Strater Hotel

Behind the Strater Hotel in Durango, Colorado, there's a railroad alley, and people who cross the tracks back there say they've seen a man in a white shirt. He stands on the rails as if he's waiting for a train. Then he's gone.

The story told to explain him is the kind a railroad town keeps to itself. The way locals tell it, a brakeman riding into town one winter was working the handbrake when he slipped on the ice, fell between the cars, and went under the wheels. The Strater doesn't sell that story. The town tells it anyway.

The hotel itself is the unlikely part. The Strater opened in 1887, built by Henry Strater, a pharmacist from Cleveland who decided the railroad town needed a grand hotel. It cost $70,000 and took more than 376,000 red bricks. Below the rooms sits the Diamond Belle Saloon, all ragtime piano and dance-hall girls, and directly above it is Room 222. The Western novelist Louis L'Amour asked for that room again and again, because the honky-tonk drifting up through the floor set the mood for his Old West novels. He wrote much of his Sackett series there. A few accounts say he sometimes took the adjoining room, 223, as well.

The ghost stories climb the upper floors. Guests log them in a Ghost Diary the hotel leaves in every room. Housekeepers say they've been touched on the shoulder while alone. A railway engineer in period clothes is said to cross the lobby. A transparent woman in white drifts the top floors, and the story goes that employees won't work those floors alone.

And the man who'd know best didn't buy any of it. Rod Barker, whose family ran the Strater from 1926 until 2021, told the Durango Herald flatly: "I have seen no evidence whatsoever of ghosts in the Strater." He blamed the ice machines.

Ninety-five years his family kept the place. He never saw the man on the tracks. People who only cross the alley once say they do.