Windsor Hotel

At the Windsor Hotel in Del Norte, Colorado, the entire ghost story fits behind one door. The room is 209, the original number still on it, and you can book it. Guests who do are the ones who report her: waking in the dark to a face leaning over the bed, peering down as if trying to place them. One guest said they heard her scream.

She has a name. In the spring of 1906, a woman checked in under a false one, then bought a .38-caliber revolver and cartridges and shot herself in Room 209. She left a note giving her real identity. The local paper, the San Juan Prospector, ran her death on April 7, 1906. Her name was Maud Heinz.

What drove her isn't simple. The newspaper account that survives says she had been hurt in a runaway-horse accident two years earlier and afterward suffered what were called visionary spells, and that a lover's quarrel came right before the end. The version told around town is softer and sadder: a woman jilted, watching the man she loved leave with someone else, waiting a few days, then crossing the street to buy the gun. Both stories end in 209.

The hotel around it is one of Colorado's oldest, brick-built in 1874, the social and commercial center of the San Juan mining country before it declined and nearly came down. In 1993 a wrecking ball was parked at the curb. Dr. Raymond and Barbara Culp bought the building, handed it to a preservation nonprofit, and roughly two decades and $3 million later it reopened as a working hotel of 20 rooms.

Other rooms have their stories too. A housekeeper in 210 reported hangers swinging and a radio switching on by itself. A guest in 204 heard vacuuming in the hall at 1 a.m., where no one vacuums at night.

But the Windsor's haunting isn't diffuse. It is one room, one sad woman, and a number still on the door.