Windsor Hotel

One of Colorado's oldest hotels, a three-story Victorian in the San Luis Valley built in 1874. It served miners, ranchers, and travelers crossing the remote valley and has been restored to its original look.

The Windsor Hotel in Del Norte was built in 1874, making it one of the oldest hotels in Colorado. Located at the gateway to the San Luis Valley -- one of the most geographically and culturally distinctive regions in the state -- the Windsor served as a social hub for travelers, miners, ranchers, and settlers making their way through the remote high desert and mountain passes of southern Colorado. The hotel fell into disrepair over the decades and was saved from the wrecking ball in the 1990s, restored to its nineteenth-century character while retaining the ghosts that had accumulated over more than a century of continuous occupation.

The hotel's most famous ghost is Maude, whose tragic story has become the defining legend of the Windsor. According to the account, a woman named Maude arrived in Del Norte with the love of her life, and the couple decided to stay at the hotel for six days. Her lover told her he would be right back, but as she watched from the window, she saw him getting into a car with another woman. After four agonizing days of waiting for his return, Maude walked across the street, purchased a pistol, returned to her room, and shot herself. Guests who stay in the room where Maude died have reported hearing her moaning in pain -- from the loss of her love, from the gunshot wound, or perhaps from both. Her ghost has been seen peering over the beds of sleeping male guests, as though she is searching for the man who abandoned her.

The Windsor is home to at least nine distinct spirits beyond Maude. A young girl in Victorian clothing has been seen playing with a ball in various areas of the hotel, and the elevator moves from floor to floor on its own with no passengers inside. The combination of the hotel's extreme age, its location in the isolated San Luis Valley -- a region known for strange phenomena including UFO sightings and cattle mutilations -- and the sheer number of lives that have passed through its doors over 150 years has made the Windsor one of Colorado's most quietly haunted lodgings. Unlike the flashier haunted hotels of the Front Range, the Windsor offers an intimate, deeply unsettling experience in a town where the old West has never entirely faded away.