Hotel Colorado

Ask of each claim here what it is resting on, and the answers separate very cleanly. Start with the sentence that put the Hotel Colorado in the haunted canon. Wikipedia's ghosts section says that "the two suites in the bell towers are frequently reported to be haunted". It carries no footnote — not a weak one, none. The sentence beside it, about a September 2006 visit by CCPI Paranormal Investigations that "recorded two areas of higher electromagnetic energy" outside rooms 325 and 551, traces back to a single ghost-tourism page, which reproduces the investigators' own write-up. That report is worth reading for what it actually claims: a needle "pegged at 10 milligauss" on a Cell Sensor meter, and 8 to 10 milligauss by a locked door on the fifth floor. A hand-held EMF meter registers mains wiring, lift motors, transformers and fluorescent ballasts; in a 130-year-old building that has been rewired repeatedly, and beside a locked service door, a reading of that size is what one would expect to find whether or not anything else is present. No control readings elsewhere in the hotel are published, which is the measurement that would make the figures mean something. The teddy bear is the clearest case, because the town's own newspaper covered the week in question. The story in circulation is that Roosevelt came back from the 1905 hunt empty-handed and the hotel's maids sewed him a bear from scraps. The Glenwood Post of 13 May 1905 devoted its front page to the visit under the headline "After Most Successful Hunt", printed both of the president's speeches, listed his party, his guides, his dinner guests and the two men who managed to shake his hand — and used the word "maid" not once. Roosevelt himself, standing on the hotel balcony, said they had got ten bears. The New-York Tribune's dispatch of 6 May puts the tally at ten bears and four bobcats, four of the bears shot by the president, the skins already at a taxidermist's to be made into rugs. No member of his family was on the trip; the versions that place his daughter Alice at the scene, or that have a maid amusing his young children, describe people who were not there. And the name was not available to be invented in Glenwood in 1905: it had been in American newspapers since the Mississippi hunt of November 1902. What the hotel really did with the teddy bear is better than the legend, and it is in the same newspaper. On 3 July 1909 the Glenwood Post reported that guests "have been treated to a number of surprises this season by Manager Lucas, who secured six Teddy bears, two mute swan, two Canada geese, four eastern ducks and twenty-four Texas squirrels for the parks and hotel court pool. The six Teddy bears are by far the leading attraction." They were live cubs. Two years earlier the Post had noted a "real live Rocky mountain Teddy bear captured near Coal Basin" drawing crowds to a shop window in town. The hotel was trading on Roosevelt and bears within four years of his visit — with animals, in the courtyard, as a paid attraction. That is a documented commercial origin for the association, and it is not a toy. The nickname is thinner than it looks too. "The little White House of the West" appears in Wikipedia sourced to a 1993 retrospective in the Aspen Daily News. In the Glenwood Post's own digitised run, 1897 to 1922, the phrase "little White House" occurs exactly once — in a syndicated short story about a cottage — against 471 hits for "White House". The nickname is real; it is just not contemporary with the presidents it describes. Al Capone is the weakest link of all, and it is the one our own file was built on. Searching every title in Chronicling America between 1925 and 1950, "Capone" and "Glenwood Springs" occur together on three pages, and on all three the coincidence is accidental: a circus proprietor who began his career in Glenwood Springs, an aviatrix from Glenwood Springs, a fatal car crash near Glenwood Springs. The control is healthy — the same corpus returns 197 pages for "Hotel Colorado" and Roosevelt in 1905 alone, and puts Diamond Jack Alterie's Colorado land purchase on front pages. The hotel's own history page, listing the gangsters it entertained in the twenties, names the Verain brothers and Alterie and does not mention Capone at all. Our previous description had Capone keeping a mistress in an upper room and posting lookouts on the roof; none of that appears in the hotel's material, in the investigators' report, or in the contemporary press. Even the hotel's construction cost turns out to rest on nothing. English Wikipedia says the building cost $850,000; Spanish Wikipedia, translated earlier, says $350,000. The change happened on 6 July 2017, in an edit by an anonymous IP address that altered the page by zero bytes — one digit, 3 to 8 — with an empty edit summary and without touching the citation attached to the sentence. The higher figure has since been repeated in a Brigham Young University public-history article, which also states twice that the hotel was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1974. It was not. The National Park Service's own register lists the Hotel Colorado as a National Register property certified on 26 May 1977, with the landmark flag empty; eleven Colorado properties carry that flag and this is not one of them. Which leaves the part of the story that has documents behind it, and it is the part nobody sells. Between 1943 and 1946 this was a hospital for men coming back from the Pacific, with a morgue and eight cells in its basement, chosen by the Navy precisely because it was 700 miles from anything. The hotel's own ghost page hangs its two named ghosts on that period and on the founder — Bobbie, said to have been a nurse here, and Walter, whom the writer Kathy Rippy Fleming argues is not Walter Devereux at all but E. E. Lucas, the controller who became manager in 1905 and owned the place from 1916 until his death in 1927. That page also does something the derivative sites do not: it dates its anecdotes and names its witnesses — a houseman called Dave in 1993, a security guard called Richard leading a night tour, a couple in tower suite 661 — and then declines to vouch for any of it. "We're not here to tell you whether these stories bear any truth, just to pass them on." That is a more honest position than the one the encyclopaedia takes, and it is the one this file adopts.