{"id":2997,"slug":"georgetown-georgetown-colorado","story":[{"heading":null,"paragraphs":["Staff at the Hotel de Paris Museum in Georgetown keep a running list of smells reported in the building: coffee, bread, frosting, oranges, cinnamon, curry, perfume, cigars. What makes the list unusual is the cross-check — every item on it appears in the surviving purchase receipts of Louis Dupuy, the hotel's proprietor, dead since October 1900. The kitchen has not served dinner in over a century.","Georgetown itself was a silver boomtown — about 3,500 citizens when the Colorado Central Railroad arrived on August 1, 1877 — that hardened into one of the best-preserved mining-era streetscapes in the country. The Georgetown-Silver Plume district was made a National Historic Landmark in 1966, with the Hotel de Paris cited by the Park Service as a major reason for the designation. Two of its buildings carry most of the ghost file."]},{"heading":"The documented record","paragraphs":["Louis Dupuy was born Adolph François Gerard in Alençon, France in 1844 — a seminary dropout, culinary student, New York writer caught plagiarizing, Army deserter, and Rocky Mountain News mining reporter before a mine explosion near Silver Plume ended his digging in 1873. Georgetown took up a collection; he opened the Hotel de Paris on October 9, 1875, modeling it on a Norman inn, and ran it as the finest French kitchen between St. Louis and San Francisco. He died in October 1900 — by his own hand, the record says — and his housekeeper and heir Sophie Gally followed in February 1901.","The Burkholder family acquired the hotel in increments for about $4,500 and kept its reputation into the 1950s; the National Society of the Colonial Dames bought it in 1954 for $15,100 and has run it as a museum since, preserving some 5,000 Victorian objects, ninety percent of them original to Dupuy's era. A few blocks away, the Hamill House — expanded by silver magnate William Arthur Hamill into its Gothic Revival form in the 1860s and '70s — is the other half of the file."]},{"heading":"What investigators filed","paragraphs":["The Hotel de Paris is 'certified haunted' per Visit Clear Creek, and its own museum blog documents investigations — staff reported indistinct voices on the second floor, velvet ropes swinging on their own, dishes clattering in an empty dining room, and a doorknob that rattles insistently in the laundry. A 2018 team brought the standard kit — REM pod, spirit box, EVP recorders — and filed word responses including 'papa' and 'remember.'","At the Hamill House, a ParaColorado investigation in August 2015 logged a Mag Lite on the mantel flashing in response to questions about the Hamill family — the day after three generations of Hamills had visited for William's birthday — plus K2 meter spikes throughout the rooms and a spirit-box name, 'Seth,' in the nursery. One investigator reported a spirit under a bed; the whole team reported a sudden heavy feeling in the chest. Georgetown's walking-tour operator reports the ghost tour is her most popular offering in any season. The file, in other words, is professionally maintained."]},{"heading":"What remains","paragraphs":["The town still answers to its silver-era street plan, the museum still fields 'is the hotel haunted' as its most-asked question — ahead of whether you can get a room or a meal — and Dupuy's receipts still furnish the reference list for the kitchen smells. The record is a plagiarist who became the best hotelier in the Rockies and died badly. The lore is that the hotel kept his standards — and possibly his staff."]}],"name":"Georgetown","aliases":[],"type":"TOWN","type_label":"Town","cats":["LOCAL_FOLKLORE","HAUNTED_PLACE","HISTORIC_DISTRICT","MINING"],"groups":["hauntings","legends"],"desc":"The \"Silver Queen of the Rockies\"—where the hamlets’ ghosts reportedly stay.","full_desc":"A town in Georgetown, Colorado, Georgetown is filed here for what the record attaches to it. The \"Silver Queen of the Rockies\"—where the hamlets’ ghosts reportedly stay. The presences in its file go unnamed: the georgetown dead, the record says. The dossier holds 2 reported claims, 2 legends and 1 documented fact, with the verified spine filed separately from the lore. It is a living community — be a respectful visitor.","address":null,"city":"Georgetown","county":null,"state":"Colorado","postal":null,"region":"West","lat":39.717886,"lon":-105.694488,"coord_kind":"CITY","status":"ACTIVE","access":"PUBLIC","access_notes":null,"ownership":null,"website":null,"phone":null,"year_built":null,"year_opened":null,"year_closed":null,"year_demolished":null,"designation":null,"current_use":"Historic site / ghost town","research_notes":"mines2 batch; VERIFY task auto-queued.","stage":"SOURCE_RESEARCH","quality":{"level":"MEDIUM","score":59.4,"dims":{"location_confidence":0.75,"identity_confidence":0.65,"historical_confidence":0.8,"source_quality":0.3999999999999999,"paranormal_claim_provenance":0.8,"coordinate_confidence":0,"current_access_confidence":0.7,"freshness":0.65}},"claims":[{"id":2844,"type":"APPARITION","description":"Reported figures in the buildings. Georgetown, Colorado is a living community with a dead file — the reports are the town's other history. It circulates as local folklore — the kind communities keep rather than verify. The account appears in 'Georgetown'. It is the sighting the place is known for, and it hasn't