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Several rooms in the oldest hotel in Denver are reportedly haunted.

AS THE OLDEST HOTEL IN DENVER, the Oxford Hotel’s history is rooted in luxury. Built in 1891 during the peak of the silver rush, the hotel was fitted with gas heating and an elevator and even had its own power plant to enable these luxuries. It was, in fact, one of the first buildings in Denver to have elevators, or as they were better known then, “vertical railways.” With an ideal location of mere blocks away from the railway at Union Station, rooms would set weary travelers back $1, or $2 if they wanted a bath. This was made possible because each floor had its own water closets and other sanitary appliances.

At the time the hotel opened, Denver was considered the third largest city in the West after San Francisco and Omaha. The hotel survived the Silver Panic that caused many businesses to crumble in 1893, and it continued to thrive. Its subsequent history includes several renovations and additions to the building.

The start of a new century did not halt the hotel’s booming business. In 1902, hotel manager Calvin Morse boasted that the hotel was so popular that it was hosting 35,000 guests per year and they were turning people away due to no vacancies. This popularity led to the first addition to the hotel, a two-story building behind the hotel on Wazee Street. Not much later, in 1906, the new managers conducted a remodel of the hotel that added an exterior entrance to the barbershop, a mezzanine, a café, and marble wainscoting (decorative paneling). In 1912, a five-story annex was added, connected to the original hotel by a bridge from its second story. Since being renovated once again in the 1930s, the Oxford has been known for its Art Deco style. This renovation also added the Cruise Room, the hotel’s local watering hole.

In 1979, the hotel gained a new owner, who temporarily closed it for renovations. This round of changes turned out to be quite important, as the owners discovered false ceilings and other unexplored areas of the property. They found several items in these hidden rooms, including blueprints from the first architect, which helped the renovations more closely match the original work. This was also when they began to modernize the hotel and the era during which it attained landmark status. For those who dare to look, there are also a few gems of ghostly activity hidden throughout the building’s many stylish rooms.

The building was designed by Frank E. Edbrooke, who, coincidentally, designed the Brown Palace, Denver’s second oldest hotel and the Oxford’s prime competition for the most haunted hotel in Denver. The hotel is five stories high and contains several reputedly haunted locations.

One of the first haunted locations presents a little bit of a novelty. Located off the main lobby and down some stairs on a lower floor is a women’s restroom, but when the hotel was originally built, this area was the barbershop. Some of the activity here is fairly “typical,” such as doors locking by themselves and faucets turning on of their own accord. What makes this restroom a little more unique is that the ghost who resides there is apparently a peeping tom who has frightened several women trying to use the facilities. Undoubtedly, this puts the hotel in a slight predicament, as there are not many women who would appreciate a desk clerk telling them that the person startling them in the bathroom is a ghost or a figment of their imagination.

The next room that sees ghostly activity is the Cruise Room. It now houses Denver’s first post-Prohibition bar, which opened the day after passage of the 21st Amendment, which ended Prohibition in December 1933. On the more racy side of history, there is rumor that before the Cruise Room officially opened, it was the location of a speakeasy, complete with a secret back stair that led to a room with prostitutes. As far as paranormal activity goes, it is reputed to be haunted by the ghost of an old man who comes to the bar to order a beer. Bartenders and patrons alike have witnessed the man drink his beer and continuously mutter about getting presents to children. When the man leaves and the bartender goes to pick up his empty glass, however, he always finds it full again. He is supposedly the ghost of a mailman who was going to deliver Christmas presents to children in Central City in the early 1900s, but he never arrived, and people assumed he had stolen the gifts. His partially frozen and decomposed body, however, was found in Central City with the presents still with him near the end of winter.

One of the more mystifying and scary areas of the Oxford Hotel is its attic. It used to be a hot spot for ghost tours but now the hotel uses it for storage, and customers are no longer allowed into it. Some say it is one of the more eerie of the haunted locations in the building, and it has been the subject of paranormal investigations in which people claim to have recorded voices. Some employees will not go up into the attic alone because of the creepy vibes they get there. There have also been reports of objects stored there moving by themselves and the distinct sounds of footsteps behind people when it is obvious no one else is there.

The last of the haunted locations in the Oxford Hotel is room 320. About half of the stories about it say that a woman named Florence Richardson was staying in the hotel with her husband one night in 1898 when she decided to kill him and then turn the gun on herself. There is no proof that the couple were actually married, but they registered for the room as “H. C. Rockwell and wife” from Greeley, Colorado. She shot him and then herself a half hour later. The name H. C. Rockwell was presumed to be an alias, as the man Richardson shot was later identified as W. H. Lawrence from Cleveland, Ohio. The New York Times ran an article on the deaths of both Lawrence and Richardson on September 12, 1898, citing jealousy as the motive for the killing, but the article did not provide the room number. The other half of the accounts say that a man caught his wife with another man in this room and killed them both, which fits better with the paranormal experiences people have had in the room. Indeed, the ghostly presence seems to make itself known only when there is a single man staying there, and the men have reported waking up to an apparition of a male figure at the foot of the bed yelling about corrupting his wife. Reportedly this has caused several of the men to leave the room, and in turn the hotel, immediately. Other accounts report the bathroom light 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.