Strater Hotel

The Strater doesn't promote its ghost stories. A lot of guests over 139 years have had them anyway. Louis L'Amour wrote Westerns in Room 222.

The Strater Hotel doesn't promote its ghost stories. The official history skips over them entirely. That silence is an interesting position to hold about a 139-year-old Victorian hotel with a cast-iron safe in the lobby, a saloon called the Diamond Belle where pianists play honky-tonk all afternoon, and a guest room named after Louis L'Amour because he wrote parts of his Sackett novels there while the music leaked up through the floorboards.

Henry Strater opened the hotel in 1887 in Durango, a railroad town at the bottom of the San Juan Mountains. He was a Cleveland pharmacist who'd decided the town needed a grand hotel, so he built one out of 376,000 native red bricks with hand-carved sandstone cornices, spent $70,000 doing it, and lost control of the building to his older brother within a few years. The hotel passed through several owners, nearly went under during Prohibition, and was run by the Barker family from 1926 until 2021, when Rod Barker sold it to Ross Garrett and Karen Hutcherson.

The ghost stories the official history skips over mostly involve three figures. There's a woman in a Victorian dress who appears in the hallway on the third floor, usually near the old rooms that overlook Main Avenue. There's a child, sometimes described as a little girl, sometimes a boy, who gets blamed for the sound of small footsteps running down carpeted hallways. And there's an older man, often in work clothes, who turns up in the Diamond Belle Saloon at odd hours.

Guests have reported these figures in enough numbers over enough years that the stories kept getting printed in travel articles long after the hotel stopped promoting them. The ghost tour operating out of Durango still includes the Strater on its loop.

Room 222 is the room guests still ask for by number, and it has the quietest supernatural reputation in the building. The L'Amour room sits directly above the Diamond Belle, and L'Amour asked for it every time he came because he wanted the piano music while he wrote. Guests who stay there describe falling asleep to ragtime and waking up to the building groaning the way a Victorian building groans when the temperature changes. Whether that counts as a ghost depends on what you want to count.

The better read might be that the Strater isn't dramatically haunted, just deeply lived-in. It's been open almost continuously since Grover Cleveland's first term. Thousands of people have slept here. A cast-iron register behind the front desk still has signatures from the 1890s in it. If you think old buildings hold anything at all, this one holds a lot.