HGB Ep. 598 - Brown Palace Hotel

Moment in Oddity - Diesel the Donkey (Suggested by: Chelsea Flowers)

There have been many instances in nature where one species of animal is orphaned and raised by another species. However, that type of situation can be a bit more rare when it comes to animals that live in a herd or flock. In the spring of 2024, a bow-hunter named Max Fennell was out in the wilderness when he came upon an unexpected sight that he captured on film. He spotted a herd of at least twelve Roosevelt elk on a hillside. That was not the least bit unusual for the area, however what was strange was that one of the members of the herd looked a bit different. This unique fellow was actually a donkey named Diesel. Five years prior to Fennell's discovery, the Drewry family had been out camping with their pet donkey near Clear Lake, California. Diesel had spooked and ran away. The distraught family searched for their friend, but despite seeing hoofprints and trail camera footage of their four legged family member, they were unable to locate him. The Drewry's were overjoyed at seeing Diesel thriving with his adoptive family despite missing having him at home. They decided to leave him be, to live his best life as an elk. We like to watch different species of animals living in peaceful coexistence, but a donkey living with a herd of elk, certainly is odd. 

This Month in History - Storming of the Bastille

In the month of July, on the 14th, in 1789, Parisian revolutionaries and mutinous troops stormed the Bastille. The Bastille was a royal fortress and prison in Paris, France. The populace were agitated over economic hardships and were frustrated with the monarchy. Fears that King Louis XVI was about to arrest France's newly constituted National Assembly led to the uprising. A mob approached the Bastille with demands for arms and ammunition. The guards resisted and the revolutionaries attacked, seizing the fortress which represented the monarchy's oppressive power. Approximately 100 of the revolutionaries lost their lives as well as governor Bernard-Rene de Launay and some of the guards. It was a fierce battle. The event was a culmination of many years of discontent by the people and is considered the starting point of the French Revolution. It began a decade of radical social and political change signalling the end of the old regime. Bastille Day is now a national holiday in France, commemorating the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille. 

Brown Palace Hotel (Suggested twice by Tim Kemble, Vicki Luther and David Law)

The Brown Palace Hotel and Spa is an iconic landmark in Downtown Denver. The hotel has stood for over 130 years and was one of the first atrium-style hotels ever built and was fire-proof. She was affectionately nicknamed The Grand Dame of Denver and she has stood as a sentinel in the downtown area, watching over the history that has unfolded here. The Brown hosted celebrities, Molly Brown, several Presidents and even the Beatles. And rumors claim that she hosts spirits as well. Several of them. Join us for the history and hauntings of the Brown Palace Hotel.

Let's set the stage. This is an excerpt from a September 1956 House and Garden article by Lucius Beebe: "Above and beyond its celebrity as one of the great hotels of the nation, the Brown possesses an even greater asset than culinary citations and the presence on its register of the names of the mighty and affluent. This is its sense of continuity, of being inseparably joined to the past. The Brown is from the old times, the good times, when all the country was young and there were those still living who could remember the Long Hunters and the Mountain Men. Over the shoulders of the young men in Brooks suits and sport jackets at the Ship Tavern, there are shadowy figures in fringed buckskin and raccoon hats with scalp knives at their belts drinking amazing quantities of Taos Lightning and planning ghostly wagon trains that shall set out from Kansas over the Jornada del Muerto, the Route of Death, for Santa Fe. Only the true believers, heirs to the second sight of the Medicine Men, can see them. But they are there." I grew up in the suburbs of Denver and also lived in the heart of Capitol Hill for a few years, so I'm very familiar with the idea that while Denver is a very modern city, it still embraces its Old West history. 

Denver can thank gold for its beginning. A prospector named William Russell lead a bunch of miners north of the Santa Fe Trail into what was then Kansas Territory at the confluence of the Cherry Creek and South Platte Rivers. They found gold there in 1858 and created a permanent settlement they called Auraria. The Colorado Gold Rush was off and running and brought another man who had been a general in the Pennsylvania state militia named William Larimer, Jr. He built Denver City across the river from Auraria. The name Denver came from Kansas territorial Governor James Denver. The two towns would merge as Denver before the Civil War.  

