The Black Monarch Hotel, Victor: A Haunted Gold Rush Brothel Turned Horror Hotel

On the corner of Victor Avenue and Third Street, a block from the Victor Hotel, stands a two-story brick building that began life in the gold rush as the Monarch, a saloon, casino and brothel. After decades as an art gallery and then nothing at all, it reopened in 2019 as the Black Monarch Hotel, with seven rooms themed on vampires, folklore monsters and history’s most notorious killers. It is the most unusual stay on our list of haunted hotels in Colorado.

The decor is theater, but the stories came first. Long before the rooms were painted black, locals reported a woman standing at the corner window with her arms raised, as if parting curtains. Today guests in that room describe a party downstairs, with laughter, clinking glasses and a piano, when the building is empty.

The ghosts of Black Monarch Hotel

The woman in the corner window

For years before the hotel reopened, people in Victor said they saw a woman standing in the corner window that looks over Victor Avenue and Third Street. Passersby described her holding her arms up in a V, as if she were parting curtains. The hotel’s publicist told Colorado Public Radio that people would call the police, “and the police would come and no one would be here.”

That corner window is now part of the Nikola Tesla room, the largest room in the hotel and the one said to be the most haunted.

The party downstairs

Guests in the Tesla room regularly report hearing a party below them, with a crowd, laughter, clinking glasses and a piano. When they go to look, there is nobody there and the noise usually stops. In 2020 the hotel said it happened about twice a month, and the Denver Gazette heard the same story in 2022, describing men shouting and a woman laughing in a town where almost nobody is out at night.

Writer Josiah Hesse, who ran a week-long writers’ retreat at the hotel, said he felt someone tapping his forehead during the night.

The swinging bed in the Black Annis room

The Black Annis room is themed on the English legend of a witch who lived in a cave and carried off children. Its bed hangs from four ropes. Poet Sammy Moore told CPR that the swaying bed stopped dead, and a few minutes later one of the ropes was pulled, “like someone grabbed it, but it wasn’t scary.”

The barkeep

Local lore says a barkeep was shot and killed during a saloon fight in the building’s early years and has never left. The hotel itself refers to bartender gunfights in its Wild West past, but we have not found a record that names him, so treat this one as a story.

The most haunted rooms and places to look

• The Nikola Tesla room: The biggest room, with the corner window where the woman was seen and the phantom party below.
• The Black Annis room: A suspended bed that guests say has been stopped and pulled.
• The H.H. Holmes, Elizabeth Bathory, Jack the Ripper, Lizzie Borden and Dracula rooms: Themed rooms with no specific ghost story of their own, but the same building around them.

History of Black Monarch Hotel

Victor boomed in the 1890s on the Cripple Creek gold field. The Monarch opened in the middle of it as a gentlemen’s club, which in a mining camp meant a saloon, casino and brothel. When fire destroyed most of Victor in August 1899, W.S. Sexton rebuilt it and called it “the finest gentlemen’s club this side of the Mississippi.”

As the mines wound down, so did the Monarch. It passed through several owners, spent time as an art gallery, and eventually sat empty and decaying, owned by a bank in Woodland Park. A popular rumor says Nikola Tesla wired the original building and much of Victor while he was working in Colorado Springs; it is a nice story, and it gave one room its name, but there is no record to confirm it.

Denver developer Adam Zimmerli saw a for-sale sign in 2017, expecting a price of around $2 million. The bank wanted $195,000 and a buyer who would care for the place, and he signed a lease-to-own deal in 2018. He restored the first four rooms and opened the Black Monarch in May 2019, painted black from floorboards to tin ceiling and filled with skulls, suits of armor, taxidermy and torture instruments. The first year sold out, and three more rooms followed.

The hotel has since gathered a cult following; guests have become engaged and married there, and the building has appeared in indie films and photo shoots. The property has been listed for sale, but the hotel’s own booking site was still taking reservations in 2026.

Tips for a haunted stay

• Ask for the Nikola Tesla room if you want the ghost stories; it has the corner window and the party.
• Look at the room themes before you book. The decor is graphic, and this is not a place for anyone squeamish.
• Read each room’s listing on the hotel’s site before you book; layouts and bathrooms differ from room to room.
• Pair the stay with the Victor Hotel a block away, where Room 301 and the birdcage elevator have their own stories.
• Book through the hotel’s own website, and check its cancellation terms: prepayments are not refundable.

More haunted hotels nearby

• Victor Hotel: Room 301 and the fourth-floor morgue, a block away
• Haunted places in Cripple Creek: the gold camp next door
• The Hand Hotel, Fairplay: a 1930s inn where every room has a 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.

• CPR News: This haunted hotel in Victor is like a real-life spooky Disneyland ride (2020)
• ColoradoBiz: The Monarch Hotel has been twice reborn
• Denver Gazette: A hotel of horror in an old, remote mining town (2022)
• The Black Monarch Hotel: rooms and booking
• LoopNet: 301 Victor Ave listing

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