Haunted hotel guide · Boulder, Colorado

The Haunted Hotel Boulderado: Rooms 302 and 304 and Boulder's Grand Old Hotel

Boulder’s citizens built this hotel to put their town on the map in 1909. More than a century later, the city’s own historic preservation staff list two of its third-floor rooms as rumored to be haunted.

By The Haunted Rooms Team · Updated November 2026 · How we rate hotels

3.5/5Haunted Rooms Score

1909Opened to guests

302 and 304Most talked-about rooms

Check availabilityMeet the ghosts

The Hotel Boulderado stands on the corner of 13th and Spruce, one block off the Pearl Street Mall, and it has been Boulder’s grand hotel since New Year’s Day 1909. It still runs the Otis elevator it opened with, its lobby is lit by a stained-glass ceiling, and its dining room, open since 1909, is billed as Boulder’s oldest continuously operating restaurant. It is one of the most historic stops on our list of haunted hotels in Colorado.

It also has a ghost story that the city itself repeats. In a Halloween round-up of Boulder’s oldest buildings, the City of Boulder noted that “numerous ghosts are said to walk the halls” here, and singled out rooms 302 and 304. Below we set out what guests and staff have described, where the stories come from, and what the records can and cannot confirm.

The ghosts of Hotel Boulderado

The woman in white of rooms 302 and 304

The best-sourced story at the Boulderado comes from the City of Boulder. Its historic preservation round-up says rooms 302 and 304 are rumored to be haunted, with electrical disturbances, voices and sightings of a woman in white. It adds that these rooms are believed to be where a double suicide took place.

We could not find a newspaper record of a double suicide at the hotel, and the hotel itself does not tell the story, so treat that part as local legend. What is documented is that the reports keep coming from these two rooms.

What a housekeeper saw

In a Denver Post feature, Beverly Silva, who started at the hotel as a college student and went on to become its director of sales and marketing, described her own experiences. While making a bed in Suite 302 in the 1980s, she said, the television turned itself on, though nothing had touched the wire.

In Suite 304 she was vacuuming when the hands of an old grandfather clock spun wildly, twice, then stopped at the correct time. She told the paper that 302 and 304 draw the most haunted complaints, and that people have speculated about suicides there, though the suite numbers were changed during a remodel. That last detail matters if you book: the room called 302 today may not be the room the stories began in.

Pinned down in Suite 306

The same article told of a woman who worked in the hotel office and stayed in Suite 306. She said she woke unable to move, with the feeling of a presence pressing down on her. Experiences like this are often explained as sleep paralysis, and it is worth reading the story with that in mind, but it is one of the reasons the third floor has its reputation.

Honey Bee and her portrait

Beautrice “Honey Bee” Lennartz (1904 to 1998) was a familiar face in the hotel dining room, especially late in her life. The City of Boulder notes that she left a life-sized portrait of herself to the hotel, and that it can still be seen on the fifth floor. Her name comes up in the ghost lore because of that portrait and her long attachment to the place, though we found no specific sighting of her.

The elevator and the lady in the chairs

A Boulder visitor guide from 2015 recorded two more stories that guests and staff tell: an elevator with an “interesting sense of humor”, and a woman in a Victorian-era gown said to linger around the hotel’s chairs. The elevator is the original Otis car, still carrying guests more than a century on.

Staff have also mentioned a heavy window in a former bar rising partway up its frame with a creak on a summer evening, and guests reporting scratching inside the walls. None of these is documented beyond guest and staff accounts.

The most haunted rooms and places to look

• Room 302: The TV that switched itself on, and the most haunted complaints. Request it in the original building.
• Room 304: The grandfather clock whose hands spun, and the woman in white.
• Room 306: Where an office worker woke unable to move.
• The Otis elevator: The original 1908 car, said by guests and staff to have a sense of humor.
• The fifth floor: Honey Bee Lennartz’s life-sized portrait.

History of Hotel Boulderado

In 1906 a group of Boulder residents and the town’s Commercial Association formed the Boulder Hotel Company to build the first-class hotel they felt their growing town lacked. Architects William Redding and Son designed a five-story brick building mixing Italian Renaissance and Spanish Revival styles. Construction took more than two years. A gala ball on December 31, 1908 marked the finish, and the first guests checked in on New Year’s Day 1909.

The original stained-glass ceiling over the lobby was imported, and Wikipedia notes it was modeled on the one at San Francisco’s Palace Hotel, lost in the 1906 earthquake. In 1910 the corner porches were enclosed and dormers added to the fifth-floor rooms. Guests over the years included naturalist Enos Mills, Ethel Barrymore, Douglas Fairbanks Sr., Billy Sunday, Clarence Darrow, Helen Keller, Robert Frost, Benny Goodman and Louis Armstrong.

In 1940 hotelier William Hutson Sr. bought the Boulderado for $40,000 and gave it to his son Bill and Bill’s bride Winnie as a wedding gift. After a 1960 snowstorm damaged the lobby ceiling, Winnie replaced the stained glass with red, white and blue plexiglass. New owners from 1967 moved the main entrance to 13th Street, and when Boulder County lifted its long local prohibition that year the hotel got one of the first liquor licenses. A basement restaurant, the Catacombs, followed in 1969.

The Boulder Landmarks Board named the hotel a city landmark in 1976, and in 1977 about 1,500 square feet of new leaded glass, designed from old photographs, restored the lobby ceiling. Frank Day’s company bought the hotel in 1980 and carried out a full renovation, then added the North Wing in two phases, 61 rooms in 1985 and 48 more plus an event center in 1989. The hotel was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1994 and joined Historic Hotels of America in 1996.

The bars were reworked in 2014, when License No. 1 opened in the basement and Spruce Farm and Fish took over the dining room, which the hotel calls Boulder’s oldest continuously operating restaurant. In 2025 ownership passed from Frank and Gina Day to AJ Capital, with Schulte Hospitality managing the hotel. Wikipedia also notes that Stephen King, who lived in Boulder in the 1970s, mentions the hotel in The Shining and Misery.

Tips for a haunted stay

• Book directly and ask for Room 302 or 304 in the original 1909 building, not the North Wing.
• Remember the suite numbers were changed in a remodel, so ask the front desk which rooms carry the stories today.
• Take the original Otis elevator up to the fifth floor to see Honey Bee’s portrait.
• Have a drink in License No. 1, the basement bar in the old Catacombs space.
• Visit for New Year’s Eve if you can: the hotel has held a gala since the night before it opened.

More haunted hotels nearby

• The Goldminer Hotel, Nederland: A small mining-era hotel about 17 miles up Boulder Canyon
• The Stanley Hotel, Estes Park: Colorado’s most famous haunted hotel, about 35 miles north
• The Brown Palace Hotel, Denver: Denver’s grand haunted hotel, about 30 miles southeast
• 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.

• Hotel Boulderado: History
• Hotel Boulderado (official site)
• City of Boulder: Boulder's oldest and possibly spookiest properties
• The Denver Post (repost): The Boulderado a favorite haunt
• Wikipedia: Hotel Boulderado
• Your Boulder: Haunted Boulder

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