HauntBound archive · catalog record
Reported phenomena — as catalogued
1886 Silver-Boom Hotel in the San Juan Mountains
505 Main Street, Ouray, CO 81427
Research updated May 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
$$$
Boutique hotel rates vary seasonally; check website for current room and suite pricing.
Access
Wheelchair OK
Paved sidewalks; historic building with stairs to upper floors
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1886 · National Register of Historic Places · San Juan Silver-Boom Architecture · Hosted U.S. Presidents Roosevelt and Hoover
Construction of the Beaumont Hotel began on July 5, 1886, on Main Street in Ouray, Colorado, a town then at the center of the San Juan Mountains silver-mining boom. The structure was completed at a reported cost of $75,000 and held its grand opening on July 25, 1887. Designed in the Victorian style typical of late-nineteenth-century mountain resort hotels, the four-story building rose above a downtown of brick storefronts servicing miners, freight teamsters, and rail traffic.
During its first decades, the Beaumont developed a reputation as the most prominent hotel between Denver and the West Coast on the southern Colorado route. Theodore Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover both stayed at the property, alongside mining executives and traveling performers booked into the adjacent Wright Opera House. The hotel's dining room and ground-floor lounge anchored the social calendar of Ouray's Gilded Age.
The collapse of silver prices in the 1890s and the long decline of mining in the San Juans reduced the Beaumont's traffic. The hotel was closed in 1964 and entered nearly four decades of dormancy. The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places, but the upper floors remained sealed and unrestored.
A private restoration begun in the late 1990s returned the Beaumont to operation in 2003, and subsequent ownership transitions have continued period-appropriate renovations. The hotel today operates as a small luxury property, with restored guest rooms, the Luella Lounge in the original ground-floor parlor, and a spa.
Sources
The Beaumont's documented historical violence dates to 1887, the year the hotel opened. A waitress named Eller Day — also spelled Ellar in some period records — was shot in the hotel's parlor lounge by a man named Joe Dixon, a pastry chef who had previously threatened her at another Ouray establishment. Dixon was arrested and jailed; that night a vigilante crowd set fire to the jail with Dixon inside. Eller died from her wounds two days after the shooting. The account is corroborated by the Ouray County Plaindealer archive and regional history writing. The lounge today is called the Luella Lounge after Luella Huey, a different figure from the hotel's early years — a point that generates confusion in some popular retellings that mistakenly use "Luella" as Eller Day's given name.
Guests and staff have reported a range of phenomena attributed to Eller's residual presence. The most repeated accounts describe a woman's laughter heard in upper-floor rooms, footsteps in vacant hallways, and unexplained movement of small objects in the lounge. A guest review on Tripadvisor describes a woman's laugh that 'seemed to be coming from the wall at the foot of our bed,' a detail repeated in subsequent travel coverage.
A secondary, looser thread of regional folklore — appearing on aggregator sites such as cohauntedhouses.com and in older ghost compendiums — describes a woman walking the halls at 2:15 a.m. on quarter-moon nights, framed in some versions as a bride murdered by her husband, in others as a maid killed by a jealous ex-lover. These versions contradict one another and are not corroborated by Ouray County historical records or the Beaumont's own materials. Treat them as unverified oral tradition; the Eller Day account is the documented one.
The Beaumont does not market itself primarily as a haunted attraction. The history of the 1887 shooting is woven into the hotel's restoration narrative and is presented as period history alongside the building's architectural and political provenance.
Notable Entities
Book a room in the restored 1886 hotel that hosted Theodore Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover. The Luella Lounge anchors the lobby — the 1887 shooting of waitress Eller Day by a pastry chef is the documented dark history associated with this space; guests have reported a woman's laughter and footsteps along the upper-floor corridors.
The hotel's lobby lounge, named the Luella Lounge. The documented 1887 incident in this space: waitress Eller Day was shot by pastry chef Joe Dixon, who was jailed and died when vigilantes burned the jail. Drinks and small plates are served in the restored Victorian space.
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