somebody, according to the staff, is Florence Montague, who has been dead since 1898.

Florence walked into Room 320 that year and found her husband in bed with another woman. She shot him and then turned the gun on herself. The Oxford, which had opened in 1891, doesn't argue with any of it. Julie Dunn, the hotel's PR rep, told Denver7 flatly, "Our ghosts are very nice." Elsewhere she's been a little more pointed about Florence: "Florence just likes to have fun with gentlemen." The complaints from Room 320 tend to agree with the second half of that statement more than the first.

The phenomena are consistent. Sheets and covers get pulled off the bed. Arms get pulled by an unseen force. Faucets run in the empty bathroom. Lights flip on and off. It happens often enough that the hotel avoids placing single men in 320 when it can. Women in the room are mostly left alone. Men traveling with wives or girlfriends get the worst of it.

Florence isn't the only ghost at the Oxford. The Cruise Room, the hotel's art deco martini bar, opened the day after Prohibition ended in December 1933. The bar has its own postman. He walks in out of the cold, orders a beer, and mutters the same line before he leaves: "the children, the children, I have to get the presents to the children." The beer stays full on the bar. The story goes that the postman disappeared during a 1930s Christmas run to Central City up in the mountains, and when the snow melted in the spring, searchers found his body with the undelivered presents still on him.

The Oxford sits a little differently in the Denver rotation. The 1898 murder-suicide is in the newspaper archives, not on a ghost-tour flyer. Florence and her husband were real. The staff bring the story up only when asked. The hotel has been open continuously for 128 years and, by staff count, has been haunted for 121 of them.

Frank E. Edbrooke designed the building. He also did the Brown Palace and the Peabody-Whitehead Mansion, which means a surprising share of Denver's ghost stories live inside his blueprints. The Oxford opened in 1891 as a five-story hotel that was taller and more ambitious than anything around it. A century-plus of travelers have slept inside. A small number of them, in one specific room, don't sleep well. If you book 320 alone, the hotel will check you in without comment. Whether the covers stay on the bed is a different question.