What would become Capitol Hill was originally owned by Henry C. Brown. Brown was born in 1820 in Ohio and his early work was in carpentry in St. Louis. He made a small fortune in California working as a master builder and he opened a sawmill. In 1858, he decided to relocate back to St. Louis and then he heard very promising things about a city named Decatur that was located in Nebraska. Brown sunk most of his money into the town, which went bust, so he went back to Missouri to make money in carpentry again. When he had $2,500 in his pocket, he decided to head to California again, but by the time he and his wife arrived in Denver, she was done with traveling and demanded that they stop. Brown set up a carpentry shop , but eventually decided to real estate was where the real money was at he bought and homesteaded the land that would become Capitol Hill and it was known as Brown's Bluff. It was given that name because people thought of it as a wasteland. Brown had hopes of building neighborhoods and he platted out the land, but settlers soon abandoned the future Mile High City for Cheyenne. Brown continued to believe in his plan.

Brown was right. Denver would be chosen to build the state capitol and Brown's Bluff was the perfect hill for placement. Brown donated the land for the Capitol building and he gave money so that a library could be founded. Soon Denver would be a booming metropolis. There was a triangular block of land bordered by Broadway, 17th Street and Tremont Place, in what would become downtown Denver, that Brown owned and he sold it to some English investors who planned to build a hotel on the plot. People were flocking to the West and Denver was a great stop over point, so places for people to stay were desperately needed. They dug out the foundation and went bankrupt, abandoning the project and leaving behind a hole that was used as a swimming pool by kids. Brown foreclosed on the land and took it back, deciding to build his own hotel there and he did just that, calling it the Brown Palace Hotel. He didn't have an ego or anything. And as we said, the plot was triangular, so the hotel is indeed, triangular.

Henry Brown hired Civil War veteran architect Frank E. Edbrooke to design the hotel and Edbrooke decided on the Italian Renaissance and Romanesque Revival styles. That design took nearly two tons of paper for the drawings and every guest room would face the streets. The hotel was built with an iron and steel frame constructed by Whitehouse & Wirgler Stone Company. Construction began in 1888 and red granite from Colorado and sandstone from Arizona were chosen for the building's exterior. Artist James Whitehouse was commissioned to create twenty-six medallions depicting Colorado animals. These were carved into the stone between the seventh-floor windows. When finished, the hotel stood taller than most everything around it, offering great views, morning and afternoon sun depending on which side of the hotel you were on and the hotel really appeared like a giant ship with a massive prow.

Edbrooke designed an amazing interior as well. There was an atrium lobby with balconies rising eight floors and those balconies had cast iron railings with ornate grillwork panels. The atrium was topped with stained-glass windows. The wall of the lobby were paneled with onyx brought in from an onyx mine in Torreon, Mexico. The Grand Salon, which is known as the Onyx Room now, and the 8th floor ballroom were also paneled in the onyx. There was also an 8th floor dining room that could seat 250 guests and offered panoramic views of 300 miles of the Rocky Mountains. The room was two stories and the windows had stained glass fruit designs at the tops of the windows. The floor also had six private dining rooms and the kitchen was up there as well. Floors and partition walls were built of hollow blocks of porous terra cotta fire-proofing, making this one of the first fireproof structures in America. Each room had its own fireplace. There was steam heat, a huge engine room, a power plant within the hotel, and an ice machine that could make five tons of ice a day. An artesian well provided the hotel with its own water. The interior was furnished at a cost of $400,000, which included fine china and silver, Irish linen, sofas covered in silk, and furniture made from white mahogany, cherry and antique oak. The entire hotel cost $1.6 million to build.

