Queen Victoria’s Cherry Back Bar: The Irma Hotel

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

The Irma Hotel sits in the middle of Cody, Wyoming, a town that carries the name of the man who built the place: William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody, co-founder and namesake of the city. He named the hotel after his daughter Irma. It opened in 1902, it is still taking bookings and serving dinner more than a century later, and along the way it collected a set of ghost stories that staff and guests repeat with more affection than fear.

Quick Orientation to the Irma

• Opened: with a party on November 18, 1902
• Built by: William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody, for his daughter Irma
• Recognition: listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973
• Status: still operating as both a hotel and a restaurant

The Opening Party of November 18, 1902

Cody did not open his hotel quietly. The Irma launched with a party on November 18, 1902, and the guest list reflected the showman’s instincts: he invited the press along with dignitaries from as far away as Boston. Positioned near the town’s railroad depot, the hotel was built to catch the traffic Cody expected his young town to draw, tourists, hunters and businessmen arriving by rail. It worked. The Irma quickly became the social center of Cody, which is roughly what a man who had toured Europe with a Wild West show would have considered the minimum acceptable outcome.

Queen Victoria’s Gift Behind the Bar

The single most photographed object in the building is the back bar, carved from cherry, that anchors the barroom. It came to Buffalo Bill as a gift from Queen Victoria, and it remains the focal point of the hotel’s interior. Whatever a visitor makes of the ghost stories, the bar is a documented piece of frontier celebrity history sitting in a working saloon, and it is free to look at.

Creditors, Louisa Cody, and the Newell Years

The hotel’s ownership history is messier than the legend around its founder. Buffalo Bill came under pressure from creditors and in 1913 was forced to sign the Irma over to his wife Louisa, with whom he was on bad terms at the time. Popular retellings often describe this as a divorce settlement; the record is simply that debt forced his hand.

After Cody’s death in 1917 the hotel was foreclosed upon and sold to Barney Link. Before the end of that same year, Link’s estate sold the property back to Louisa, who held it until her death in 1925. The next owners, Henry and Pearl Newell, expanded the building steadily, adding an annex on the west side around 1930 specifically to accommodate the new wave of visitors arriving by automobile rather than by train. Henry died in 1940 and Pearl ran the Irma alone until her own death in 1965. She left the hotel’s extensive collection of Buffalo Bill memorabilia to the Buffalo Bill Historical Center and stipulated that proceeds from her estate become an endowment for the museum, which is why so much of the Irma’s Cody material now sits down the road behind glass.

The Friendly Dead and the “Guest From Hell”

None of what follows is documented; all of it is reported experience, passed between staff, guests and local tellers of tales. Taken as folklore rather than fact, it is unusually cheerful folklore.

Most of the Irma’s reported spirits are described as benign. Guests and employees have said they encountered apparitions in the corridors and rooms, and the two most frequently named are Buffalo Bill himself and his daughter Irma, cast in local lore as watchful presences keeping an eye on the hotel that carries their names. Reports lean toward the harmless end of the spectrum: a figure glimpsed and gone, a sense of company in an empty hallway.

The exception is a presence local storytellers call the “guest from hell.” In the telling, he was a genuinely bad man in life, with a history involving victims and nefarious deeds, and he is the one entity at the Irma described as malevolent rather than merely present. The stories claim he will occasionally interact with the living but will not discuss his own past, with the folkloric explanation being that he fears being called to account and evicted from his comfortable afterlife at the hotel. That is legend, and it should be read as legend. There is no record connecting any named criminal to the building.

Staying at the Irma Hotel

The Irma is still open for business as a hotel and a restaurant, which makes it one of the easier haunted buildings in the American West to actually experience: you book a room, or you order a meal, or you simply stand at the cherry bar and look at Queen Victoria’s gift. The building’s 1973 listing on the National Register of Historic Places means the fabric of the place, including the roughly 1930 west annex built for early motorists, is part of what you are paying to sleep in. Cody sits on the eastern approach to Yellowstone, so the hotel gathers a mix of park traffic, Buffalo Bill pilgrims and people who came specifically to see whether anything walks the halls at night. Ask staff about the stories, and expect the version you get to depend entirely on who is working.

See Irma Hotel for Yourself

Sources

• National Park Service
• Irma Emporium
• Wikipedia: Irma Hotel

Address: 1192 Sheridan Avenue

More Haunted Hotels

Virginian HotelThe Occidental HotelThe Plains HotelBroadmoor HotelRedmont HotelJerome Grand Hotel