Haunted Hotels of Southern Colorado

Crested Butte, Colorado’s last great ski town, has been spared the development that transformed the rugged mining camps of Telluride and Aspen into glitzy resorts. Crested Butte wasn’t a silver or gold boom town; its wealth was in coal. Many who call it home today are descendants of immigrants from Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, or Cornwall. Their ancestors came by the shipload, eager to get a job in the coal mines. They built homes, churches, and a school and raised their families here. Today, their descendants are fiercely protective of their roots, which are deeply entwined in Crested Butte’s history.

Regarded as a preservation pacesetter in Colorado, Crested Butte received History Colorado’s Stephen H. Hart Award for the restoration of its numerous historic structures. In 1974, this entire town of nineteenth-century Victorian buildings was designated as the Crested Butte National Historic District.

Around 1861, eager prospectors who’d come west in the Pike’s Peak gold rush made their way into this part of the Elk Mountains, where they found about $1 million worth of gold dust and nuggets in the icy streams. Their intrusion infuriated the Utes, and as the gold began to run out, the prospectors, fearing attack, fled from the mountains.

The Utes controlled the Elk Mountains until the prospectors returned in the 1870s, armed with new maps of the region that had been prepared by the Hayden Geologic survey of 1873–74. Daring prospectors, who ventured far into the Elk Mountains, discovered silver on the high peaks and started the new mining camps of Gothic, Irwin, and Ruby. The Hayden surveyors had named two of the area’s prominent peaks, Gothic Mountain and Mount Crested Butte.

In 1877, entrepreneur Howard Smith planned a town in the valley at the base of Mount Crested Butte. It would become a supply center for prospectors in the silver camps in the nearby mountains. Smith built a sawmill to provide lumber for new buildings and a smelter to process silver ore. Taking the name of the neighboring mountain, Smith organized the Crested Butte Town Company, laid out a town site, and began selling lots on July 3, 1880. Prices quickly escalated from $35 to $750 a lot after representatives of the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad snatched up much of the land, accumulating one-half interest in the budding town.

The railroad men wanted to haul silver ore from the new mines to the smelters, but they also coveted the real treasure of Crested Butte—its enormous deposits of coal. Great layers of bituminous coal had been discovered just west of Crested Butte, as well as some veins of hard anthracite coal. This turned out to be the only deposit of anthracite coal west of Pennsylvania, and it was quite valuable. Colorado Coal and Iron Company opened its Jokerville Mine on Coal Creek in 1880. This company would eventually become the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (CF&I) and dominate the coal industry in the Rocky Mountains. Men who’d worked in the coal mines of Pennsylvania and West Virginia came west, looking for jobs in Crested Butte’s mines. They were joined by immigrants from the British Isles and northern Europe, Greece, Italy, and the Slavic countries of southern Europe. Experienced coal miners, they brought their families and gave Crested Butte a solid foundation that was so different from Colorado’s boom-and-bust mining camps.

The D&RG rushed to lay its narrow-gauge tracks up the valley from Gunnison, arriving in Crested Butte on November 24, 1881. As soon as the new depot had been completed, one of the first trains to chug out of town was pulling three boxcars and thirteen carloads of coal to heat homes in chilly Gunnison.

Crested Butte grew rapidly as a supply center after the D&RG arrived, bringing reasonably priced food, goods, materials, and equipment for the town and the mining camps. The main street, Elk Avenue, was usually dusty and crowded with freight wagons and long strings of mules and burro pack trains loading goods to be hauled to the mines. This commerce ended with the first snowfall, which closed the treacherous trails over the passes, blocking them with drifts that piled up as deep as fifteen feet. The railroad could only run regularly to Crested Butte from July to January due to the heavy winter snows.

In the mountains west of Crested Butte in the late fall of 1879, a prospector named Fisher found deposits of ruby silver ore, a silver-bearing mineral with deep-red crystals. He made two claims, the “Forest Queen” and the “Ruby Chief,” and sent ore samples to Denver to be smelted and assayed. Fisher’s ore proved to be high-quality silver, and news of his rich find spread through Denver long before he received the news. By spring, thousands of hopefuls were flooding this new silver field in the Elk Mountains.

By 1880, the Ruby Mining District was organized, and a small camp called “Ruby City” was established. When winter approached, several prospectors decided to stay, despite the bitter cold and howling blizzards that filled their prospecting holes with snow. Overwhelming drifts completely buried their cabins, forcing them to shovel tunnels from their cabin doors up to the surface of the snow. When a party of miners traveling on snowshoes arrived in early spring, they looked around but couldn’t find Ruby City or see any cabins. Eventually, they noticed plumes of smoke drifting up through holes in the snow—vents for the chimneys of cabins hidden deep beneath.

By 1882, Crested Butte had one thousand residents, a bank, a newspaper, several saloons and restaurants, three livery stables, and a church. The arrival of the railroad brought reasonable prices for supplies and fueled continued growth. Freight for the silver towns of Aspen and Ashcroft came by rail to Crested Butte and was carried by burro pack trains over treacherous Pearl Pass.

