Windsor Hotel

Maud shot herself at Del Norte's Windsor Hotel in 1906 after her lover left with another woman. Male guests still wake to find her watching.

Sometime in 1906, a woman named Maud shot herself in a room on the upper floor of the Windsor Hotel in Del Norte, Colorado. According to the story Del Norte has been telling for over a century, she arrived in town with the man she loved, the two of them checked in for a six-day stay, and on day one he told her he'd be right back. She watched from the window as he left with another woman. She spent the next several days at the same window convinced he was still coming. When she finally accepted that he wasn't, she crossed the street, bought a revolver, returned to her room, and put it to her head.

Guests in the room today still hear her. A moan in the middle of the night. The feeling of someone leaning over the bed. A face studying yours in the dark, close enough to make out the detail. Several male guests have described waking up to find her hovering, looking into their eyes as if trying to recognize someone. A few, according to the hotel's co-owner Steve Whitehead, have gotten up and asked for a different room.

The Windsor is one of the oldest hotels in Colorado. Whitehead will tell you it is the oldest continuously operating one, with 1874 brickwork, local masonry, and enough original character that it wasn't just restored in the 1990s, it was rescued. The hotel had been in serious decline for decades and was close to demolition when the restoration work began. What came back is a nineteenth-century building with its ghosts intact.

Del Norte sits at the north edge of the San Luis Valley, and anyone who's spent a weekend in the valley knows the local ghost stories are not really the strangest thing happening in the region. The San Luis Valley is one of the most concentrated UFO-sighting zones in the country, the epicenter of the cattle mutilation reporting that made national news in the 1970s, and an ongoing source of accounts of unexplained lights, animal disappearances, and equipment failures. The valley's ringed by the Sangre de Cristo Mountains to the east and the San Juan Mountains to the west, and the isolation has fed the folklore for a long time. The Windsor is the obvious base camp for any of it.

Maud is the headline ghost, but she isn't the only one. The Windsor claims around ten spirits in the building. A young girl in Victorian dress has been seen playing with a ball in the upper hallways. The elevator moves between floors on its own. Footsteps go down corridors that turn out to be empty. Cold patches settle into specific rooms and don't move. For a hotel of this size in a town with a year-round population under two thousand, the density of reported activity is unusual.

The Windsor doesn't run ghost tours. It doesn't do paranormal weekends. It doesn't package Maud the way the Stanley packages Stephen King. What it has is a small, carefully restored nineteenth-century hotel, a working dining room, and a bedroom upstairs where the saddest story in the San Luis Valley happened.

Maud's room is available to book. Whitehead leaves the original room number on the door.