Colorado Haunted Hotels - Windsor Hotel

Between now and late spring, we're sharing the history and haunted legends associated with each of the hotels and B&Bs included in our forthcoming book,  

Windsor Hotel

WILD WEST GHOSTS:
an amateur ghost hunting guide
to Haunted Hotels
in southwest Colorado.

This week, we feature the Windsor Hotel  in Del Norte, Colo. (If you missed -- or want to revisit -- the paranormal investigation we conducted at this hotel, you can click here, as well as watch YouTube clips from our actual investigation.)

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Historical Context

 

The current site of the town of Del Norte falls within the vicinity of the Old Spanish Trail system used as a trade route from Santa Fe to California. By the 1870s, the area saw streams of prospectors flooding into Colorado to seek the rich deposits of gold and silver discovered in the San Juan Mountains. In 1872, the town of Del Norte sprang up on the Rio Grande River as a supplier and financial center for mining operations. At one point, freight wagons lined up on Grand Avenue for a mile waiting to head into the mining camps to the west.

In its boomtown heyday, Del Norte climbed to over 10,000 inhabitants, filled with saloons, dance halls, and local brothels as well as an opera house, movie theater, and library. During the boom years, the failure of only one vote prevented Del Norte from becoming the state capitol. In anticipation, town planners built extra wide roads capable of turning around six-horse teams.
 

Offsetting these high aspirations, the community experienced a Wild West town’s expected share of murders, stage robberies, jail escapes, and lynchings.

Lobby staircase

According to current co-owner Steve Whitehead, the Windsor is the oldest hotel in Colorado.  Enterprising citizens constructed the establishment in 1874 with local masonry and bricks. The building had expanded three times by 1888.

The hotel operated until the late 1970s, when it closed and sat empty for the next fifteen years. On the evening before scheduled demolition, Whitehead and several other locals decided to save the historic hotel. Pulling together enough funds overnight to buy the dilapidated property, they formed a committee called the Windsor Restoration and Historic Association to prevent the site’s fate of becoming a fast food restaurant.

From that point forward, the town joined together to preserve and later renovate the hotel. Grants and investors made it possible to restore the building above and beyond its former glory days.

Legends, Stories, and Guest Experiences

The hotel’s night supervisor said she thought it unsurprising a 140-year-old hotel would be haunted – the whole town is, including the streets and other buildings. One local resident shared stories about a nearby private residence where owners had captured apparitions by accident on multiple occasions in photos of the house.

Hotel co-owner Steve Whitehead reported he witnessed a rock fly out of a door he’d just opened while conducting a tour during building renovations. No one was in that room at the time. A housekeeper said she watched undisturbed clothes hangers start to move – swinging, stopping, swinging again. The radio also suddenly came on and lights switched on and off in Room 210 while she worked.

A guest staying in Room 204 reported hearing someone vacuuming in the hallway at 1 a.m. She was about to peek out her door but the noise quit, only to begin five minutes later. Staff doesn’t vacuum in the middle of the night.

Room where Maud Heinz
committed suicide

The most often reported site on the premises with paranormal activity is Room 209, where hotel guest Maud Heinz committed suicide in 1906. She’d arrived by train one morning, checked in under an alias, and then purchased a .38-caliber revolver and cartridges. She returned to her room and shot herself. She’d left a note, explaining her true identity, and the story soon came out. 

Two years earlier, she’d suffered an accident after an incident with a runaway horse, and she had “visionary spells” thereafter, according to Del Norte newspaper the San Juan Prospector in an article published April 7, 1906.  Shortly before her death, she’d had a lover’s quarrel and decided to end her life. In the century since then, guests report hearing and sometimes seeing her. 

Lodgers recount awakening in the middle of the night to see Maud peering down at them, and one overnight guest reported he awoke to hear her scream.

One of the more unusual features of the hotel lies below the south wing, accessible only from the outside courtyard: an ice cellar. The facility served double duty in the early days as a storage area to keep bodies during the winter, pending the spring thaw while remains awaited proper burial. We found no particular ghostly accounts relating to the cellar, but it certainly adds to the atmosphere!

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 Next week, we share history and ghostly stories for the Hand Hotel in Fairplay, haunted by at least five separate apparitions as well as a ghost dog!.

