The Brown Palace Hotel

Henry Cordes Brown, who had made a fortune in Denver real estate, opened the Brown Palace Hotel in 1892 after four years of construction; its Italian Renaissance facade and eight-story atrium made it one of the first hotels of its kind in the country, and it was Denver's tallest building when it opened. Louise Crawford Hill, a Denver socialite, lived in suite 904 for roughly the last fifteen years of her life, until her death in 1955. Some years later, during a renovation that had stripped room 904 down to its studs — no telephone included — the hotel's switchboard began receiving calls from that extension; the operator who answered heard only static, and the calls are said to have stopped once staff stopped telling the story on hotel tours. Staff elsewhere in the hotel describe a conductor-like figure near the Brown Palace Club entrance, phantom music and dancing in the old dining room, a waiter glimpsed by the service elevator, children's voices in the hallways, and lights that switch on and off with no one nearby.