Georgetown

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.

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.

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.