Carl in Room One: The Brook Forest Inn, Colorado

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated October 4, 2026 · How we verify

Up a canyon road west of Denver, in a scattering of houses that never quite became a town, the Brook Forest Inn has been trading on the same two things for the better part of a century: Alpine atmosphere and the stories guests tell afterward. The inn sits in the Brook Forest area of Colorado, an unincorporated community spread across Jefferson and Clear Creek counties, and its reputation rests on a man named Carl who is said to have died in room one and never entirely left.

The Inn at a Glance

• Built: 1927, by Edwin and Mary Welz
• Began as: a single cabin, later expanded into an Alpine style village
• Grounds: 160 acres, eventually including nine chalets
• Setting: the Brook Forest community near Evergreen, Colorado
• Most reported figure: Carl, associated with room one and with the bar

What the Welzes Built in the Canyon

Edwin and Mary Welz are the names attached to everything here. They are described as the pioneers of Brook Forest, and in 1927 they started with a cabin on a tract of 160 acres. What grew out of it was not a roadside lodge but a deliberate piece of theater: an Alpine village in the Rockies, with nine chalets added over time and the kind of landscaping that was meant to make a Colorado hillside read as Switzerland.

The Welzes ran the place with a mixture of strict management and genuine hospitality, and they programmed it like a resort rather than an overnight stop. Guests played tennis and rode horses. On Sundays the waitresses wore traditional Swiss costumes and the kitchen served its signature fried chicken, which turned the ordinary end of a weekend into an event worth driving up for.

The timing fits the area. The Brook Forest post office had opened on October 11, 1921, a few years before the inn went up, and it stayed in operation until February 15, 1949. The Evergreen post office, ZIP code 80439, serves the area now. For most of the inn’s early life, in other words, Brook Forest was a named place on the map in its own right, remote enough to need its own mail and close enough to Denver to fill chalets on a weekend.

Carl, Room One, and the Figure at the Bar

Every building this old collects anecdotes. At the Brook Forest Inn they concentrate on one room and one name. Carl is said to have died in room one, and the accounts cannot agree on how: some versions say a heart attack, others say suicide. That disagreement is worth noticing. When a story survives in two incompatible forms, it is operating as folklore rather than as record, and nothing in the available material pins down who Carl was, when he died, or whether a death in that room was ever documented at all.

What guests describe is consistent in a way the backstory is not. Room one draws reports of sudden cold spots and the persistent sense of being watched. Carl’s apparition is most often said to turn up at the bar, present for a moment and then gone. A figure at a bar is one of the most common shapes a hotel ghost takes anywhere in the country, which is either evidence of something universal or evidence of how suggestible people are in dim rooms after a drink.

Footsteps, Locked Rooms, and the Child Who Died of Influenza

Beyond room one, the reports spread through the building. Staff and guests describe footsteps in the hallways with nobody walking them, and sounds coming from rooms that are locked and empty. The second named figure in the inn’s lore is a child, said to have died of influenza on the property, whose whispers are reported in the corridors.

Again, this is reported experience and not established fact. Influenza deaths were commonplace in the first half of the twentieth century and a child’s death at a mountain inn is entirely plausible, but plausible is not the same as verified. Treat the child, like Carl, as part of the house tradition.

Investigators Who Walked Out

The inn’s reputation has drawn paranormal investigators for years, and it has become a regular destination for groups working Colorado’s Front Range. The detail most often repeated about those visits is that some teams have left in a hurry, abandoning equipment on the property rather than going back in for it.

That anecdote does a lot of work for the inn’s reputation, and it should be weighed accordingly. No independent record establishes what frightened anyone, and a story about experienced investigators fleeing is exactly the sort of claim that improves in the retelling. The honest summary is that nothing at the Brook Forest Inn has ever been demonstrated to anyone who was not already there and already primed.

Planning a Night at the Brook Forest Inn

This is lodging, not a ghost attraction with a ticket booth, so the way in is to book. Room one is the room people ask for, and the bar is the other location named in nearly every account, so an unhurried evening downstairs covers most of the ground. Operations at small mountain properties change hands and change hours, so confirm availability before you commit to the drive up the canyon.

Go for the building and the setting first. A 1927 Alpine village built on 160 Colorado acres by a couple with a very specific vision is a rare survival on its own terms, and the chalets, the trees, and the quiet are the reliable part of the experience. The rest is what other people say happened to them.

See Brook Forest Inn for Yourself

Sources

• Colorado Counties (Colorado (official))
• Brook Forest CDP, Colorado (Census (official))
• ZIP Code Lookup
• Home | colorado.gov (Colorado (official))
• Wikipedia: Brook Forest, Colorado

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