Brown Palace Hotel

Henry C. Brown, who had homesteaded much of Denver’s Capitol Hill, chose a triangular plot where his neighbourhood met the old downtown street grid – land where he had once grazed cattle – for a hotel to rival any in the country. Architect Frank Edbrooke designed it around a soaring atrium lobby lined with golden onyx from Mexico, carried on an iron and steel frame that put the half-built Brown Palace on the cover of Scientific American in May 1892. It opened that year as Denver’s tallest building and one of America’s first fireproof hotels.

The Brown became the city’s parlour. Theodore Roosevelt was the first sitting president to visit, in 1905; Dwight Eisenhower ran his 1952 campaign from its second floor and used it so often it was called the Western White House; the Beatles, presidents and royalty followed. In 1959 a lobby meeting helped launch the American Football League and the Denver Broncos.

Its darkest night came on 24 May 1911. In the hotel’s Marble Bar, Frank Henwood, a New Yorker in Denver on business, shot Sylvester Louis “Tony” von Phul of St. Louis – the two men were rivals for the attention of socialite Isabel Springer, wife of businessman and mayoral candidate John W. Springer – and fatally wounded a bystander, George Copeland. The killings led to a series of sensational, highly public trials.

The hotel’s ghost stories are told mainly on its own tours: each October the Brown Palace has run historian-led haunted tours recounting what it calls “mysterious sightings and disturbances from our past”. Visitors also like to note the lobby’s onyx, which some claim attracts benign spirits. Compared with Colorado’s more aggressively marketed haunts, the Brown keeps its ghost lore genteel – and firmly rooted in its well-documented history.

The hotel’s tours and self-guided brochure tell of phantom switchboard calls from Suite 904, where socialite Louise Crawford Hill lived and died; a sound system in the Churchill Cigar Bar that changed by itself until a manager scolded “Henry”; a ghostly quartet in the former dining room; and a man dressed as a railroad conductor. A tour guide told the Denver Gazette in 2025 of an unexplained whistle on the tenth floor. None of these accounts has been independently investigated.

The atrium lobby and upper galleries, Suite 904, the tenth floor, the Churchill Cigar Bar and the former Marble Bar area linked to the 1911 shooting; the hotel’s October haunted tours visit the best-known spots.

The Brown Palace is a Denver institution, appearing in Joan Didion’s A Book of Common Prayer and the film Our Souls at Night, and on the city’s historic and haunted walking tours. The Henwood–von Phul case remains one of Denver’s most retold crime stories.