Tarabino Inn

Seven ghosts, one aggressive, one who smokes cigars in the library. The Tarabino Inn is Trinidad's quietest haunted stop.

A guest in the West Gable Room on the third floor woke up to feel someone sit down on the edge of her bed, grab her shoulder, and tell her, in two words, to get out. She left before breakfast.

The West Gable is the most intensely reported space in a building a visiting psychic once counted seven separate spirits in. Seven is a lot for a bed and breakfast, but the Tarabino Inn has the raw material for it. It's a 1907 Italianate brick mansion on a quiet residential street at 310 East 2nd in Trinidad, Colorado, built by the Tarabino brothers with money they'd earned running the Famous Department Store on the Santa Fe Trail in the late 1800s. Trinidad itself is one of the stranger towns in the state. It sits at the junction of the Santa Fe Trail and Raton Pass, it was the site of the 1914 Ludlow Massacre just up the road, and its residents include a long line of Italian merchants, coal miners, mountain men, and Spanish settlers. The Tarabino Inn has all of them under its roof.

The ghost most guests see first is the woman at the foot of the stairs. She's in a long gown, she stands near the main staircase in the entryway, and she watches people climb. She doesn't move. She doesn't speak. On the second floor a different woman taps guests on the shoulder and vanishes before they turn around. Barney Tarabino, one of the brothers who built the house, stays in the Walnut Suite, the room believed to have been his. Staff call it Barney's room. The activity there is steady enough that the owners don't bother renaming it.

The library smells of cigars. Guests describe it as a sweet, distinct cherry-tobacco smoke with no source, filling the room the way it would if an older man was sitting in the armchair enjoying one. Co-owner Teresa Vila has smelled it herself. She's also seen the shadow of a man walking, and she's the source for most of the other activity reports. A little girl knocks on doors and walls upstairs. An elderly woman turns up in the hallways. A dog has been seen on the first floor. Batteries in remote controls drain overnight. None of this, Vila notes, is something she went looking for.

The common thread is being watched. Most people who report something at the Tarabino don't describe being scared. They describe feeling examined. It's the ghost equivalent of a house full of people who've lived there longer than you, and who'd like to know who you are and what you're doing in their parlor.

The Tarabino operates quietly. It doesn't have the Stanley Hotel's line of ghost-tour buses or the Crescent's reality-show film crews. Trinidad is three hours south of Denver on the way to New Mexico and most road-trippers blow through it. The inn keeps turning up on Colorado ghost-hunter lists anyway: seven spirits, one confirmed aggressive one, a co-owner willing to talk on the record, and nothing about the place trying too hard.

The West Gable guest did not finish her booking.