Most of the town’s saloons were along Elk Avenue and Second Street, and after their shifts, coal miners often stopped in for a drink or two at the Croatian Hall, the Elk Bar, Spritzer’s Bar, the Slogar Bar, or the Bucket of Blood. Crested Butte had a small red-light district of three or four buildings near the saloons, but unlike some Colorado mining towns, the madams had no role in the social or business scene.

In 1882, the first fifty coke ovens were built at the Jokerville Mine, which supplied coal to Leadville, Pueblo, and Denver. Within a year, three anthracite mines, three bituminous coal mines, and 150 coke ovens were in operation there. The Jokerville Mine was the pride of CF&I, steadily producing bituminous coal. It was a very dangerous mine because of “firedamp,” which are the flammable gases, particularly methane, that build up in the coal itself. These highly poisonous, flammable gases can’t be seen or smelled, but they suddenly explode. Coal dust and the naked flame head lamps that were used by miners to light their way through the tunnels greatly increased this danger of explosions.

On January 24, 1884, a thunderous explosion at the Jokerville Mine killed fifty-nine men, including two twelve-year-old gatekeepers. Almost every family in town lost at least one relative, and flags were flown at half-mast everywhere. The miners were buried together in one mass grave with a single marker in the Crested Butte Cemetery. The Jokerville Mine was closed, but that same year, CF&I opened another coal mine, called the Big Mine, and built 150 additional coke ovens. CF&I was Crested Butte’s largest employer, and by 1902, the Big Mine was producing one thousand tons of coal a day.

Most of Crested Butte’s buildings were wood frame construction, and the first catastrophic fire came on January 25, 1890. It destroyed most of the business district, and the poorly equipped volunteer firemen were reduced to throwing snow on the out-of-control flames. Unlike many towns that rebuilt with bricks and stone after a fire, Crested Butte again used lumber.

In January 1893, there was another fire. Once again, it destroyed most of the business district. This time, the water lines were frozen, and as they tried to remove fuel sources from the advancing flames, the firemen’s overenthusiastic dynamiting destroyed several uninsured commercial buildings and blew a gaping hole in the side of city hall. Once again, rebuilding was done with lumber. There were more fires in 1899 and in 1901, and this time the firemen couldn’t douse the flames because they had no fire hoses. Crested Butte rebuilt—with wood.

The 1893 repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act ended Colorado’s silver boom and closed the smelters, decreasing the need for coal. Coal miners had been working for low wages, sometimes earning as little as one dollar a day, and their working conditions were very dangerous. Corrupt mine management easily took advantage of the immigrant workers, who often spoke no English. In 1895, the company store arrived in Crested Butte, making the coal miners’ financial situation even more difficult. Instead of paying their employees in cash, the mine owners switched to scrip, which could only be exchanged for its face value in the company store. The miners’ wives had to pay inflated company prices for their food, clothing, and supplies. This returned a tidy profit to the company, and the miners grew resentful. Unions protested loudly about this practice, and by 1899, CF&I had received a lot of bad publicity because of this practice.

There was a great deal of unrest among CF&I’s coal miners, and as the eastern labor unions gained members, there were several violent strikes in the early twentieth century. The International Workers of the World (the Wobblies) and the Ku Klux Klan tried to recruit coal miners in Crested Butte, but they had little success among the immigrant workers.

Prohibition began early in Colorado in 1916, but Crested Butte never went completely dry. Saloons were converted into soda fountains that continued to serve homemade wine, white lightning, and bathtub gin. The advent of the automobile was a great boon to the bootleggers, and the revenue agents who came to town had little luck finding their stills. In October 1927, the town’s newspaper, the Pilot, was indignant when the “Feds” arrested nine “of our most prominent bootleggers” and destroyed a few stills. The paper insisted “someone had tipped off ” the revenue agents.

After World War I, Crested Butte’s coal production decreased as CF&I developed new mines closer to the steel mills in Pueblo. During the late 1930s and 1940s, the mines began laying off workers, and some of the smaller coal mines closed. In 1952, the Big Mine shut down operations, and with no coal to haul, the Denver & Rio Grande shut down the rail line to Crested Butte. This ended the era of coal and left Crested Butte facing hard times. Many people left town searching for work on local ranches or in the coke ovens and mills in Pueblo and Denver.

The mood in town wavered between despair and resignation, but the air was finally clear. For years, Crested Butte had crouched beneath clouds of dense, black smoke and soot from the coke ovens, but now the mountains and blue skies could be seen once again. In 1963, a fledgling ski resort, Crested Butte Limited, opened, and today thousands come for winter sports on Mount Crested Butte. In the summer, visitors come to see hillsides that are a riot of color in this legislature-designated “Wildflower Capital of Colorado.” Locals are proud of their tiny town and often brag, “Crested Butte, like Aspen once was!”

