Haunted hotel guide · Buffalo, Wyoming

The Haunted Occidental Hotel, Buffalo: Emily, the Bordello Suite and a Saloon Full of Stories

Buffalo Bill, Calamity Jane and Owen Wister all passed through the Occidental. Guests say a little girl named Emily never left, and that something likes to climb into bed between couples.

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

4.2/5Haunted Rooms Score

1880Year founded

Bordello SuiteMost requested room

Visit hotel websiteMeet the ghosts

The Historic Occidental Hotel, known locally as the Ox, sits on Main Street in Buffalo at the foot of the Bighorn Mountains. It began in 1880 as a stop on the Bozeman Trail, ten years before Wyoming became a state, and it is one of the most talked-about haunted hotels in Wyoming.

Its ghost stories come from guests, housekeepers, bartenders and desk clerks, and they have been gathered by Cowboy State Daily in 2023 and the Wyoming Livestock Roundup in 2025. The best known is Emily, a little girl tied to the old Bordello Suite. Here is who is said to haunt the Ox, which rooms to ask for, and the history behind them.

The ghosts of the Occidental Hotel

Emily

Emily is the Ox’s best-known ghost. The story told at the hotel is that she was the young daughter of a woman who worked from the Bordello Suite on the upper floor, and that she died in the early 1900s. The details shift with the telling: Cowboy State Daily has given her age as six and her death as 1912 in one story and cholera as the cause in another, while the Wyoming Livestock Roundup calls her seven and says it is unclear whether cholera or typhoid killed her. No record of her has been published. Guests describe a thin girl with long dark hair, sometimes in white, who taps them on the shoulder at the bar, moves furniture and vanishes.

Staff keep a stuffed orange tabby cat near the room where she is said to have died, and guests leave other stuffed animals and notes for her there. Housekeepers have reported a girl hiding and trying to play hide and seek, and some stopped cleaning that room. One guest told staff Emily kept bouncing on his bed and left in the middle of the night; staff later learned he was a wanted felon. Others hear a ball bouncing in the upstairs hallway.

Margaret, the lady of the house

Writer Deborah Cobb, quoted by the Wyoming Livestock Roundup, describes Margaret as the former lady of the house: a tall, imposing woman in Victorian dress who drifts along the upstairs hallway as if she is still checking on things.

The ghost who gets into bed

The strangest stories come from couples. Guests in the Teddy Roosevelt Suite told the front desk they felt someone slide into bed between them. A husband and wife in the Herbert Hoover Room smelled a woman’s perfume nobody was wearing, and then each felt someone slip in between them. Desk clerk Nancy Lehnert, who heard that story at checkout, told Cowboy State Daily she thinks of the hotel’s spirits as protective.

The Prairie Cowboy Room and Room 56

Lehnert says the Prairie Cowboy Room produces more stories than any other. One man woke in the night and saw what he described as a whoosh, something like a spirit going by, and chose not to wake his wife. Another guest heard a heavy antique iron move across the floor of Room 56. He put it back, it moved again, and he told it that it could stay where it was.

Cowboys, spurs and the saloon

Shadowy figures are said to lean against the walls and then vanish, often with the jingle of spurs on the staircase. In the saloon, bartender Vanessa Vann told Cowboy State Daily she has seen bottles pop off the shelves, corks blow out on their own and a wine glass break just as someone set it up to pour. Penny Ramirez, a waitress at the Busy Bee Cafe, has heard a piano key ding in the empty lobby, stepped through cobweb-like sensations, usually on a Friday after the jam session, and heard her name called in the saloon with nobody there. Others describe touches at the bar, cold spots in the hallway and doors that open and close by themselves.

The 2011 investigation

In February 2011 Black Hills Paranormal Investigators spent two days at the hotel at the owners’ invitation. They reported recording EVPs and filming a door opening in Room 19, and concluded the activity was real. As with any amateur investigation, that is their interpretation of what they captured.

The most haunted rooms and places to look

• The Bordello Suite: Emily’s room in the hotel’s stories, on the upper floor.
• Room 19: Where a 2011 investigation filmed a door opening.
• Teddy Roosevelt Suite and Herbert Hoover Room: The rooms where couples say someone slid into bed between them.
• Prairie Cowboy Room: The room the front desk hears the most stories about.
• The saloon: Flying bottles, popping corks and a ghost who pinches.

History of The Historic Occidental Hotel

The Occidental opened in 1880 near the Bozeman Trail, at the foot of the Bighorn Mountains, ten years before Wyoming became a state. As Buffalo grew into a ranching town, the hotel grew with it, was expanded into a grand hotel, and became known for its hospitality and fine food.

Its guest list reads like a book of the Old West: Buffalo Bill Cody, Calamity Jane, Tom Horn, Frank Canton, “Red” Angus, Teddy Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover, and, by many accounts, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid riding in from the Hole in the Wall. Ernest Hemingway is also said to have stayed. The scuffed back stairs are sometimes pointed to as proof of the upstairs bordello, though historians dispute it.

Owen Wister was among the guests, and the hotel’s event planner told Cowboy State Daily that the climactic showdown in The Virginian is staged outside the Occidental saloon. The original barroom was replaced in 1908 by the present saloon, with an imposing back bar, stained glass accents and an embossed tin ceiling; the hotel says the back bar was brought in by wagon and that the bullet holes in the saloon are original.

The Great Depression hit the owners hard, and by the mid-1980s the hotel had closed. Dawn Dawson bought it in 1997, by one account eight weeks before it would have been torn down, led a restoration that took about ten years, with the rooms finished in 2007, and got the hotel listed on the National Register of Historic Places. David Stewart, who helped restore the north wing, started the Thursday night bluegrass jam in 2006. He and Jackie Stewart became managing partners in 2008 and bought the whole property in 2015. Today they run the hotel with 18 antique-filled rooms, the saloon, the Virginian restaurant and the Busy Bee Cafe next door.

Tips for a haunted stay

• Call or email to request the Bordello Suite, Room 19 or the Prairie Cowboy Room; each room has its own name and character.
• Rooms are limited, so book well ahead for summer. Rates are lower from January to April.
• Bring a small toy or note for Emily’s room. Guests have been doing it for years.
• Spend the evening in the saloon: the Thursday bluegrass jam has run since 2006, and Busy Bee staff say the strange moments tend to come on the Fridays after.
• Ask about the bullet holes and the hotel’s museum.

More haunted hotels nearby

• The Mansion House Inn, Buffalo: a 1903 house up the same street
• The Sheridan Inn: Buffalo Bill’s inn and Miss Kate, 35 miles north
• The Irma Hotel, Cody: Buffalo Bill’s own hotel, over the Bighorns
• Haunted hotels in Wyoming

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.

• Cowboy State Daily: At Wyoming's Historic Occidental Hotel, the ghost gets into bed with you (2023)
• Wyoming Livestock Roundup: Characters of the past still haunt the Occidental Hotel (2025)
• Cowboy State Daily: For 143 years, Buffalo's Occidental Hotel (2023)
• Historic Occidental Hotel (official site)
• Historic Occidental Hotel: History
• Travel Wyoming: 15 haunted places to visit in Wyoming

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