The Haunted Oxford Hotel, Denver: Room 320, Florence and the Ghost in the Cruise Room

The Oxford Hotel stands at 17th and Wazee in LoDo, a block from Union Station. It opened in 1891, a year before the Brown Palace, and was designed by the same architect, Frank Edbrooke. Today it is a restored boutique hotel run by Sage Hospitality with Dana Crawford, the preservationist who helped save it, and it is one of the best-loved stops on our list of haunted hotels in Denver.

Unlike many grand hotels, the Oxford is happy to talk about its ghosts. It sells a Stay with the Spirits package in Room 320, the room tied to a woman named Florence, and its Art Deco Cruise Room bar has a ghost story of its own.

The ghosts of The Oxford Hotel

Florence and Room 320

The Oxford’s best-known story belongs to Room 320. As the hotel’s own spokesperson told Denver7 in 2019, legend says that in 1898 a woman named Florence Montague found her husband in bed with another woman there, shot him and then turned the gun on herself. The Denver Gazette tells it more simply, as Florence killing her lover and then herself. No contemporary newspaper report or police record of the shooting has been published, so treat the details as legend.

The hotel itself names the spirit as Florence. Its Stay with the Spirits package describes guests reporting flickering lights, unexplained noises and bedding pulled off the bed in Room 320, and its spokesperson has added a faucet that turns itself on and off.

Why men alone in Room 320 sleep badly

The most repeated detail is that the activity is aimed at men staying on their own. Lone male guests have described the sheets being ripped off the bed while they slept and a firm tug on the arm when nobody else was in the room, according to Uncover Colorado. The hotel takes it seriously enough, or enjoys the story enough, that its spokesperson told Denver7 it tries not to put lone male travelers in Room 320.

The postal worker in the Cruise Room

The second ghost belongs to the bar. The story says that in the 1930s a postal worker set out in winter to deliver Christmas presents to children in Central City and never arrived. His body was found in the spring, still with his parcels.

Bartenders in the Cruise Room have described a man in old-fashioned clothes who matches him. In the version the hotel tells, he mutters about getting the presents to the children, sits down, orders a beer and seems to drink it, but when he leaves, the glass is as full as when it was poured.

Other stories around the hotel

Guests elsewhere in the building talk of feeling watched, of footsteps behind them in empty corridors and of a sound like wood breaking. Uncover Colorado also repeats a lighter story: restroom stalls that lock on their own with someone inside.

The most haunted rooms and places to look

• Room 320: Florence’s room on the third floor, sold as the Stay with the Spirits package.
• The third floor: Footsteps and the feeling of being followed are reported along the corridor.
• The Cruise Room: The Art Deco bar where the postal worker orders a beer he never finishes.
• The restrooms: Stalls said to lock on their own.

History of The Oxford Hotel

The Oxford was completed in 1891 as a five-story hotel near Union Station, developed by local builders and brewers Adolph Zang, Philip Feldhauser and William Mygatt and designed by Frank E. Edbrooke, then Colorado’s leading architect. It survived the Panic of 1893, when Mygatt sold his shares to former Colorado governor Job A. Cooper, and grew quickly: a $75,000 two-story addition on Wazee Street came in 1902, a remodel with a mezzanine and cafe in 1906, and a five-story annex on 17th Street, designed by Montana Fallis, in 1912.

The hotel saw some history of its own. In February 1906, after the bombing murder of former Idaho governor Frank Steunenberg, Denver police secretly held Western Federation of Miners leader Bill Haywood and two other union officers overnight in rooms here, then put them on a special train to Idaho before their supporters could challenge the extradition.

In the 1930s architect Charles Jaka remodeled the hotel in the Art Deco style. His Cruise Room, modeled on a lounge aboard the Queen Mary, opened as Prohibition ended in 1933, with bas-relief panels by Denver artist Alley Henson showing toasts from different countries. A panel featuring Germany was later replaced with one of Ireland.

Like much of downtown Denver, the Oxford declined after the war, and by the 1950s it was described as a flophouse, though it escaped the wrecking ball that took many of the city’s 19th-century hotels. Charles Callaway bought it in 1979 and closed it for restoration, joined in 1980 by Dana Crawford, who had led the revival of Larimer Square. After about $12 million and three years of work led by William Muchow & Associates, it reopened on June 19, 1983.

The Oxford was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on April 17, 1979. A room-by-room renovation began in 2009, and the Cruise Room’s original paint colors were restored in 2012.

Tips for a haunted stay

• Want Room 320 itself? Watch for the Stay with the Spirits package, which in October has included the room, a $65 Cruise Room credit, a vinyl record and late checkout when available.
• Outside the package, book direct and ask for Room 320; it cannot be guaranteed through third-party sites.
• Even if you stay elsewhere, have a martini in the Cruise Room and look for the man with the untouched beer.
• The hotel is a short walk from Union Station, so you can arrive from the airport by train.
• Combine it with the Brown Palace and Hotel Teatro for a downtown Denver haunted weekend.

More haunted hotels nearby

• The Brown Palace Hotel: Edbrooke’s other masterpiece, with its own phantom quartet
• Hotel Teatro: a former tramway building a few blocks away
• The Patterson Inn: the Croke-Patterson Mansion in Capitol Hill
• Cheesman Park: Denver’s haunted former cemetery
• Haunted hotels in Colorado
• Haunted hotels in Denver

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.

• The Oxford Hotel: Stay with the Spirits
• The Oxford Hotel: History
• Wikipedia: Oxford Hotel (Denver)
• Denver7: An 1898 crime and the ghost story that followed inside Denver's haunted Oxford Hotel (2019)
• Denver Gazette: Colorado's most haunted hotels (2017)
• Uncover Colorado: Haunted hotels in Colorado
• HISTORY: The first trial of the century (Haywood arrest, February 17, 1906)

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