Occidental Hotel

The Occidental Hotel in Buffalo, Wyoming, began in 1880 as little more than a tent. Charles Buell, who first sheltered travellers on the Bozeman Trail at the foot of the Bighorn Mountains, built a two-storey log hotel with six rooms, a saloon, kitchen and livery stable; he later replaced it with a brick hotel, adding to it in 1908 and 1910. Its guest list, as the hotel tells it, runs from Buffalo Bill Cody, Theodore Roosevelt and Calamity Jane to the gunman Tom Horn and, according to local tradition, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

The hotel declined through the Depression and had become run-down by the 1980s, closing from 1986 to 1997. Dawn Dawson bought it in 1997, spent about a decade restoring it, and had it listed on the National Register of Historic Places; she also opened a museum on the premises. David and Jackie Stewart became managing partners in 2008 and bought the property in 2015.

The best-known ghost is Emily, said to be a child who died of cholera or typhoid in the early 1900s. One version makes her the seven-year-old daughter of a woman who worked from an upstairs suite; another calls her an escort’s daughter. Visitors describe a thin, dark-haired girl in white who taps shoulders and tugs on trouser legs before vanishing. Guests leave stuffed animals for her, and children write her notes. The legend’s origin is clearly uncertain, and historians dispute whether the hotel was ever a brothel; the claim rests largely on a worn back staircase.

Other reports collected by local media include a tall figure in Victorian clothing nicknamed Margaret, the jingle of spurs on the stairs, and the smell of perfume. In a 2023 Cowboy State Daily feature, hotel staff named Joel Mera, Penny Ramirez, Vanessa Vann and Nancy Lehnert described bottles popping off bar shelves, glasses breaking, a single piano key sounding when no one was at the piano and a moving iron in room 56. A couple staying in the Herbert Hoover room said they smelled a woman’s perfume and then each felt someone slide into the bed between them. In February 2011 a regional group, Black Hills Paranormal Investigators, spent two days at the hotel and reported audio and a video of a door opening in Room 19, though the group’s own methods are not independently reviewed.

Guests and staff report a child’s apparition who taps shoulders, a lady in Victorian dress, the jingle of spurs, the smell of perfume, bottles and glasses moving at the bar, a piano key sounding on its own, and the sense of someone getting into bed.

The second-floor hallway and suites such as the Herbert Hoover and Teddy Roosevelt rooms, the staircase, the saloon bar and the ground-floor piano.

The hotel presents its ghosts as part of its Old West character, alongside bullet holes, a saloon and its museum. It features on Wyoming’s haunted-places lists and in local radio and newspaper Halloween features.