Location Description and History

The Hotel Victor was built in the mid-1890's by the Woods brothers. After the devastating fire of 1899, it was rebuilt to house the Woods Brothers Investment Company and the First National Bank. The upper floors would be simple rooms for businessmen and mine workers. The most distinctive feature of the hotel is its elevator. Wrought iron strips twist to the top, ending in a lofty birdcage dome of graceful swirls and curves. The four-story brick exterior of the hotel has the look of a business building. Typical of that era, there are decorative touches. The windows of the top floor are arched, echoing the arched entryway. The ground is frozen in this area from October to June. Back then, they had no heavy equipment to dig graves. So the bodies were stored up on the fourth floor until summer when they could be buried.

A large crowd of men and boys sit or stand in the lobby of the Victor Hotel, Victor, Colorado. Most wear suits and hats; some smoke pipes or cigars. One man holds the paw of a dog sitting up in a chair while another reads the "Victor Daily Record" newspaper. On the back wall is a sign of advertisements that reads: "Victor Bakery", "Miner's Meat Market", "Real Estate Mining Broker", "Victor Transfer", "Bank Exc[hange]".

Exterior view of original Victor Hotel, Victor Avenue & Fourth Street, Victor, Colorado, a two-story wooden commercial frame building. It shows additional ground level with storeroom window displays & awnings, the corner main entrance & several side entrances, parapet with entablature, cone-shaped tower with shingles, double hung windows, semi- elliptical surround with plain molding& balconies on second & third story. The photo also shows electrical or utility poles and street intersection light.

How Victor was named is not known, but the theory is that the Woods named it after one of the town's first pioneers, Victor Adams. By the time it was platted in 1893, it was already known as the City of Mines because the largest & richest gold mines of the Cripple Creek Mining District were located just above Victor on Battle Mountain. While Cripple Creek claimed all the shining glory of a wealthy gold camp, nearby Victor and its environs played the biggest important role in the production of the nearly $434,000,000 in gold ($6 billion in today's value) produced here. Victor was the working man's town of the mining district, supplying homes for much of the labor force that brought the wealth of gold to the surface in the 500-plus gold mines that once operated in the mining district.

In March of 1894, about the time the Florence & Cripple Creek Railroad arrived in Victor, the Woods started building a hotel, which was greatly needed. While excavating for the foundation of the hotel, a vein of gold ore, which leads to the now famous Gold Coin vein, was opened. By then the town had a population of 8,000 residents.

Aug. 21, 1899 it took wind-driven flames only five hours to destroy the bustling town that shortly afterward claimed it had 18,000 residents. The pioneering spirits that had already made Victor a stronghold in a rough mining camp at nearly 10,000 feet above sea level rebuilt the City of Mines with brick in less than 6 months after the fire.

While the Woods empire was short-lived, the contributions made in those 30-plus years had a long and substantial impact on the mining district.

We arrived at the hotel around 7:00pm. After talking with some of the staff, we were escorted around the hotel and shown the main areas where ghosts and ghostly activity had been reported.

Our first stop was the basement. Obtaining EM readings here was difficult due to interference from AC power lines which ran underneath the building. The basement was quite fascinating on a historical level as it is practically unchanged from the hotel's old mining days.

Next we took a ride on the hotel's original elevator up to the third floor to Room 301. During the search of the room we did locate a small DC EM field that hovered around 2 nt for several minutes before disappearing.

From here we searched the entire fourth floor, but nothing noteworthy (EM wise) was located. The woman who escorted us had also had unusual events happen to her in the hotel's kitchen, so we moved back down to the main floor to have a look. According to her and at least one of the cooks, utensils would move about the room as if someone had thrown them. We did find high AC fields in the areas where these events happened but nothing else of interest was located.

The hotel was not very active during our visit but we did locate enough interesting EM fields and information to warrant another look at the hotel.