The hotel opened on August 12, 1892 with 400 guest rooms that rented for between $3 and $5 a night under the co-management of William Bush and Maxey Tabor. Bush built and managed the Broadway theater across from the hotel and he had vast experience in managing hotels. Maxey was the son of Augusta and Horace Tabor and learned the hotel business from his dad. It was Tabor's expensive taste that led to the expensive furnishing of the Brown. The hotel also featured eighteen unique storefronts. The first guests to use the dining room were the Triennial Conclave of Knights Templar and they had a 7-course dinner with a wine list of 227 different items that included 28 different champagnes. Brown's wife died in February of 1893 and he moved out of the Sherman Street Mansion that they shared and took up residence at the Brown Palace. The crash of 1893 hit him hard and he wasn't able to pay his bills. This left the managers of the hotel thinking that they were actually going to have to evict him. Brown was saved from that when a fellow carpenter who hit it big in the Cripple Creek gold rush, W.S. Stratton, bought the Brown Palace and he let Brown stay there. In 1894, Brown set his sights on marrying a 22-year-old grocery clerk. He was 74. Surprisingly, the marriage didn't last and they were divorced by 1900. Brown went to San Diego, California and he died there in 1906. His body was brought back to Denver and laid in state in the Capitol. After his death, there was litigation with Brown's son over the deed and the Stratton estate officially bought the hotel in 1907.

Horace Bennett and Associates bought the hotel in 1922. One of those associates was Charles Boettcher and he and his brother Claude bought the hotel when the Depression forced Bennett to sell some of his holdings. Claude guided the hotel through the Depression and two World Wars. In 1937, two murals were added to the hotel lobby by artist Allen Tupper True named "Stage Coach" and "Airplane Travel." When prohibition ended, the Ship Tavern was added to the hotel. In 1959, the Denver Broncos were born in the lobby of the Brown Palace. Lamar Hunt was starting a new football league called the American Football League and Bob Howsam agreed to meet him at the hotel to finalize a plan for Howsam to own the Denver franchise. The AFL and NFL would eventually merge into the game of football we know today. Also in 1959 came an expansion to add more rooms and this was in the form of a 22-story annex across Tremont Place that offered 231 rooms. Eventually this annex became a Comfort Inn and today are a Holiday Inn Express. The Boettcher name was associated with the Brown Palace for fifty years and then it was sold to Associated Inns and Restaurants Company of America in 1980. Rank Hotels of North America took over management in 1983.

Guests who came to the Grand Dame of Denver were Frontier and Alaska gangster Jefferson “Soapy” Smith, Louise Sneed Hill, Margaret “Molly” Brown, Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison, Peter Lorre, Jane Russell, Red Skelton and Charles Lindbergh. The first president to visit was Teddy Roosevelt in 1905. Incidentally, only three presidents that have served after Teddy have not visited the hotel. Every other President has been a guest. The Beatles were coming to Colorado to perform at Red Rocks Ampitheater, which is THE best placed to see a concert, period. Fight me. That's why so many groups have released live albums that were recorded at Red Rocks. Anyway, when the Beatles arrived at the Brown Palace on August 26, 1964, pandemonium ensued. There is fun story about a character who stayed here named Lord Ogilivie shared in Corinne Hunt's 1982 book "The Brown Palace Story." (Pg. 45)

Interesting guests would show up in the lobby during the National Western Stock Show every year: the champion bulls. Crow Holdings acquired the Brown in 2014 and today it is owned by Crescent Real Estate LLC and is managed by Marriott. Today, the Brown is officially known as The Brown Palace Hotel and Spa, Autograph Collection and features not only the spa, but afternoon tea, the Molly Brown Suite Experience, the Eisenhower Suite, a French restaurant, live jazz in the atrium lobby and honey bees that produce honey for spa products and fresh jars of honey. There are tours offered that include ghost tours and the hotel is rumored to be haunted by several spirits. 

Let's talk about one reason we might have a haunting going on here. Murder. The Brown Palace had a bar called the Marble Bar in 1911 and it was the scene of a double murder and as is the case with many murders, this was all over a woman and jealousy. First, we'll introduce our characters. There was Sylvester Von Phul who everybody called Tony. He was a big athletic guy measuring over six feet and weighing 220 pounds. His features were handsome and he easily caught the ladies' eyes with his deep set blue eyes and pompadour hair. Tony was 34-years-old in 1911. There was Frank Henwood who had only been in Denver a short time. He was a friend and business associate of a man named John Springer. Frank was an impeccable dresser and thin and had traveled the world. He was divorced with two daughters and 35-years-old in 1911. Isabel Patterson Springer was born in Kansas in 1886 and was a social butterfly who worked her way up to elite socialite. She was married to a traveling shoe salesman and divorced him in 1907. Only a few weeks after that divorce, Isabel married Colorado businessman John Springer, who was very powerful and very rich. He was forty-seven and she was twenty-seven, so she made the perfect trophy wife. And she fit the bill being both beautiful and vivacious. Isabel loved to throw parties, especially at the Brown Palace, and everybody was always eager for an invite.

