Rochester Hotel

Room 204 at Durango's Rochester Hotel is booked for its Victorian ghost. Owner Mary Finn still drifts through in a cloud of roses.

Room 204 is the one guests ask for by name.

They call it the John Wayne Room because Wayne actually stayed there while filming a Western in the 1960s, but that's not why people book it now. They book it because a woman in Victorian clothes has been appearing at the foot of the bed for years, and sometimes, according to accounts collected by hauntedcolorado.net, she rifles through luggage, turns on the hair dryer, and leaves lipstick prints on water glasses. One recurring guest description has her in either an elaborate Victorian dress or what the site calls 'classy lingerie,' which makes this possibly the most specifically dressed ghost in southern Colorado.

The Rochester Hotel sits on East Second Avenue in downtown Durango. It's a fifteen-room brick inn that went up in 1892, during the San Juan silver boom. Alexander C. Hunt, an ex-territorial governor and one of the founders of the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad, laid the foundations in 1890. E.T. Peeples oversaw construction, and by the time J.E. Schutt and W.C. Chapman finished the building in 1892, it was being called the Peeples Hotel. Mary Finn ran it in the early 1900s and gave it the Rochester name that stuck.

Mary is the ghost most staff swear is still around. Her calling card is the smell of roses. It shows up in the upstairs hallway and the kitchen, usually late afternoon or after the housekeeping carts get rolled away for the night. Staff have been tracking it for so long that most of them just say 'Mary's in today' when it hits. Psychics who've toured the building describe her almost identically: white apron with lace trim at the hem, working in the kitchen or the service areas at the back, which is exactly where the owner of a boarding hotel would have spent her day.

Then there's the Woman in White at the top of the staircase. Long white skirt, striped blouse, hair pulled back in a loose bun. Multiple guests and at least two psychic investigators have described her in nearly identical language, and the hotel has come to think of her as an innkeeper on a shift that never ended. On the second floor, the spirit of a young boy has also been reported. He was picked up by a visiting psychic in 2019 and is said to hide in the corner of Room 204, which means the John Wayne Room has two ghosts, not one.

Kirk Komick's family bought the Leland House and the adjoining Rochester in 1992 and has run both ever since. Komick told the Durango Herald in 2015 that he's never personally seen anything, but the guest reports keep coming, and the activity seems to cycle. Some years are dormant. Other years, the stories stack up fast. He also noted, drily, that he doubts the ghost rumors attract or deter a single customer.

Here's what's honest about the Rochester. This isn't a scary place. Nobody's been grabbed, nothing's flown off a shelf, nobody's checked out in a panic. The ghosts here are what you get in a well-run silver-boom hotel that's been cared for by the same family for over thirty years. They're protective, fussy about guests' belongings, and pleasantly weird. The hotel is on the list of the 100 Most Haunted Hotels in America, and it's been featured on a couple of paranormal television shows, but the vibe is closer to friendly roommate than malevolent presence.

Most afternoons, the only sign Mary's around is the roses, hanging in the kitchen doorway a few minutes at a time and then gone.