Ghosthunting Colorado. Kailyn Lamb
turning on and off very quickly and feeling a depression in the bed next to the guest as if someone were lying down.
Room 320 has been called the Murder Room and is one of the most requested in the hotel. Like the attic, it has also had many paranormal investigators visit it. Another thing that is different about this room is that it is the only one with a decorative plaque on the headboard. This brass plaque reads: “Come sweet dreams; the hour of sweet beguile.” Research indicates this passage is fairly close to the English translation of the French poem “The Child Asleep” by Clotilde de Surville, which reads “Sweet error! He but slept, I breathe again / Come gentle dreams, the hour of sleep beguile! / Oh when shall he, for whom I sigh in vain / Beside me watch to see thy waking smile.” No one is sure why this room in particular has this embellishment.
Strangler’s Row
Before the Lower Downtown (LoDo) area became the long strip of bars and restaurants it is today, it was filled with businesses of a different kind. When the city was founded, present-day Market Street was called McGaa Street after William McGaa who, after General William Larimer (who helped found the city of Denver), was responsible for naming streets. However, he soon became known as the town drunk and the city founders voted for a name change. Benjamin Holladay was the next man to have the street named in his honor. His claim to the right was that he had picked Denver over Auraria to be the main station for the stagecoach in the 1860s. When the street started to be filled with brothels, however, the Holladay family petitioned for its name to be changed so they would not be associated with the newly founded red-light district. Their request was granted and the name changed to Market Street, which it is still called today. For some time during its brothel days, Market Street began to be known by a different name due to a series of murders that the paper likened to England’s Jack the Ripper. Indeed, some papers called the murderer Jack the Strangler, and this was how Market Street got the unfortunate nickname “Strangler’s Row.”
In 1894, papers across the United States were buzzing about three murders that had happened in Denver, specifically on the west side of the 1900 block of Market Street. All three women were prostitutes, and all three were left dead in their beds with no signs of struggle. First killed was 37-year-old Lena Trapper (1911 Market St.), next was 23-year-old Marie Constassot (1925 Market St.), and last was a woman suspected to be in her 20s named Kiku Oyama (1975 Market St.). The three women were killed in a short time frame, within a few days of each other, according to The Atlanta Constitution in a November 16, 1894, article called “Denver’s Great Murder Mystery.” The murderer came in, most likely posing as a customer, and silently strangled them. There were no known witnesses, although another prostitute reportedly saw a man leaving the building in a hurry after the death of Oyama. Supposedly, a clairvoyant also came to the police after the murders and used her abilities to provide a description of the killer. Some of the details she gave to the police matched several details they had already found in their investigations, such as describing an item taken from Oyama by the killer.
Because of the lack of witnesses, no one was actually charged with the murders of these women, although many men were arrested. According to The New York Times, an Italian man was arrested after he was caught in the act of strangling a woman named Marie Anderson; however, the police thought he was not the real strangler but a copycat.
Despite arrests being made, the women of Denver were still terrified, and many of those working in the brothels were worried the Strangler would strike again. Some of the working girls also started to claim that they had seen the ghost of Trapper in buildings near where she had been murdered. After Oyama’s death, however, the Strangler disappeared and no more women were murdered. To this day the question of what happened to Jack the Strangler remains unanswered.
Two friends of mine actually worked at the Oxford Hotel, and both occasionally worked graveyard shifts during their employment. In addition to confirming most of the above ghost stories, they had some of their own to add as well. They preferred not to be mentioned by name, but one of them, who worked at the hotel for more than five years, participated in several of the haunted tours throughout the hotel as well as a séance in room 320. During one of the tours he took a mother and daughter up to the attic to take pictures with their digital camera. The first couple of images showed just a couple of orbs, but the next one showed hundreds in the same spot. He said it felt as if the spirits had all rallied into the room because they were there taking photos. Both employees said that the theory behind the haunting in the attic is that it was originally divided into rooms for the overflow of soldiers staying there during times of war, some of whom were sick and injured and may have died there. The other employee mentioned that visitors to the attic can see the divisions where the different rooms were.
Both of my friends also claim that the postman is also not the only ghost that has been seen in the Cruise Room, and the spirit of a little girl has been seen around there and the second floor. One of them mentioned a time that the girl was photographed in the Cruise Room right after opening when there were only two customers at the bar, and they think she may have been the daughter of a prostitute who died in an unknown accident in the hotel. She also said that she got odd vibes walking through the hotel and that when she would do rounds of the building at night she would sometimes hear voices from rooms she knew were empty.
One of the last things the two mentioned was a suicide that happened in a room on the second floor. While nothing incredibly out of the ordinary happens in the room itself, there is an orb that continually seems to fall out of the second story window from which the man threw himself. According to the pair, the hotel currently no longer advertises itself as a haunted hotel and has stopped giving haunted tours, although CBS did rate it as one of the top haunted tours in 2012. The hotel may no longer present itself as a haunted getaway, but customers still flock to room 320 and the rest of the site, hoping to catch a glimpse of past lodgers who never left.
CHAPTER 5
Denver’s Infamous Brothels
DENVER
The Navarre building, which is now a museum, used to house a brothel. Its location directly across the street from one of Denver’s most prestigious hotels caused some problems for businessmen who did not want to be seen going from one place to the other. Tunnels underneath the buildings helped to solve that problem.
BAR BRAWLS AND LOOSE WOMEN are indelibly part of the history of the Old West and, once Denver was established, it too had a red-light district. Some of these brothels became connected to expensive hotels via an intricate underground tunnel system that was built beneath the Mile High City, as its wealthy did not want to be seen coming and going from such establishments. Rumor has it that these passageways were put to further use during Prohibition, and many businesses used them to transport liquor and sometimes trade it with brothels. While the tunnels still exist underneath Denver, they are not widely used, many of them have been closed down, and some, like those underneath the capitol building, are used for storage. One of the brothels on this tunnel system could be found across the street from the Brown Palace Hotel, connecting the hotel to one of the city’s top businesses for ladies of the night.
THE NAVARRE
THIS BUILDING WAS ORIGINALLY BUILT as a school for girls in 1880 and was called the Brinker Collegiate Institute. While originally it served only women, it soon after became a coed institution. After the death of the school’s namesake in 1889, the building was sold and reopened as Hotel Richelieu, a more infamous type of establishment. Here gentlemen could dine with ladies of the night, either publicly or in more private areas of the building.
The thought process behind this idea was that there was a pool of clients just across the street, but business did not take off quite as quickly as its owners might have hoped. As noted, to be seen coming to and from The Navarre from the Brown was not ideal for a gentleman, and that was how the idea for the tunnel system was born. The first tunnel connected the basement of the Brown Palace Hotel to the Hotel Richelieu around 1892. Later, a whole system of tunnels would spread underneath Denver, connecting other