Colorado Haunted Hotels - The Fairlamb House B&B

Between now and late spring, we're sharing the history and haunted legends associated with each of the hotels and B&Bs included in our forthcoming book,  

Fairlamb House B&B

 WILD WEST GHOSTS:
an amateur ghost hunting guide
to Haunted Hotels
in southwest Colorado.

This week, we feature The Fairlamb House B&B  in Delta, Colo. (If you missed -- or want to revisit -- the paranormal investigation we conducted at this hotel, you can click here, as well as watch YouTube clips from our actual investigation.)

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Historical Context

 For hundreds of years, this area was homelands to the Ute tribes, and by the early 1800s, a trading post sprang up in the region to serve Native Americans, traders, and trappers. In 1828, Antoine Robidoux built Fort Uncompahgre, established as a fur trading center. The nearby 200-year old Ute Council Tree still commemorates the tribe's Chief Ouray and his wife Chipeta. Legend says Chipeta was the only Indian woman ever permitted to sit in council meetings held at this site.

Annual Ute powwow in Delta

      Delta County was created by the Colorado legislature in 1883. The town took its name from the delta that forms at the confluence of the Uncompahgre and Gunnison rivers. The area’s story reflects a heritage of pioneering agriculture, mining, as well as land and water development.

Millard and Stella Fairlamb built The Fairlamb House in 1906, constructed of local Delta brick in classic Four Square architectural style. It was the first home in the area built by workers on an eight-hour work day. The house stood on a bluff that overlooked the delta below, and family members erected a series of houses that stretched an entire block. The Fairlamb House is listed on the State Historical Register.

One curious story centers on Millard, who combed through the nearby Utah desert in search of Indian artifacts. Finding a human skeleton, he gathered up the bones, put them in a box, and stored them in his third-floor attic. There they stayed for a number of years, always scaring the Fairlamb children. Eventually, the skeleton was turned over to the Utes for interment.

The house passed from Millard and Stella to Charles and Ethel Fairlamb and later Harley and Ethel (Lale) Fairlamb Jackson, and it continued to stay in the family for over seventy-two years. The Fairlambs experienced their share of life’s tragedies, including the death of one household member after she fell from a ladder hanging Christmas lights. After 1978, the house continued under had two subsequent owners, both doctors, and also numerous renters.

John Taylor and Elizabeth Thompson purchased the house in 1994, and they’ve maintained the turn-of-the-century décor.

Guestroom directly below attic
hosting the skeleton

Legends, Stories, and Guest Experiences

Despite the fact that there was a skeleton in the attic for years and at least one Fairlamb family member died on the premises, current B&B owners John and Elizabeth attest they’ve personally witnessed very few instances of paranormal activity other than the occasional odd noises that an old house can make. 

Elizabeth did, however, experience an unexplained phenomenon during the renovations. She’d hired a high school girl to help, and soon the student pointed out a small seashell placed on a shelf kept showing up in other parts of the house. At first, Elizabeth thought the girl was playing a joke on her. But when she started paying attention, she, too, noticed the rogue seashell popping up in strange places.

Millard Room - It was at the foot of this
bed the five trapped spirits appeared.

Then in 1996, two years after the new owners purchased the property, they learned five female spirits resided at the Fairlamb. During the Ute powwow that year, the B&B played host to several visiting Native Americans, including a Lakota medicine man and his wife. That first morning at breakfast, the couple told John and Elizabeth they’d almost left in the middle of the night because of what happened to them. The medicine man recounted that they both woke to five benevolent female spirits standing at the foot of their bed in the Millard Room. They told the shaman they were trapped in the house.

The Lakota offered to perform a release ceremony, which included chanting and burning sage that he wafted with an eagle feather. The ceremony may have released those five trapped ghosts, but paranormal activity continued for at least one woman we interviewed, who regularly stays at the Fairlamb.

A year after the Lakotas visited, she reported seeing a wicker chair rocking on its own in the bathroom while she washed her face. She again stayed at the house in 2001, this time with her husband and baby. Back in the same bathroom, lights started to flicker and she heard banging noises. On a third visit, nothing paranormal occurred to her, but she still sensed an unseen presence – even when alone in the house.

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Next week, we share history and ghostly stories for Fairplay's Hand Hotel, "home" to six distinct entities, including a ghost dog.

Colorado Haunted Hotels - Linda Goodman's Miracle Inn

We're sharing the history and haunted legends associated with each of the hotels and B&Bs included in our book, which features fourteen establishments: 

Miracle Inn

 WILD WEST GHOSTS:
an amateur ghost hunting guide
to Haunted Hotels
in southwest Colorado.

