Room 904 and the Marble Bar: Denver’s Brown Palace Hotel

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated August 7, 2026 · How we verify

A wedge of sandstone and red granite sits where 17th Street, Broadway and Tremont Place refuse to meet at right angles, and inside it the Brown Palace Hotel has been letting rooms in Denver, Colorado, since 1892. It is the second-longest operating hotel in the city, one of the earliest atrium-style hotels ever built, and a National Register property that has hosted presidents, a Chinese revolutionary and a fatal shooting in its bar. It is also, by long tradition among staff and guests, one of the most talked-about haunted addresses in the Rocky Mountain West.

The Brown Palace at a Glance

• Built: 1892, of sandstone and red granite, one year after the Oxford Hotel
• Architect: Frank Edbrooke, who also designed the Oxford; the building is considered the finest surviving example of his work
• Location: 321 17th Street in downtown Denver, behind Republic Plaza, with the main entrance door on Tremont Place
• Now: The Brown Palace Hotel and Spa, Autograph Collection, operated by Highgate Hotels and Resorts, a Marriott Autograph property since 2012 and a member of Historic Hotels of America since 2023
• Most requested room by ghost hunters: 904

Why Henry Brown’s Hotel Came Out Triangular

Henry C. Brown had homesteaded the Capitol Hill area, and the street grid he inherited there left him with an awkward slice of ground at the intersection. Rather than fight it, Edbrooke designed to it, and the triangular footprint became the hotel’s signature. The frame was iron and steel, sheathed in cement and sandstone by the Whitehouse and Wirgler Stone Company, and a cover story in Scientific American dated 21 May 1892 described it as one of America’s first fireproof structures. When it opened it was the tallest building in Denver.

The interiors accumulated in layers. In 1935, marking the repeal of Prohibition, Denver architect Alan Fisher designed the Ship Tavern, one of four restaurants in the building. Colorado muralist Allen Tupper True had begun talking with then owner, the Denver financier Charles Boettcher, in the early 1930s about painting for the hotel; after some delay his two works, Stage Coach and Airplane Travel, were unveiled in the lobby in 1937. In 1959 a 22-story, 231-room tower went up directly across Tremont Place as the Brown Palace West, connected to the original building by a skybridge over the street and a service tunnel beneath it. That annex later ran as a budget wing, was branded a Comfort Inn in 1988 and a Holiday Inn Express in December 2014, while its lower floors, including the Grand Ballroom and the executive offices, stayed shared with the Brown Palace.

The Marble Bar Killing of 1911

The hotel’s darkest documented episode is not a legend at all. In 1911, in the hotel’s Marble Bar, Frank Henwood shot and killed Sylvester Louis “Tony” von Phul and accidentally killed an innocent bystander, George Copeland. Henwood and von Phul were rivals for the affections of the Denver socialite Isabel Springer, wife of the wealthy businessman and political candidate John W. Springer. The killings led to a series of very public trials, and the case fixed the Brown Palace in the city’s imagination as a place where the era’s money, scandal and violence all met under one roof. Denver’s crime boss Jefferson “Soapy” Smith is among the hotel’s recorded visitors, as is Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon John Galen Locke, who died there in 1935.

Presidents, Delegates and the Western White House

Theodore Roosevelt had dined at the Brown Palace as governor of New York in 1900, and on 8 May 1905 he became the first sitting American president to visit. The banquet that marked it reportedly consumed more than five hundred quarts of champagne and 1,500 cigars, with Roosevelt himself leading a rendition of “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.” Nearly every president since has passed through. Franklin Roosevelt spoke from the atrium’s second-floor balcony during his 1932 campaign. Dwight Eisenhower used the second floor as headquarters for his 1952 campaign and spent enough time here as president that the hotel picked up the nickname “The Western White House.”

Politics kept returning. The hotel served as a headquarters and meeting place for the 1908 and 2008 Democratic National Conventions. When Denver hosted the 23rd G8 Summit in June 1997 it housed the U.S. delegation’s main headquarters and was called “White House, Denver”: the Gold Room stood in as a temporary Oval Office for Bill Clinton, and the Onyx Room hosted meetings with Boris Yeltsin, Jacques Chirac and Romano Prodi, although the nearby Denver Central Library was the summit’s primary venue.

Two guests are worth knowing about before you walk the halls. Molly Brown checked in a week after surviving the sinking of the Titanic and told reporters the disaster “was as unnecessary as running the Brown Palace Hotel into Pikes Peak.” And Dr. Sun Yat-Sen was staying in room 321 when word reached him of the Wuchang Uprising; he left immediately for Shanghai by way of Europe, led the 1911 Revolution, and became the first president of the Republic of China. The rodeo performer Montie Montana, for his part, rode his horse up the grand staircase.

Who Guests Say Never Checked Out

None of the following is verified, and the hotel’s own history offers no documented deaths behind any of it. What exists is a body of consistent staff and guest reports, repeated often enough that the Brown Palace turns up on Denver’s ghost tours as reliably as it does on its architecture tours.

• Henry C. Brown. The founder is the figure most often named, described pacing the corridors or passing through the walls of the Churchill Bar.
• A bellhop with a habit. Staff lore includes a mischievous bellhop said to make off with newspapers.
• A woman from the frontier years. Accounts include the apparition of a prostitute from Denver’s Wild West era.
• A trio of musicians. Guests have reported hearing, and occasionally seeing, three spectral players, a story that fits a building whose restaurants and ballrooms have hosted live music for well over a century.
• Room 904. The hotel’s best-known haunted room. Guests report unexplained cold spots and, most repeated of all, phone calls from a room that has no telephone in it.

Treat the room 904 story as folklore rather than fact. It is the sort of detail that improves with each retelling, and no record confirms it. What is fair to say is that guests keep asking for the room, and that the hotel has never gone out of its way to argue them out of the idea.

Staying at the Brown Palace Hotel

This is a working luxury hotel, not a paranormal attraction, and that is the point: you can book a room and stay the night without a tour guide or a permission slip. Non-guests can walk into the atrium lobby, look up at the ironwork, find the True murals and get a drink in the Ship Tavern or the Churchill Bar.

Afternoon tea is served daily from noon to 4:00 p.m. under the atrium, with honey infused with Colorado’s Breckenridge bourbon; the honey comes from bees kept on the hotel’s own roof and turns up again in the in-room soaps, lotions and scrubs. At Christmas the lobby carries a roughly 25-square-foot chandelier hung with 4,800 ornaments, 250,000 crystal beads, 60,000 lights and some 500 pounds of glitter, which is the busiest and least atmospheric time of year to visit if ghosts are what brought you. If you want the quiet version of the building, come on a weekday afternoon, sit in the atrium, and listen to what a 130-year-old hotel sounds like when nobody is playing.

See Brown Palace Hotel for Yourself

Sources

• Historic Hotels of America
• John Fielder's Best of Colorado
• The Brown Palace Hotel and Spa Completes $10.5 Million Renovations
• Brown Palace annex becomes a Holiday Inn Express – Denver Business Journal
• GOV. ROOSEVELT IN DENVER.; Greeted by Veterans of the Spanish-American War — Boulder Students Carry Him in Triumph. (The New York Times)
• Wikipedia: Brown Palace Hotel (Denver)

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