Bullet Holes in the Shiloh Saloon: The Virginian Hotel

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated August 27, 2026 · How we verify

Wyoming has plenty of buildings that outgrew their towns, but few do it as bluntly as the Virginian Hotel in Medicine Bow. Three and a half stories of concrete block sit at the edge of a community of 284 people, put up over a decade by a local mayor who bet that the railroad and the highway would keep bringing strangers through. The bet paid off. Guests still check in, still sleep under pressed tin ceilings, and some of them still come back down to the desk in the morning to ask who else was walking the hall.

Quick Orientation for Medicine Bow

• Built: construction began in 1901, finished in 1911, grand opening 30 September 1911
• Builders: August Grimm, the first mayor of Medicine Bow, with his partner George Plummer
• Style: a loosely handled Renaissance Revival in the Italian manner, three and a half stories
• Where: midway between Laramie and Rawlins on the old Lincoln Highway, now U.S. Route 30
• Listed: National Register of Historic Places, 1978
• Reopened: 1984, after a full renovation back to turn of the century decor

August Grimm’s Ten-Year Bet on a Prairie Town

Grimm and Plummer took ten years to finish the job, and the building shows why: the concrete blocks were cast on site, using sand hauled out of the Medicine Bow River. When it opened it was the largest hotel between Denver and Salt Lake City, an odd distinction for a settlement this small, and it brought the town its first electric lights and its first sewer.

Medicine Bow grew up around the Union Pacific line, with mining and livestock filling in the rest of the local economy, and the hotel is usually described as a bunkhouse for cowboys and railroad crews. That is only half right. It was built for a much broader clientele, and it worked as the town’s common room: a place where everyone met, ate, and closed deals. The name almost certainly nods to The Virginian, the novel Owen Wister wrote in Medicine Bow, which did more for the town’s reputation than any freight schedule ever could. For close to a century the building has served as both a landmark for Medicine Bow and a historic landmark for the state.

Bullet Holes in the Shiloh Saloon

The main floor holds three rooms worth walking through even if you are not staying: an “Eating House,” the formal Owen Wister Dining Room, and the Shiloh Saloon. The saloon walls are riddled with bullet holes, left in place as a souvenir of a shootout that the building’s promotional history mentions without naming names or dates. Treat it as folklore attached to a real set of holes rather than as a documented incident.

Upstairs, the hotel proper has been kept deliberately old. Victorian gold and burgundy medallion wallpaper, velvet draperies, twelve foot ceilings finished in pressed tin. Rooms come with antique brass beds and tulip-shaped light fittings and are still heated by steam radiators. Only the suites have private baths, and those have claw foot tubs; the other original rooms share bath facilities out in the hall. There are no telephones and no televisions in that part of the building. Two cement block extensions were added in 1957, one of which housed the owners for years and now contains rental units, and those are where you will find coffee makers, small refrigerators, phones, cable television, and your own bathroom.

What Guests Report on the Upper Floors

None of the following is established fact. It is what guests and staff say, repeated often enough that it has become part of how the hotel is described.

• Figures seen in hallways and doorways, usually described only in outline
• Cold spots in rooms and corridors that do not track with the radiators
• Music from an earlier era, heard faintly and with no obvious source
• A presence in the restaurant that some staff read as helpful rather than hostile

The stories attached to these reports are looser still. One holds that two former lovers are stuck in an argument that never resolves. Another says people who died in the building never quite left it. Neither claim comes with a name, a date, or a record, and a hotel that has been in continuous use since 1911 has had ample time to accumulate legends that nobody can check. What can be checked is the setting: a building with almost no soundproofing, radiators that knock, a hallway bathroom arrangement that means guests move around at night, and a saloon downstairs. Any of that will produce experiences worth talking about without anything supernatural involved.

Staying at the Virginian Hotel

This is a working hotel, so the simplest way to see it is to book a night. Decide first which kind of room you want, because the difference is real: the original rooms give you the 1911 experience with a walk down the hall to the bath, while the 1957 units give you a bathroom, a phone, and cable. Anyone hoping for a paranormal night should be asking for the original building.

You do not have to be a guest to eat in the Owen Wister Dining Room or stand in the Shiloh Saloon and look at the bullet holes, which is the cheapest way to get a sense of the place. The location works well as a stop rather than a destination: it sits on U.S. Route 30 between Laramie and Rawlins, close enough to either for an easy detour. Go in expecting an unusually large old hotel in an unusually small town, and let the ghost stories be whatever they turn out to be.

See Virginian Hotel for Yourself

Sources

• Virginian Hotel
• The Virginian Hotel – 307-379-2377
• Home
• National Park Service
• Wikipedia: Virginian Hotel (Medicine Bow, Wyoming)

Address: 404 Lincoln Highway

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