The Broadmoor Hotel: Colorado Springs' Gilded Age Ghosts
Inside the century-old luxury of The Broadmoor, staff and guests have long whispered of spirits that never checked out. What's documented—and what's legend.
The road up to The Broadmoor still feels like an arrival from another era—sweeping drives, manicured grounds, the pink stucco facade glowing against the dark wall of Cheyenne Mountain. For over a century, this has been Colorado’s most storied address for luxury, and like many grand old hotels that have hosted generations of the wealthy, the powerful, and the merely curious, it has accumulated something else alongside its five-star reputation: a thick layer of ghost stories that staff and guests have traded in hushed tones for decades.
Separating what’s documented from what’s legend is the real work here. The Broadmoor’s history as a building and a business is a matter of public record. Its reputation as a haunted hotel is something else entirely—a living oral tradition passed along by bellhops, tour guides, and travel writers, almost none of it tied to named witnesses or formal investigation. Both halves of that story are worth telling, as long as we’re honest about which is which.
The Man Who Built It
The Broadmoor exists because of Spencer Penrose, a Philadelphia-born entrepreneur who made his first fortune in the Cripple Creek gold rush and a second, far larger one in Utah copper mining alongside his business partner Charles Tutt. By the 1910s, Penrose had become one of Colorado Springs’ wealthiest and most flamboyant residents—a man as famous for his parties and his pet orangutan as for his business acumen.
In 1916, Penrose purchased a small existing hotel and casino on the site, along with the surrounding acreage at the base of Cheyenne Mountain. He had grander ambitions than a renovation. Working with architects from the New York firm Warren and Wetmore—the same firm behind Grand Central Terminal—Penrose commissioned an entirely new hotel in the Italian Renaissance style, with pink stucco walls, a red tile roof, and formal gardens arranged around an artificial lake. The Broadmoor opened on June 29, 1918.
Penrose’s ambitions for the region didn’t stop at the hotel’s doors. He went on to build the Pikes Peak Highway, found the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo, and construct the Will Rogers Shrine of the Sun as a memorial, cementing his influence across the Pikes Peak region well beyond hospitality. The Broadmoor itself has since become one of the longest continuously running Forbes Five-Star and AAA Five-Diamond resorts in the country, a distinction it has held for an unbroken streak of decades—a genuinely remarkable record in an industry where such honors rarely last.
Penrose died in 1939, but his imprint on the property, and on Colorado Springs more broadly, remains difficult to overstate. The El Pomar Foundation, which he and his wife Julie Penrose established, continues to fund philanthropic work across the state today.
The Lore That Grew Around the Lake
It’s against this backdrop of old money, old architecture, and a century of guests that the hotel’s ghost stories have taken root. Unlike some of Colorado’s more thoroughly chronicled haunted sites—the Stanley Hotel chief among them—The Broadmoor’s reputation for hauntings exists almost entirely in oral tradition: stories told by longtime staff, repeated on local ghost tours, and recycled in travel journalism looking for a seasonal hook around Halloween.
The most frequently repeated piece of Broadmoor lore centers on Cheyenne Lake, the artificial lake at the heart of the resort’s grounds. Versions of the story describe a woman in period clothing seen walking near the water’s edge at night, sometimes described as vanishing before reaching the shore. Other accounts place her sorrow at the lake itself, suggesting a drowning in the hotel’s early decades—though no documented drowning tied to a named individual has surfaced in historical newspaper archives or hotel records that would confirm this as fact rather than embellished legend. It’s the kind of story that attaches itself to still water at old resorts across the country, and The Broadmoor’s version should be read in that tradition: atmospheric, persistent, and essentially unverifiable.
Beyond the lake, the broader body of hotel lore includes the usual catalog found at historic luxury properties: reports of unexplained cold spots in certain hallways, elevators that staff describe moving or stopping without being called, and whispered claims of apparitions glimpsed in mirrors or at the edges of ballrooms once used for Gilded Age-style galas. These accounts tend to circulate through word of mouth among employees rather than through any formal paranormal investigation, and no reputable ghost-hunting organization appears to have conducted a documented, published investigation of the property comparable to the kind of work done at sites like the Stanley or the Brown Palace in Denver.
What’s Missing From the Record
It’s worth being direct about the limits of the evidence here. Unlike cases built on newspaper archives, inquest records, or named witness testimony collected close to the time of an alleged event, The Broadmoor’s hauntings exist mostly as secondhand hospitality folklore—the sort of stories that spread easily in an industry built on atmosphere and guest experience, where a slightly spooky backstory can become part of a property’s charm rather than a liability.
That doesn’t make the stories meaningless. Oral tradition is its own kind of historical artifact, telling us something about how guests and staff have related to this strange, beautiful building for a hundred years. But it does mean researchers and skeptics alike should treat the Broadmoor’s ghost stories as living folklore rather than documented paranormal cases. There’s no equivalent here of a signed affidavit, a contemporaneous newspaper account of a tragic death, or a named investigator’s published findings—the kind of paper trail that gives weight to hauntings at other Colorado landmarks.
A Building Worth the Mystery
Whatever one believes about what lingers in its hallways, The Broadmoor’s physical and historical reality is remarkable enough on its own terms. It is a genuine artifact of Colorado’s Gilded Age ambitions—built by a copper baron with a taste for spectacle, designed by architects who also gave the country Grand Central Terminal, and sustained for over a hundred years as one of the most honored resorts in America.
The ghost stories, meanwhile, remain exactly what they’ve always been: unverified, atmospheric, and deeply tied to the kind of old-world grandeur that makes guests want to believe something uncanny might be sharing the halls with them. Perhaps that’s the most honest way to approach The Broadmoor’s hauntings—not as settled fact, but as part of the mood the hotel itself was built to create. Spencer Penrose wanted to build something unforgettable at the base of Cheyenne Mountain. A century later, whether or not anything unexplained walks those gardens at night, he undeniably succeeded.