Isabel was young and unsatisfied in her marriage to Springer who was often away on business, so she took up with both Tony Von Phul and Frank Henwood. She had met von Phul on a trip to St. Louis and after she left, she started writing him some very steamy letters. The two met up in Hot Springs, Arkansas where Isabel went to recover from a surgery and the two were seen doing the party circuit together. Isabel had met Frank at her husband's office and the three all started hanging out as friends. Things crossed the line at some point and Frank would visit Isabel at her and John's 12,000 acre ranch outside of Denver when John would be out of town. Isabel couldn't decide between the two men. At what point they found out about each other, we don't know but apparently von Phul started threatening Isabel that he would start sending her letters to him, to her husband one at a time, unless she dropped her husband and Frank for him. Isabel turned to Frank for help in getting back "some foolish little letters." Frank agreed. He wasn't about to let von Phul blackmail Isabel.

The Springers had a suite at the Brown Palace and Isabel and Frank met there. This was easy to do because frank also had a room at the Brown, Room 715. Isabel again asked for Frank to get moving on getting the letters back. He told her that he wanted her to write a note to von Phul telling him that things were over, but she refused. Frank persisted and a letter was indeed typed up. Isabel had summoned von Phul to come from St. Louis and when he arrived, he checked into the Brown Palace and was given Room 524. he asked later to be moved to Room 603 next to the Springer's suite. When he checked in, he was given the Dear John letter, which told him it was over and that Isabel was sending someone to have a final talk with him.

Henwood made an appointment with von Phul to meet that evening, May 23rd, 1911 at 5:30 in the afternoon. Before that meeting happened, Frank found out that von Phul and left to meet up with Isabel and her mother at a department store. Frank met up with him at the store and encouraged him not to make a scene and got him to get into a car with him to go back to the Brown and things got very heated in the car and Frank joined von Phul in his room at the Brown. Henwood insisted that Tony return the letters to Isabel and von Phul punched him in the face. Then von Phul hit Frank with a shoe tree and he pulled a revolver from his pocket and threatened to kill Frank. Frank left the room. Isabel later told Frank that von Phul  had punched her and that he had done it twice more in the past. She also said that von Phul said he was going to kill her husband John. So Frank Henwood got a gun. 

The next evening, May 24th, Frank and von Phul met up at the Marble Bar in the Brown Palace. Von Phul asked a friend to change places with him so he could be near Frank because he had already licked him twice and might want to do it again. Frank would claim that von Phul said to him about John Springer, "I'll go upstairs and drag the gray-headed expletive out and show him who is the master here." Frank got in his face, and von Phul knocked him down and then reached in his pocket. Frank thought he was grabbing a gun and he pulled his gun and fired at von Phul. He not only hit von Phul twice, but he shot two other men. The bartender was hit in the leg and an innocent bystander named George Copeland was fatally wounded. Tony died of his wounds the next day.  

Frank wasn't tried for the murder of von Phul, but rather the unintentional killing of Copeland. This was done so that Frank couldn't claim self-defense in killing von Phul which would have made Copeland's death just negligence. The prosecution really wanted Frank to be convicted, so they thought this was best and it worked. Henwood was found guilty of first degree murder and sentenced to death, but this was commuted to a life sentence by the state pardon board. Then in May 1922, Isabel's husband John made a personal appeal to the Colorado governor to pardon Henwood and he agreed to do it. So Henwood was released from prison the prison in Canon City as long as he promised to never return to Denver. John Springer divorced Isabel and said she could keep his last name, but he forbade her to ever return to Denver. She moved to the East Coast to try becoming a model, but got addicted to opium and overdosed in 1917 at the age of 31.

