20 of the Most Haunted Places in Colorado

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Colorado's mining booms, high-altitude isolation, and more than a century of grand hotels, opera houses, and frontier cemeteries have left the state with one of the densest collections of haunted places in the American West. Below are 20 of the most often cited haunted places in Colorado. For each one we give the documented history first, then the ghost story attached to it, presented as local legend rather than confirmed fact.

The Stanley Hotel, Estes Park

Steam-car inventor Freelan Oscar Stanley opened his Georgian Revival hotel above Estes Park in 1909 as a summer resort for wealthy East Coast guests. In 1974 Stephen King and his wife stayed in Room 217 on a night when the hotel was closing for the season, and the nearly empty building gave him the idea for The Shining (1977).

Staff and guests describe piano music from the empty music room, children's footsteps on the fourth floor, and an unseen presence in Room 217. The hotel embraces the stories and runs regular ghost tours.

The Brown Palace Hotel, Denver

Built by real-estate developer Henry C. Brown on a triangular lot downtown, the Brown Palace opened in August 1892 with an eight-story atrium lobby. It has operated continuously ever since and has hosted a long list of presidents and celebrities.

Hotel lore includes a uniformed waiter in the old dining room, a string quartet heard where the San Marco Room once stood, and a former owner said never to have left the building. None of these accounts is documented beyond staff and guest testimony.

Central City Masonic Cemetery, Central City

Central City grew up after John H. Gregory's 1859 gold strike in Gregory Gulch, and its hillside cemeteries hold many of the miners, merchants, and families from the town's first boom decades, along with numerous children lost to disease and hard winters.

Visitors walking among the oldest headstones report figures in period clothing and an unusual stillness. The stories are local tradition, not recorded events.

Cheesman Park, Denver

Cheesman Park sits on what was Denver's first city cemetery, laid out in 1859 as Mount Prospect. When the city turned the land into a park, contractor E. P. McGovern was hired in 1893 to move the remains. He was paid per coffin and was soon accused of splitting bodies into child-sized boxes to collect more fees. The scandal halted the work, and many graves were never moved; remains have been turned up by excavations in the area ever since.

That documented history is unusually well established. The ghost stories layered on top, of figures and voices in the park at night, are legend.

Hotel Jerome, Aspen

Jerome B. Wheeler, a Macy's partner who invested heavily in Aspen's silver mines, opened the Hotel Jerome in 1889, when Aspen was booming. The 1893 silver crash emptied the town, and the hotel spent decades as a cheap boarding house before Aspen's ski-era revival.

The best-known story concerns a little boy, said to have drowned in the old hotel pool, who appears wet and shivering in the halls. Staff also mention a former maid and a silver miner. No record of a child drowning at the hotel has been confirmed.

Croke-Patterson Mansion, Denver

This sandstone château on Capitol Hill was built around 1890–91 for Thomas B. Croke, who soon sold it to lawyer and later U.S. senator Thomas M. Patterson. It later housed offices and apartments, and in 2011 it was bought and restored as the Patterson Inn, which opened in 2013.

The house has a reputation as one of Denver's most haunted. The most repeated story says two guard dogs leapt from a third-floor window during a 1970s renovation; others describe a baby crying in the basement. These accounts are anecdotal.

Riverside Cemetery, Denver

Founded in 1876 along the South Platte River, Riverside is Denver's oldest operating cemetery and the resting place of territorial governors, pioneers, and Union and Confederate veterans.

Its best-known legend centers on the so-called “Denver Witch,” a grave that local storytellers say radiates cold and reaches for passers-by. The story is folklore.

Central City Opera House, Central City

Opened in 1878 with stone walls more than four feet thick, the opera house was built by Central City's Welsh and Cornish mining families. It declined with the town, then was restored and reopened in 1932, launching a summer opera festival that still runs today.

Local tradition says performers from its early decades still visit, along with a woman in a white dress and a miner from the boom years.

Miramont Castle, Manitou Springs

French priest Jean Baptiste Francolon built Miramont in 1895 as a private home, mixing nine architectural styles into a 14,000-square-foot house on the hillside. It later served as a sanatorium run by the Sisters of Mercy and is now a museum.

Miramont is said to host several ghosts, most often a lady in white seen in the upper rooms. The claims come from staff and visitor anecdotes.

The Oxford Hotel, Denver

Opened in 1891 a block from Union Station, the Oxford is Denver's oldest operating hotel. Its 1933 Cruise Room bar, styled after a lounge on the Queen Mary, opened the year Prohibition ended.

Paranormal enthusiasts say a ghostly figure appears in the Cruise Room and in one of the upper rooms, though the stories are thin on specifics.

Molly Brown House, Denver

Built in 1889 on Pennsylvania Street, the house was bought in 1894 by J. J. Brown and Margaret “Molly” Brown, whose fortune came from the Little Jonny gold mine. Margaret survived the sinking of the Titanic in 1912. Historic Denver saved the house from demolition in 1970, and it is now a museum.

Some visitors and staff report the scent of pipe smoke, attributed to J. J., and furniture that seems to move overnight. These are anecdotal reports.

