Originally published as a Special to The Denver Post [source]
The first time Beverly Silva felt a ghostly presence in the Hotel Boulderado was in the 1980s.
She was a housekeeper then, and as she began to make a bed in Suite 302, the television suddenly turned on.
“This was in the days when we didn’t even have remote controls,” she says, her eyes widening. “I looked to see if maybe when I gathered the dirty sheets if I had touched the wire. Nothing had touched the wire, though.”
Silva has worked at the hotel since she was in college, and as she’s climbed the ranks of management, she’s grown to love the spirit – and spirits – of Boulder’s historic downtown hotel.
She got her start at the Boulderado in 1983 when she was a University of Colorado student. She graduated from CU in 1986 but instead of pursuing a career in architecture, she continued to work at the Boulderado, the place she felt the most at ease. Now she’s director of sales and marketing.
“What happened was I got comfortable working at the hotel,” she says.
Nothing could change her comfort level at the Boulderado, even paranormal sightings.
A few months after her initial sighting, she had another, this time in Suite 304.
“There’s an old grandfather clock that never had the right time in there,” Silva says. “I vacuumed the room and then I stepped backward out of there.”
Twice, the clock hands started spinning around, making noise and “going crazy, cachook, cachook, cachook,” she says, waving her hands to demonstrate how the clock moved.
“After it went crazy, it would stop on exactly the right time,” Silva says.
Although Silva says she never was “one of those people who listened to ghost stories,” she listens when her colleagues and guests report otherworldly encounters.
“This girl who worked in our office stayed in 306 and said she woke up in the middle of the night and tried to get out of bed but she couldn’t,” Silva said. “She felt this presence holding her, she said there was like a pressure holding her down – she wanted to get up, but she couldn’t.”
Silva walks up the hotel’s central staircase, headed for Suite 306, and motions toward the dark, wood paneling. “Even the wood on the staircase is a mystery,” she says, nothing that hotel historians aren’t sure where the cherrywood panels came from when the hotel, which opened on New Years Day of 1909, was built. “No one knows how it got here.”
As she turns the knob, the narrow door to 306 creaks on its hinges. Like the lobby, the suite is outfitted with antique furniture. It smells musty.
In the lobby and on the mezzanine level, floral wallpaper in dark reds, greens and beiges smothers the wall space. The decor looks more like a scene out of a Broadway musical than a contemporary hotel lobby.
The cream-and-brown tiled floor looks as though Fred and Ginger should be dancing cheek-to-cheek. Guests have been stepping on this floor for nearly 100 years.
Guests have reported hearing scratching in the walls throughout the hotel’s long life. Some say they sense the presence of spirits.
Silva used to receive frequent “haunted complaints” when she worked the front desk. Two rooms get an overwhelming number of reports – adjoining suites, 302 and 304 – perhaps because of the speculation that the hotel’s famous suicides occurred around those locations, even though the suite numbers were changed after a remodel.
The sleeping chambers aren’t the only places spooky happenings allegedly occur.
“Very recently, I was with a group of five, six women in Q’s Bar area of the restaurant,” Silva says. “It was a summer evening, and we were sitting by the window. It’s a heavy window, and all of a sudden it made this creepy noise like ‘ehhhhhh’ and it lifted up, I’m not kidding you, halfway up the wall.
“It was a beautiful evening, and with a creaking noise the window just lifted itself up, Silva said.
Silva reasons that it makes sense that there would be random spirits left behind because the building is so old and so many people have come through the doors.
This would be a great place to haunt – great food, a glass of wine, clean sheets, Silva says with a smile.
“I’m going to be a ghost here someday.”
Jessica Barraco is a journalism student at the University of Colorado.
Read more:The Boulderado a favorite haunt – The Denver Posthttp://www.denverpost.com/ci_7313542?source=bb#ixzz1BPOdkaXP
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