Employees and guests claim to hear a ghostly orchestra on occasion and the full-bodied apparition of a waiter in a period uniform has been seen near the service elevator. A ticket salesman in an old uniform is seen walking around in the lobby. The sounds of children playing and the crying of babies is heard when there are no children around. Lights turn themselves off and on. A spirit wearing what looks like train conductor clothes from another time has been seen near the entrance and if he is approached, he floats down to the ground floor and disappears. Incidentally, we have mentioned in other episodes that there are tunnels that run under ground in Denver and some of these tunnels are reputedly under the Brown palace.

Night watchmen claim to see Henry Brown's ghost in the wee hours of the morning pacing the hallways. The spirit is seen walking through the walls  of the Churchill Cigar Bar in the hotel. The main dining room was once known as the San Marco Room and there was always live music. One of the main musical groups that played here were the San Marco Strings. An employee was working one night when he heard muic coming from the dining room and he was confused because it was closed. When he looked inside, he saw a formally dressed string quartet playing. He went inside and approached the group and told them, "You're not supposed to be in here." One of the men calmly replied, "Oh, don't worry about us. We live here." The musicians then disappeared.

Room 401 houses the spirit of an unfriendly male. Women are often touched by something unseen when in the closet of this room. A former owner's wife was named Edna and she is blamed for lights turning off and on by themselves. She also may be the elderly female spirit that wears a long black dress and complains that the heat isn't working in her room and then vanishes when the maintenance guy comes to fix things. A bellhop from a time gone by likes to swipe newspapers from doorways. He is also seen walking through walls. Rooms were never rented by the hour, but a ghost of a lady of the evening has been seen. She may wander over from buildings across the street because there had once been a gambling hall and brothel over there that patrons of the Brown Palace could get to via a tunnel going under the street. 

Louise Crawford Hill lived in Room 904 for thirteen years from 1942 to 1955. Louise was born in North Carolina in 1862 and she arrived in Denver in 1893. She was determined to climb her way to the top of society and she accomplished this by marrying the very rich Crawford Hill whose father had been a smelter magnate. Louise created the first social register in Denver and called it "Who's Who in Denver Society." Louise wouldn't include Maggie Brown (Molly) on her list, so Maggie dubbed her "the snobbiest woman in Denver." Crawford died in 1922 and Louise continued to live in their mansion until 1942 when she sold it because she couldn't find any hired help to upkeep it because of World War II. She was mostly a recluse at the hotel and she died there in 1955. Jenna Robbins has given haunted tours of the haunted areas of the hotel for years. She told the Denver Post in 2016, "I was a I-don’t-believe-in-ghosts person, but all it took was an experience I can’t explain in any other way than ‘ghosts must exist’ to change my mind." The paper Westword reported in 2008 what that experience was, "Years later, when Mrs. Hill was but a distant memory, renovations were being done to the top two floors of the hotel — where she had lived — and a hotel historian [Robbins] was giving tours of the floors, telling interested participants about the people who used to reside there. When she got to the tales of Mrs. Hill, which involved heartbreak suffered over a lost love, the hotel’s main switchboard suddenly began receiving calls from Room 904 — which had been stripped of all furniture, lights, wallpaper, carpet and telephones during the renovation. Hotel operators could hear only static when they answered the calls. And when the historian removed Mrs. Hill’s saga from the tour, the phone calls from Room 904 ceased."

A Haunting in Colorado, founded by Alexis Rae, did an investigation at the hotel in 2021 and got "Let go" to come through on a Spirit Box. Alexis said that some activity that entailed an unseen spirit pulling the covers off of people, seemed to start when the hotel started offering ghost tours. She asked the spirits if this bothered them and very clearly through the box came the answer, "It does." Later, a male voice yelled "foot!" There was an "okay" and Alexis asked if they wanted to conversate for a little bit and there was a clear "yes" and then an "excuse me." Another spirit said "Leave me alone."  

The Brown Palace is a modern day reminder of the Old West. The hotel is both elegant and historic with a past rich enough to lend itself to ghost stories. Is the Brown Palace Hotel haunted? That is for you to decide!