Tag Archives: haunted hotel

Irma Hotel ghost story

My friend Jace grew up in Cody, Wyoming, a town named for the folk hero “Buffalo Bill” Cody. He gave me the following description of the purportedly haunted Irma Hotel:

“So apparently this was like, the first hotel ever built in Cody. And it was named after one of Buffalo Bill’s daughters who died when she was a kid; it’s called the Irma Hotel or whatever. And then apparently, I think it was like, some, like some important person within the state came to visit and ended up like, dying or being murdered in his hotel room. Like being- being shot with like a- one of those muskets or whatever. And then uh, so I don’t know, apparently he’s just supposed to like, haunt the whole hotel ’cause he wasn’t a good guy. Uh and then also Buffalo Bill himself uh, is supposed to haunt the hotel. There are reports of waitresses seeing people in dining booths, but then when they go over they’re not there, or seeing people- like the the people that clean the rooms seeing people like, walking around the hallways.”

This legend is deeply linked not only to the town in which it is meant to have taken place, but particularly to Buffalo Bill Cody himself. The incorporation of Buffalo Bill into folklore like this piece contribute to his status as a legendary figure and folk hero–someone who certainly existed, but whose identity is shrouded in unsubstantiated stories due to his widespread exaltation. This particular legend weaves together supernatural, patriotic (in the form of folk hero celebration), and local themes.

Haunted Hotel

Informant: There’s this hotel in Boulder, Colorado, it’s like a thing, it’s actually, there’s a thing in Boulder Colorado where this room, it’s 314, I think it’s 314, um, has like, some weird ghostly connection to things. So, um, I was on this thing called the Banjo Billy’s Bus tour, it’s a thing, um, and, he was talking about how in room 314 of the music hall in Boulder, there was like some sort of suicide or something and then in the boulder hotel, not sure what the actual name is but it’s like a very known hotel for ghost stories, and um, in room 314 there was a woman or some sort of suicide and then a woman tried to kill herself with chloroform and then a man tried to kill himself—a bunch of people tried to kill themselves in that room. And when you go to that room, like when we went to that room after the tour, we were standing there and then you could feel like a rush of like chills, and then my mom and I were waiting for the elevator because it was on the third floor and I don’t know why we didn’t just go down the stairs and everyone had already gone down the elevator and we heard footsteps and nobody was there so we ran down the stairs. Fun story!

 

Informant is a sophomore at the University of Southern California. She is studying Narrative Studies and plans to have a minor in Songwriting. She is from a suburb outside of Chicago, Illinois. I spoke to her while we were eating lunch at my sorority house one day. We were sitting together with some of my other informants. Much of what she told me was learned from her own experiences.

 

This is an interesting ghost story, and you can see the connection between the numbers in this story and others. Many haunted rooms are on a floor with the number 13 in them, and this has that flipped around, but these numbers are often found having to do with haunted places. It seems that many hotels have stories about people dying in them.