Victor Hotel

Eddie McDermott fell down the Victor Hotel elevator shaft. It's been running itself at 3am ever since, always stopping on the third floor.

Eddie McDermott was one of the miners who lived at the Victor Hotel semi-permanently after the Cripple Creek gold rush started tapering off. He always stayed in Room 301. One night, he went for the elevator, the door opened, and there was no car behind it. He fell down the shaft.

The hotel's elevator has had a mind of its own ever since. It runs on its own at three in the morning, rides up and down the shaft with nobody inside, and almost always stops on the third floor.

The Victor Hotel is a four-story brick Victorian on Victor Avenue, in a gold rush town that no longer has a gold rush. The current building dates to 1899 and 1900, put up by Frank and Harry Woods, the brothers who founded the town of Victor in 1893 to service the Cripple Creek mines. An earlier wooden Hotel Victor stood across the street and burned to the ground in the August 1899 fire that took out most of Victor. The shaft house on the current lot burned with it. The brick version that replaced both has stood for over 125 years.

The story that makes this hotel different isn't Eddie, actually. It's what happened when the Woods brothers dug the foundation. They hit a body of rich gold ore. They opened the Gold Coin Mine directly under the building, and over the next several decades they pulled roughly six million dollars of gold out of tunnels running beneath the Victor business district. The hotel was built on top of its own active mine.

Then the fourth floor. In Colorado winters above 9,000 feet, the ground freezes too hard to dig graves until spring. The Victor's fourth floor served as the town's seasonal morgue. Bodies were brought up there and stored, sometimes for weeks, until the cemetery ground softened enough to bury them. The bulk of the reported activity today is on the fourth floor. Guests describe footsteps in empty hallways, cold patches that move through rooms, and the sense of someone standing just behind them in the corridor, keeping pace.

Eddie, though, is the ghost with the name and the outfit. Witnesses describe an older gent in a flannel shirt, old jeans, and a baseball cap. A geology professor staying in the hotel reported being woken up repeatedly by an elderly man tapping on the radiator. A different woman saw the same man working the elevator controls. Former hotel manager Bill Kemp documented both accounts when the Victor underwent its 1993 restoration, and the sighting descriptions have been close to identical across decades.

Room 301 is where Eddie's body was laid out before the undertaker came. Guests in 301 report misty shapes near the bed, unaccounted footsteps outside the door, and the elevator starting its three a.m. routine without being called. The third-floor corridor is the hottest part of the building. Ghost Hunts USA and American Hauntings both run overnight events at the hotel, and Room 301 and the hallway outside it are where their recordings cluster.

The basement has its own activity, and it makes sense once you remember what's under the building. The Gold Coin Mine tunnels used to connect directly to the hotel foundation. Kitchen staff working early shifts describe feeling watched from the back of the space, the way you'd feel watched if someone were standing in a mine tunnel looking out through a doorway. The Gold Coin is closed and sealed. Whatever's still down there is attentive.

The Victor isn't flashy. It doesn't pull Stanley Hotel foot traffic, it doesn't run a ghost gift shop, and the town of Victor itself has fewer than four hundred year-round residents. What this hotel has is density: a winter morgue on the fourth floor, a miner in a baseball cap on the third, a sealed gold mine in the basement, and an elevator that took one life and has been acting strange about it for over a century.

The undertaker came for Eddie the morning after the fall. By then, according to the staff, the elevator had already started.