The Delaware Hotel was built in 1886 by the Calloway Brothers, three merchant brothers from back east who traveled to Leadville, CO during its ascendancy as a prosperous mining town in the early 1880's. The hotel saw many famous figures from the Old West travel its hallways - U.S. Grant, Butch Cassidy, etc - and it remains one of several steadfast icons from the town's Victorian heyday.
The lobby doubles as an antique shop, and most of the rooms are still open to visitors. Most are small, a little creaky, and all feature antiques (for sale) from various periods.
The hotel itself closes in the winter, a little counter-intuitive since Leadville is fairly close to the small but very nice Ski Cooper resort. The owner doesn't want swinging skis knocking over the lamps, etc - a fair concern, I guess, but one has to wonder if the hotel and the town might not benefit from some overnight tourist business during ski season.
We visited here a couple of years ago, during a ghost hunting tour hosted by one of the groups we belong to. We came up by ourselves this time.
The front desk guy Joe took us on a brief tour of the rooms and shared a few of the stories that the housekeeping staff had about questionable events in the hotel. Specifically, the sound of children in the second floor hallway, and a male spirit who appears occasionally on a couch in the third floor hallway, evidently a somewhat snarky chap who does not like men and appears only to women. (Note: the best haunted hotel stories always come from the housekeeping ladies.)
As far as our investigation, a couple of items of note:
Just after we checked in and arranged with Joe to tag along on his afternoon rounds through the rooms, I was stepping away from the desk and turned toward the stairs when I hit a genuine cold spot about six feet from the front desk. Now, I've been doing this for a few years and have never actually hit a cold spot before. This was a cold spot. I stopped, stepped back, and went over the same space again, and nothing. There was no ventilation grate above, beside or below me - just a small metal carpet joint flange at my feet. It felt planar to me, like a sheet of cold rather than a 'blob' of cold (and it was very cold, easily 15 degrees colder than the outside temperature), it felt like it was moving slowly toward the desk, and there was no activity at the front door just prior, which was 18-20' feet away anyway. Sharon was several feet away and didn't feel it. It didn't last more than 3 seconds or so, but it was interesting.
We got nothing on the static IR video we ran on the room while we were out to dinner, and nothing on the digital recorders. However, we did leave an EMF detector on when we turned in for sleep. The TV, suspended by a bracket over the desk facing the bed, was set on a self timer.
We had done some baseline readings on and around the desk earlier, and there was a very small but steady background EMF response on the meter. As we were watching TV, the meter suddenly off - two or three beeps, a moderate spike, then silence. Eh, ok.
About 2 hours after the TV shut itself off, and we were asleep - probably 2:30AM - the EMF detector suddenly went absolutely nuts. Rapid beeps (indicating a high spike), for 10-15 seconds. Loud and sustained enough it woke both of us up. No movement above us on the third floor, nothing electrical in the room or below us to cause this. **Edit: Sharon reported to me, and I had forgotten this, that during the period that the detector was spiking, she distinctly heard the floorboards in our room creaking. I didn't hear this, but I was 3/4 asleep at the time**
Paranormal? Dunno, but some would count it as evidence.
Nice place, we'll go back again.
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