Victor Hotel

At the Victor Hotel in Victor, Colorado, there's an old bird cage elevator that runs itself. The hotel's own account says it activates going up and down the shaft when no one is near it, usually stopping on the third floor, usually around 3 a.m. The ghost people credit for that is a miner named Eddie.

The story everyone tells goes like this. Eddie lived in Room 301 back when the hotel had slid into a miners' boarding house. One night he stepped through the open elevator gate, found no car waiting behind it, and fell to his death down the shaft. He's run the elevator ever since. Ghost hunters still ask for Room 301 by number.

Here's the part the brochures leave out. The town's own historians don't think the fall killed him. The Victor Heritage Society keeps an oral history with Tarie Huber, a Victor local who knew the man as Eddie McDermott, and she says he survived the drop. So the signature ghost of the building may be haunting an elevator that didn't actually take his life, which is a stranger story than the clean tragedy.

The man people describe hasn't changed in decades: an older gent in a flannel shirt, old jeans, and a baseball cap. Local historian Jan MacKell Collins recorded a geology professor who woke again and again to the vision of an old man rapping on the radiator, and a woman who saw the same figure working the elevator controls. Both reports, the hotel manager said, increased after the building was restored in the 1990s.

The hotel is older than the ghost story and stranger than it too. It was built in 1899 over a working gold mine the founders struck while digging the foundation. And in Victor's long winters, the ground froze too hard to dig graves, so bodies were carried up the elevator and stored on the fourth floor until spring. That floor is the most active one in the building today.