Available now as a trade paperback from Amazon and Barnes&Noble. Also available as a Kindle e-book.



This week, we feature Linda Goodman's Miracle Inn (formerly Last Dollar Inn)  in Cripple Creek, Colo. (If you missed -- or want to revisit -- the paranormal investigation we conducted at this hotel, you can click here, as well as watch YouTube clips from our actual investigation.)

Linda Goodman's Miracle Inn consists of two structures -- an 1890s brownstone and a reconstructed Victorian-style boarding house -- even though it's not readily apparent from the outside that both buildings comprise a single inn. But experiencing the oft-reported hauntings within the original brownstone on the western end seems like a bonus when staying at this posh and elegant B&B.

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Historical Context

Cripple Creek's 1800s history began as a cattle pasture before Bob Womack discovered an ore deposit in 1890 and sparked the last great Colorado Gold Rush. Soon after, prospectors flooded the region, increasing the population from 500 to 10,000 people in three years.

In 1896, three successive fires destroyed most of the city. Resourceful citizens rebuilt Cripple Creek over the next few months, and many of the historic buildings still in existence date back to that renovation.
 
These days, only a few small mines still operate. The real gold comes from local gambling casinos, legalized
in 1991, and they now occupy many of the historic buildings.

Goodman herself may
haunt the B&B

Shortly after the 1896 fires, a new city ordinance required builders to use brick. A gentleman from the East Coast moved to town and built what would later become Linda Goodman’s Miracle Inn. He modeled his new home after the brownstone style he was used to and erected it next door to a boarding house.

In the decades that followed, the inn also became a boarding house, a bookkeeping office, and a private residence. Legend holds that ladies of the night operated out of the guestrooms.  Even Nicola Tesla reportedly stayed there during his Colorado electrical experiments.

During the 1960s, author Leland Feitz summered in the house. After meeting astrologist/author Linda Goodman (Sun Signs) at a book signing, he invited her to Cripple Creek. Soon after, she rented the house and eventually bought it, adding her own touches, including the large stained glass window of St. Francis of Assisi. 

Rick and Janice Woods bought the building in the 1990s. They also purchased the neighboring boarding house, reconstructing it in a Victorian style and adjoining it to the brownstone to open the Last Dollar Inn.

Jason Barton and Sofia Balas purchased the historic inn in 2013, in the eleventh hour before the building faced auction and an uncertain future. 

They’ve kept much of the décor of the original house intact, including many of Goodman’s antiques and memorabilia. The B&B’s guestrooms are dedicated to various former residents as well as to notorious Cripple Creek madam Pearl DeVere.

Legends, Stories, and Guest Experiences

The house has a long-time reputation for hauntings, and this feature attracts a number of its guests.

A psychic told Jason and Sofia the basement of the brownstone contains a spirit portal. If this is true, the ghosts certainly don’t stay downstairs. 

Even before the couple purchased the B&B, they experienced paranormal activity during a vacation stay. Opting for the Linda Goodman Room, they witnessed the door open and slam by itself (in the absence of any draft). Sofia saw a picture in the bathroom shift on its own and move. 

They also heard someone sitting in a wicker chair and sensed a presence standing by their bed watching them. More impressive, they observed a shadow walk past their door. In the Womack Room, Sofia witnessed a shadow apparition pass through the closed closet door. 

Nicola Tesla stayed here 3 months
while conducting electrical experiments

Other guests report footsteps in the hallway, and a number have experienced their hair pulled from behind. One previous inn owner felt an unseen presence pat the top of his head while he leaned over the bed in the Linda Goodman Room. That owner also reported the door to the Feitz Room mysteriously closing and locking on its own (an action that takes manual locking). 

According to an article in the Pikes Peak Courier, some guests have heard a “phantom train” while staying in the Feitz and DeVere rooms; a child ghost has appeared at the desk in one of the rooms, and the apparition of a train conductor has shown up in the living room.  

Sofia has often felt a cold spot move through her while serving breakfast, an activity that often happens while she sits at the table. Guests have also noted the moving cold spot in the dining room.

Even if the spirit portal basement is off limits to the public, paranormal interactions at the ground level and on the second floor in the original building abound for the more adventurous and ghost-seeking guest.

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In the next article, we share history and ghostly stories for Del Norte's Windsor Hotel, where a tragic early-day suicide still haunts the premises.