Buffalo Bill Museum and Grave, Golden

William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody died in Denver in January 1917 and was buried on Lookout Mountain above Golden that June. Persistent rumors that Cody, Wyoming, wanted his body moved led to the grave being reinforced with concrete, and a museum opened nearby in 1921.

Local tradition holds that Cody's spirit lingers at the site, though accounts are vague.

Silver Cliff Cemetery, Silver Cliff

Silver Cliff boomed after silver was found in the Wet Mountain Valley in 1878, and its cemetery opened in the early 1880s. Since that decade people have reported small blue-white lights drifting among the graves at night. The lights drew national attention when National Geographic described them in August 1969.

Explanations range from reflected town lights to marsh gas, and none has been proven. Some locals attribute them to the miners buried there.

Black Monarch Hotel, Victor

The building in the old gold camp of Victor, near Cripple Creek, served miners in the 1890s as a saloon, casino, and brothel. After fire, rebuilding, and years of vacancy, it reopened as a themed boutique hotel on May 1, 2019.

Guests report a woman's silhouette in empty windows and late-night laughter and shouting with no source. The stories come mostly from the hotel and local tours.

Museum of Colorado Prisons, Cañon City

The museum occupies the 1935 women's building of the Colorado State Penitentiary, which began as a territorial prison in 1871. It opened as a museum in 1988 and displays the prison's gas chamber, gallows rope, and cells.

Visitors and staff describe voices in empty cell rows and the feeling of being watched, especially on the upper floors.

The Baldpate Inn, Estes Park

Brothers Charles and Gordon Mace opened the inn around 1917 and named it after the 1913 mystery novel Seven Keys to Baldpate. Guests began leaving keys, and the collection now runs past 20,000. Since 2020 the property has operated as Seven Keys Lodge.

Paranormal groups have said the Mace family still lingers, including a woman in the dining room; a former owner told reporters she preferred to think there were no ghosts.

Central City Masonic Lodge, Central City

Freemasons were active in Central City from its earliest gold-camp years, and their historic lodge hall is part of the Central City–Black Hawk National Historic Landmark district, alongside the opera house and the Teller House.

The building is rumored to hold several spirits and is a regular stop for ghost hunters visiting Central City, though specific accounts are scarce.

Fairplay Hotel, Fairplay

An earlier hotel on the site burned, and the current Fairplay Hotel was built in 1922 at 500 Main Street in the old South Park mining town. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Its best-known ghost is “Julia,” said to have taken her own life in the hotel; accounts disagree on why. Guests also describe distant music and creaking floors.

The Molly Brown Summer House, Denver

Avoca Lodge, built in 1897 near Bear Creek in southwest Denver, was the Browns' summer home and the setting for many society parties. The family later leased and sold it; the Fehlmann family bought it in 1928 and their descendants still own it.

Some local stories claim Margaret Brown's cheerful spirit visits, separate from the stories told about her main Denver house. We found no documented accounts beyond word of mouth.

Hotel Colorado, Glenwood Springs

Silver magnate Walter Devereux opened the Hotel Colorado on June 10, 1893, modeling it on Rome's Villa Medici. Theodore Roosevelt stayed so often that it was called “the little White House of the West,” and other guests included William Howard Taft and Molly Brown.

Guests report a girl in Victorian clothing playing with a ball, an elevator moving on its own, and a woman's screams tied to a story about a murdered chambermaid. In 2006 a paranormal group reported unusual electromagnetic readings near two rooms, which proves nothing on its own.

What's Actually Verifiable

We could not verify any specific ghost sighting at the 20 haunted places in Colorado above. What can be verified is the history behind them: the 1859 gold rush, the silver booms of the 1870s and 1880s, the hotel-building those fortunes paid for, and the hard labor and early deaths of mining-town life. That backdrop helps explain why so many of the state's oldest buildings and cemeteries carry ghost stories today.

Frequently Asked Questions

Which Colorado haunted site has the strongest documented history?

Cheesman Park in Denver. Its use as the city's first cemetery and the botched 1893 removal of remains are well recorded, separate from the ghost stories.

Are any of these ghost stories confirmed?

No. The sightings are legends; what is verifiable is the mining-boom and hotel-era history behind each site.

Can you stay overnight at a haunted Colorado hotel?

Yes. The Stanley, the Brown Palace, the Oxford, Hotel Jerome, the Black Monarch, the Fairplay Hotel, the Patterson Inn, and the Hotel Colorado all take overnight guests.

Sources

• Stanley Hotel – Wikipedia
• Cheesman Park – Wikipedia
• Silver Cliff Cemetery – Wikipedia
• A Haunted Victorian Hotel Is Trying to Raise Victor, Colorado From the Dead – 303 Magazine
• Avoca Lodge / “Molly Brown” Summer Home – Denver Public Library
• Tradition is key at historic Estes Park lodge – Denver7

Ghost-Hunting Gear & Further Reading

If you're planning to visit any of these haunted places in Colorado in person, a few books and tools below cover the state's mining history and paranormal-investigation basics in more depth.

• Books on Colorado mining history and ghost towns
• Best ghost hunting equipment for beginners
• Books on The Stanley Hotel and The Shining's true story

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