Hotel Colorado

The Hotel Colorado was the dream of Walter Devereux, a silver magnate and banker who set out to build a grand resort beside the hot springs at Glenwood Springs. Construction began in 1891 at a cost of around $850,000, and the New York architects Boring & Tilton modelled the Italianate hotel on the Villa de Medici in Rome. It opened on 10 June 1893 with fireworks, an orchestra in the ballroom and a midnight dinner for 300 couples. Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft both stayed for extended visits, which earned it the nickname “the little White House of the West”, and local tradition links a stay in 1905 to the story of the teddy bear.

The hotel’s second life came with the Second World War. The Navy leased it in 1942 and turned it into a convalescent hospital, which was commissioned in July 1943, treated more than 6,500 patients by the end of 1945, and closed in 1946. The building returned to hotel use afterwards, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1977 and joined Historic Hotels of America in 2007. In 2025 that organisation named it among the 25 most haunted historic hotels, a distinction that the Hotel Colorado has since turned into Halloween events.

Its best-known ghost is “Walter”, named for the founder, who is said to walk the halls and lobby in the evenings, announced by the smell of cigar smoke even though smoking has long been banned indoors. One local author has suggested the presence is not Devereux but a later general manager, E. E. Lucas. Another spirit, “Bobbie”, is said to be a nurse from the hospital years who was killed by a jealous officer; guests report a gardenia perfume near her favourite dining-room table. Neither tale is backed by any record that has been published. Further stories describe a girl with a ball, a woman in a floral dress standing over beds in the tower suite, a woman peering through a basement window, and an elevator that moves on its own.

Staff and the hotel itself freely admit that these are stories passed along over many years, and the hotel’s own blog presents them as such. A 2006 investigation reported two areas of higher electromagnetic readings, a result that carries little weight, since old hotels are full of wiring and ordinary sources of magnetic fields.

Cigar smoke in the evenings, gardenia perfume in the dining room, elevators moving by themselves, a little girl with a ball, a woman in a floral dress in the tower suite, and a woman peering through a basement window.

The lobby and halls (Walter), the main dining room (Bobbie), the tower suite room 661, the fifth floor, and the basement.

The hotel appears in Colorado ghost books and podcasts, offers ghost-themed events and a Halloween costume ball, and is promoted by Historic Hotels of America as one of the country’s most haunted.