The picturesque Forest Queen Hotel, with its high, wooden false front, hunkers down in its historic spot on Elk Avenue, where it was built in 1882. The two-story frame structure is the town’s oldest hotel and looks much as it did a century ago. Plenty of drinks were served at the old wooden bar in the first-floor restaurant, the Coal Creek Grill, which replaced the rowdy saloon.

One of the town’s original buildings, the Forest Queen escaped the numerous fires that destroyed most of the business district. It was first a hotel-bar combination, but then the owner decided a bar with a brothel upstairs would be more profitable. One-Eye Ruby, who came by her name honestly, ran the Forest Queen with an iron hand for years.

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The Forest Queen, built in 1882, is one of Crested Butte’s oldest buildings. Courtesy of Wendy Williams.

The stories about the ghosts of the Forest Queen didn’t trouble Barry Cornman when he bought the hotel in the early twentieth century. He and his mother, Thelma, operated it successfully for years, although Thelma was unpopular in Crested Butte. She was quite bossy and irritated the employees and miners who boarded there. This imperious, pushy woman barked and yelled orders at everyone and was often called the “Queen of the Forest Queen.” When Prohibition was approved in Colorado in 1916, it sounded the death knell for most saloons, but Cornman held on until 1919, when he finally closed his profitable business.

In 1920, young Yugoslavian immigrants Mike and Katherine Perko purchased the old hotel-bar and converted it into a general store. The grocery was on the first floor, and the Perkos lived upstairs. Their family grew rapidly, and the Perkos had plenty of help as their eight children sorted vegetables, swept the floors, and manned the cash register.

When Mike Perko died in 1949, he was buried in the Crested Butte Cemetery. His grieving wife, Katherine, died just a year later. Their children, once grown, sold the building in 1958 to Dr. Hubert Smith, a lawyer-physician who founded the Law Science Academy in Crested Butte. The old hotel-grocery and several houses around town were used as lodging for participants who came to study with Dr. Smith. The Forest Queen was dubbed the Academy Arms during this period, and Dr. Smith envisioned intellectual gatherings similar to those held at the Aspen Institute. In 1971, Dr. Smith’s idealistic venture flopped, the academy folded, and the hotel was empty, left to its memories and ghosts.

Sometime during the late 1800s, Elizabeth, nicknamed Liz, joined Ruby’s crew of working girls. She was a pretty woman who laughed a lot, and she became a favorite of the miners. Then a roaming gambler came to town and made the Forest Queen his headquarters. The handsome charmer captivated Liz and promised to whisk her away to the big-city life in Denver. She shared her romantic hopes with the other girls and refused to heed their warnings about double-dealing men.

The lovestruck couple needed money to make their dreams come true so the gambler charmed Liz into loaning him every penny she’d saved. Flush with Liz’s money, the gambler bought into a high-stakes card game and won piles of cash. Then he sneaked out of town with all the winnings—alone. Poor Liz was devastated when she learned that her handsome gambler was really gone, leaving her alone and penniless. Every day, she sank deeper into depression, staying in her room and drinking too much. The miners missed her laughter and bright smile, but she refused all their entreaties to join them. Then one cold wintry night, Liz could bear it no longer and jumped out of a second-story window to her death.

The melancholy spirit of Liz hangs around the Forest Queen, sometimes waking guests as she bangs and slams doors at night. After an especially noisy night, a disheveled guest dashed down the stairs, yelling, “I’m getting out of here! Nobody can get any sleep here!” Liz often sets the kitchen on its ear, tossing pots and pans about and loudly rattling through the cupboards. Occasionally, large cooking utensils disappear from the kitchen, turning up later in odd places.

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A prostitute named Liz committed suicide by jumping from the second-story window of the Forest Queen. Courtesy of Wendy Williams.

Room 4 has a lot of nocturnal activity, and a guest in room 1 insisted that he saw the apparition of a strange woman wandering about his room. His personal items were moved around, his keys disappeared, and the lights kept flickering on and off much of the night. The doors of a room may slam open suddenly, startling the person inside. When you go to look in the hall, there’s never anyone around. The housekeeping staff often finds the beds in vacant rooms rumpled and wrinkled as if someone had slept there. Once when a chef stayed overnight in the hotel’s only two-bed room, he awoke in the morning to find that all of his clothes had been laid out on the other bed.

Liz is sometimes called the Red Lady Ghost, and she could be responsible for the electrical disturbances that occur in the hotel and restaurant, especially in the restrooms. One man entered the bathroom, and the lights went out—at the same time, his cellphone was knocked forcefully from his hand. There was no one else in the bathroom. This has occurred several times in the men’s restroom. Employees who are working alone at night often say they feel like they are being watched.

Crested Butte was once a tough coal mining town, whose residents hung on through hard times, and some still remain behind. The town is full of tales of ghosts of miners who died in the Jokerville tragedy and other mine disasters. Others were swept away by sudden avalanches, and locals warn about ghostly strangers wandering along the roads and near the cemetery.