In Brief
The most-requested room at the Rochester Hotel in Durango, Colorado is 204, the John Wayne Room. The Duke never shows. What guests report instead is a friendly Victorian woman who rifles their luggage and switches on the hairdryer.
The Full Story
At the Rochester Hotel in Durango, Colorado, the room everyone wants is 204, the one they call the John Wayne Room. Book it hoping for the Duke and you get someone else: a woman in heavy Victorian dress who goes through your luggage and turns on the hairdryer.
Co-owner Kirk Komick told the Durango Herald the apparition is "usually a woman in heavy Victorian wear or a woman in Victorian lingerie." He says he's never seen her himself. But the staff have a story they keep coming back to. "We once had the hairdryer in 204 go on by itself," Komick said, "and we had to go in and turn it off." Housekeeping, he added, "say they get a strange feeling there."
The room is named for John Wayne, but no record says he ever stayed in it. So many Westerns were filmed in and around Durango that the hotel hung the room with movie posters and gave it his name. The ghost, by every account, is not him.
She isn't the only one people report. Guests describe a Lady in White at the top of the staircase, a Victorian woman in a long white skirt and striped blouse with her hair in a loose bun, standing like an innkeeper watching the floor. A little boy is said to wander the second story. Some accounts tie a rose-scented perfume to Mary Finn, who bought the place in 1905 and gave it the Rochester name.
What's strange is how gentle all of it is. The activity comes and goes, Komick says, dormant some years and busy others, and every guest who meets the woman in 204 comes away with a good story. There's no death on record here, no fire, no tragedy the haunting hangs on. Just an old silver-boom hotel, built in 1892, where the most-booked room comes with a houseguest nobody invited and nobody seems to mind.