stopped.","evidence":"LOCAL_FOLKLORE","evidence_label":"Local folklore","entity":null,"where":null,"first_report":null,"approx_date":null,"confidence":0.8,"conflict_notes":null,"source":{"name":"Georgetown","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgetown,_Colorado","publisher":"Wikipedia","type":"ENCYCLOPEDIA","authority":4},"conflicting_source":null,"variants":[]},{"id":2845,"type":"NAMED_GHOST_LEGEND","description":"The dead are reportedly seen. The presences go by the Georgetown dead in the file. Georgetown in Georgetown, Colorado carries the story the way small towns do — as common knowledge no one quite verifies. It's a documented legend: the telling is real, the contents remain folklore. Named ghosts are the ones that last — this one has lasted.","evidence":"DOCUMENTED_LEGEND","evidence_label":"Documented legend","entity":"The Georgetown dead","where":null,"first_report":null,"approx_date":null,"confidence":0.8,"conflict_notes":null,"source":{"name":"Georgetown","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgetown,_Colorado","publisher":"Wikipedia","type":"ENCYCLOPEDIA","authority":4},"conflicting_source":null,"variants":[]}],"history":[{"description":"The town’s 1860s preservation is documented. A Colorado community's documented history gives the file real ground underneath the local lore. This belongs to the verified spine of the entry, the layer everything else is measured against. 'Georgetown' documents the entry. The entry's timeline holds it; the lore holds the rest.","evidence":"HISTORICALLY_VERIFIED","date_start":"1860","date_end":null,"confidence":null,"source":{"name":"Georgetown","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgetown,_Colorado","publisher":"Wikipedia","type":"ENCYCLOPEDIA","authority":4}}],"legends":[{"name":null,"summary":"Reported figures in the buildings. Georgetown in Georgetown, Colorado carries the story the way small towns do — as common knowledge no one quite verifies. It survives as local folklore, which is to say it survives because people keep telling it. The account appears in 'Georgetown'. The story outranks the documentation, which is how you know it's folklore.","earliest":null,"evidence":"LOCAL_FOLKLORE","source":{"name":"Georgetown","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgetown,_Colorado","publisher":"Wikipedia","type":"ENCYCLOPEDIA","authority":4}},{"name":null,"summary":"The dead are reportedly seen. A Colorado town's lore is municipal property; Georgetown keeps this account in its unofficial archive. The account has a collector's pedigree — written down as legend, which is the most honest status it can hold. The tale is the site's other archive — oral, embroidered, and outlasting the documents.","earliest":null,"evidence":"DOCUMENTED_LEGEND","source":{"name":"Georgetown","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgetown,_Colorado","publisher":"Wikipedia","type":"ENCYCLOPEDIA","authority":4}}],"entities":[{"name":"The Georgetown dead","claimed_identity":"The Georgetown dead","verified":null,"summary":"The dead are reportedly seen. The accounts name only a collective — the Georgetown dead. The town in Georgetown, Colorado has its documented history and then it has this — the account everyone locally knows. The account appears in 'Georgetown'. The named presence is what turns a haunting into a household.","behavior":"The dead are reportedly seen.","area":null,"first_ref":null,"source":{"name":"Georgetown","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgetown,_Colorado","publisher":"Wikipedia","type":"ENCYCLOPEDIA","authority":4}}],"events":[],"investigations":[],"encounters":[],"media":[],"persons":[],"visitor":{"tour_availability":"Verify before visiting","notes":"Public townsite; walkable areas are generally accessible year-round.","last_verified_at":"2026-09-18 11:32:55","source":{"name":"HauntHunt generic access guidance","url":"https://haunthunt.com/about#access-guidance","publisher":"HauntHunt editorial","type":"DIRECTORY","authority":2}},"sources":[{"name":"Georgetown","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgetown,_Colorado","publisher":"Wikipedia","type":"ENCYCLOPEDIA","authority":4}],"conflicts":[],"wiki":{"title":"Georgetown, Colorado","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgetown%2C_Colorado","desc":"Town in Colorado, United States","extract":"Georgetown is the territorial charter municipality that is the county seat of Clear Creek County, Colorado, United States. The town population was 1,118 at the 2020 United States census. Georgetown has a 2026 population of 1324, and is growing at a rate of 2.64% annually.  The former silver mining camp along Clear Creek in the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains was established in 1859 during the Pike's Peak Gold Rush. The federally designated Georgetown-Silver Plume Historic District comprises Georgetown, the neighboring town of Silver Plume, and the Georgetown Loop Historic Mining & Railroad Park between the two towns. The Georgetown Post Office has the ZIP code 80444.\nThe town sits at an e","img":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/53/Georgetown%2C_Colorado_from_Interstate_70.jpg/960px-Georgetown%2C_Colorado_from_Interstate_70.jpg?utm_source=en.wikipedia.org&utm_campaign=api&utm_content=thumbnail","score":86,"lat":39.71805556,"lon":-105.69416667},"counts":{"claims":2,"history":1,"legends":2,"entities":1,"sources":1}}