About five years ago, the Brown Palace Hotel and Spa’s historical tour guide, Matthew Webb, was heading toward the 10th floor when he heard a distinct whistle.

“Nobody was there. And I’m just like: ‘Well, I know I heard it,’” Webb recalled.

The historian later mentioned the strange occurrence to another coworker who had worked at the hotel for decades, who immediately recognized what Webb was talking about.

That’s just the “prankster ghost,” Webb remembered his coworker telling him.

The ghost had already pranked his coworker a dozen times with whistles. So much so, that he just began ignoring them, Webb recalled learning that day.

At another time, the ghost mimicked the voice of another coworker who hadn’t been up to the 10th floor that day to trick him.

The prankster ghost got him again, his colleague joked.

Webb has worked at the Brown Palace for 18 years, guiding guests for the hotel’s historical and haunted tours, but he doesn’t go looking for the ghosts rumored to haunt its halls.

“When I work, I walk around with my third eye closed,” Webb said. “I know they’re there. But I don’t need to see them.”

The Brown Palace Hotel and Spa was named one of the “Most Haunted Hotels” in the U.S. in 2025 by the Historic Hotels of America.

The organization recognizing the country’s storied lodges named the top 25 hotels with paranormal and spooky activity on Wednesday. The list included two historic hotels in Colorado: Denver’s Brown Palace and Hotel Colorado in Glenwood Springs.

The Brown Palace was inducted into the Historic Hotels of America in 2023. The organization is part of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, a private nonprofit chartered by U.S. Congress in 1949.

Gilded ghosts of the Brown Palace

The Brown Palace first opened in 1892, during the Gilded Age when people were flocking to strike gold or silver in Denver and the rest of the West.

The Historic Hotels of America said not only the stories that took place in Brown Palace’s history have made it haunted, but its architecture is also a conduit for spirits.

Or so the legends say.

The right-triangular design is said to have roots in Masonic geometry and there is a 720-foot-deep artesian well at the center of the building to provide a source of water for the spa, which has “led some to believe that the hotel was conceived as a spiritual portal,” the nonprofit group of historic hotels said.

Some believe the hotel “dug too deep and tapped into some evil beneath us,” Webb joked.

Adding to the building’s lore, its triangle shape is set up in a way for the first rays of sunlight to fall on the hotel’s former front entrance, Webb said.

The hotel has a record of questionable paranormal incidents, especially at the Brown Palace Club that is above the artesian well.

The Churchill Cigar Bar, where the hotel’s founder Henry C. Brown had his office, is also rumored to still have the ghost of the hotelier lingering around.

According to the Brown Palace, a Churchill manager was sorting receipts when the sound system inexplicably turned on and began to switch between channels and volumes.

Only problem? The sound system wasn’t actually powered up.

“Henry, please! I’m trying to work here,” the manager shouted, according to the Brown Palace’s self-guided tour brochure.

Then the music stopped.

The eighth and ninth floor are also hotspots for spooky stories, as the building’s top floors used to be apartments, where residents lived and inevitably died.

Suite 904 may be the most famous of its mysterious rooms.

The apartment was once home to socialite Louise Crawford Hill, the “Queen of Denver High Society,” who died at her home in the 1950s.

Hill had an infamous public affair in her 50s with a married polo player in his 20s that ended in heartbreak, according to the hotel’s tour brochure. She spent the last decade of her life in the room and became incredibly withdrawn.

In the 2000s, the hotel began offering “romance and scandal” tours that mentioned her affair. The hotel then began to receive a multitude of mysterious phone calls to its switchboard coming from Suite 904.

When the operator would pick up the phone, all they heard was static.

The calls happened when the room was under renovation, leaving the rooms stripped of its wallpaper, furniture, lights and … the telephone.

When the tour’s historian stopped sharing Hill’s story, the calls also stopped.

Webb said another hotel historian learned there were similar incidents at Hill’s former Denver mansion, as police and the fire department would get calls from the house when they were under renovation.

“We realized Mrs. Hill is really frustrated that her home is being destroyed,” he said.

These are just some of the stories.

There have been reports of a mysterious quartet group playing in the dining space now home to Ellyngton’s, a man dressed as a railroad conductor who appears periodically, the spirit of a murdered doctor that haunts the hotel’s Ship Tavern and a former newspaper deliverer working the graveyard shift.

While incidents can be explained by the hotel’s many old wires from the time period it was built, Webb said it doesn’t explain everything.

“The old Brown Palace has a lot of weird electrical things that have happened and some of it can be just the older wires,” Webb said. “But there is definitely some energy that is created from the other side.”

The Brown Palace is featuring a multitude of Halloween events during October.

Every week, the Atrium is hosting a Halloween Tea Series with a different theme from the Wizard of Oz to a Gothic Garden and a Witches Tea.

The Brown Palace is also hosting haunted hotel tours that cost $41 and includes handcrafted cocktails. The tours take visitors into hidden passageways and show how “the line between history and haunting grows thin,” according to the hotel’s website.

And for the first time this year, the Brown Palace is hosting a Gilded Masquerade Ball on Halloween for guests 21 years old and up. There will be music and dancing under the hotel atrium’s glass ceiling. Tickets will cost $45 and guests are asked to wear black-tie or refined cocktail attire with masks.

The legends have been helpful in getting people to learn more about the Brown Palace, Webb said.

Spooky tours help attract more people to the hotel and keep its history alive, he explained.

“The Brown Palace has had some tough times over the years, and there’s a couple of instances where they easily could have just shut it down and given up, but it’s kept going,” Webb said.


And if scary stories can boost the hotel’s notoriety, he added, “then that’ll be good.”

Still, Webb said he’s not going out of his way to search for more of them.