The Haunted St. Elmo Hotel, Ouray: Kittie Heit's 1898 Miners' Hotel and Its Night Noises

The St. Elmo Hotel is a small brick hotel on Main Street in Ouray, the old silver and gold mining town in the San Juan Mountains that calls itself the Switzerland of America. It sits beside Portland Creek, has about a dozen Victorian-style guest rooms, and keeps its original tavern bar downstairs. It is one of the smaller and lesser-known entries on our list of haunted hotels in Colorado.

Its ghost stories are modest, and we want to be upfront about that. The hotel does not promote a ghost, and no local paper we found has written one up. What exists are accounts from night staff and guests, collected by haunted-place directories. We set them out below alongside the much better documented story of the woman who built the place.

The ghosts of St. Elmo Hotel and Tavern

Furniture moving in the empty dining room

The main story told about the St. Elmo comes from the night shift. According to the account on HauntedPlaces.org, staff working late have heard what sounded like furniture being dragged and shifted around the dining room. When they went to look, nothing had moved and nobody was there.

It is a simple story, and the old building has plenty of ordinary explanations for odd sounds: wooden floors, an old heating system and a creek running beside it. But it is the one that comes up again and again.

The camera that disappeared

A reader who commented on the same listing in 2018 said she stayed at the St. Elmo in March 2008 with her daughter and granddaughter, and that her disposable camera vanished from the room by the next morning. She also described the basement restaurant, the old Bon Ton space, as haunted.

This is a single guest’s account, and we include it as that. Small things going missing is one of the most common reports in old hotels, and also one of the hardest to pin on anything.

Is it Kittie?

Many people assume a ghost in this building must be its founder. Kittie Heit ran the hotel and the Bon Ton for years, sheltered townspeople during the 1918 flu, and is remembered by the team behind the 2026 redesign as a “punk rock grandma.” The 2026 redesign even puts enlarged photographs of her in the rooms.

But no published account we found names her as the ghost, and we will not invent one. If the stories are about anyone, nobody has said who.

What we could not confirm

Some online ghost maps add doors, lights and objects moving by themselves, without naming a source. We found no newspaper, TV or hotel account of a haunting, no deaths recorded in the building, and no room numbers linked to the stories. If you stay and something happens, you will be adding to a very short record.

The most haunted rooms and places to look

• The dining room: Where night staff report hearing furniture being moved.
• The St. Elmo Tavern: The lower-level restaurant, once the Bon Ton, with its original wooden bar, copper ceiling and stone walls.
• The lobby: Original Victorian wallpaper, vintage sconces, a crystal chandelier and an old church pew.
• The guest rooms: About a dozen Victorian rooms with antique dressers and photos of Kittie Heit. None is singled out in the stories.

History of St. Elmo Hotel and Tavern

Ouray boomed in the 1880s and 1890s as a supply town for the silver and gold mines of the San Juans. One of the people who did well from it was Catherine “Kittie” O’Brien Porter Heit. According to the Ouray County Plaindealer, the Bon Ton had started out in 1886 as a dance hall before becoming a restaurant, and Kittie took it over in 1890. Its success gave her the money to build a hotel next door, and ColoradoBiz reports she became the first woman to own land in Ouray County when she bought the lot.

The hotel opened in 1898. Architectural historian Thomas J. Noel, writing for the Society of Architectural Historians, describes it as a “neat brick hotel” built by Francis Carney, with round-arched openings on the ground floor and Italianate segmental-arched windows above. It charged miners a dollar a night, and Kittie named its dining room the Bon Ton, a name it kept for about a century. Some older sources give 1889 or 1891 as the build date; the hotel and most histories give 1898.

Kittie, remembered locally as Aunt Kittie, ran more than a flophouse. The hotel served miners, working women and travelers, hosted union meetings, and took in locals during the 1918 flu epidemic. The original Bon Ton building next door was torn down in the early 1900s, but the restaurant lived on in the hotel’s lower level.

In the 1980s the hotel was rehabilitated as a bed and breakfast with Victorian-style rooms, and in 1983 it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places as a contributing building in the Ouray Historic District. For years the Lingenfelter family ran it, followed by David and Blake Baggett. The Bon Ton opened and closed several times over the decades and had been shut for months by 2025.

In June 2025 Clay Bales and Jason Raible, who also own the Rathbone hotel in Montrose, bought the St. Elmo and the restaurant for $3 million, according to county records reported by the Plaindealer. They renamed the restaurant the St. Elmo Tavern and kept the Victorian wallpaper, calling the building “a bit of a time capsule.” A redesign by Abigail Morris Interiors, completed by 2026, refreshed the rooms while keeping the tavern’s original wooden bar, copper ceiling and stone walls.

Tips for a haunted stay

• Eat in the St. Elmo Tavern: it is the old Bon Ton space and the part of the building most linked to the stories.
• Ask the evening staff whether the night shift still hears the dining room furniture move.
• Check tavern hours before you arrive; under the new owners it has opened in the late afternoon and closed on Mondays.
• Breakfast has moved toward coffee and to-go options, so plan on one of Ouray’s Main Street cafes for a sit-down meal.
• Pair your stay with Ouray’s hot springs pools and a walk along the town’s historic Main Street.

More haunted hotels nearby

• Hotel Colorado, Glenwood Springs: A grand 1893 resort hotel with tower suite 661
• Hotel Jerome, Aspen: Aspen’s silver-boom hotel and its famous ghost stories
• The Delaware Hotel, Leadville: Another 1880s mining-town hotel with a ghost story
• Haunted hotels in Colorado

Sources

Facts on this page are checked against the hotel’s own website, historic records and news coverage. Ghost stories are reported as guests, staff and local historians tell them. Read how we rate haunted hotels.

• St. Elmo Hotel and Tavern (official site)
• SAH Archipedia: St. Elmo Hotel
• Wikipedia: St. Elmo Hotel
• Ouray County Plaindealer: A new chapter for historic St. Elmo
• Montrose Daily Press: Same Victorian flair, new vision for the St. Elmo
• ColoradoBiz: Ouray's St. Elmo Hotel redesign honors founder Catherine Heit
• HauntedPlaces.org: St. Elmo Hotel

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