The Woman in the Yellow Dress: Red Lodge’s Pollard Hotel

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

The Pollard Hotel has been taking guests in Red Lodge, Montana, since 1893, which makes it older than most of the streets around it. It went up as the Spofford Hotel, the first brick building in the area at a time when the rest of the town was timber, and it cost roughly $20,000 to build. That was a serious outlay for a coal town on the edge of the Beartooths, and it bought the kind of establishment that expected important people to walk through the door. Some of them did. So, according to a century of staff and guests, did a few who never checked out.

The Pollard at a Glance

• Built: 1893, originally as the Spofford Hotel
• Distinction: the first brick structure in the area
• Construction cost: around $20,000
• Renamed: after Thomas Pollard took over in 1902
• Status: still operating as a hotel

From the Spofford to Thomas Pollard’s House

The building’s second life began in 1902, when Thomas Pollard took over and put his own name on it. Pollard was not content with beds and a front desk. Under his ownership the hotel gained a dining room, a bar lounge, a barbershop and, unusually for a frontier hotel of its size, a bowling alley. The result was less a place to sleep than a small self-contained social world, which is exactly what a town built on coal and cattle needed when the weather closed in.

That mix of comfort and novelty pulled in the sort of names that get repeated in every retelling of the hotel’s history. Buffalo Bill Cody and Calamity Jane are both said to have passed through the Pollard’s doors, and the hotel has traded on that association ever since. Treat the guest list the way you would treat any Old West celebrity claim: plausible for a well-appointed hotel on a well-travelled route, and repeated far more often than it is documented.

Rooms 309 to 312: What Guests Report on the Third Floor

Nothing that follows is a matter of record. It is reported experience, accumulated over decades and passed between staff, returning guests and the local grapevine, and it should be read as folklore rather than evidence.

The third floor is where most of it concentrates, and specifically the run of rooms numbered 309 to 312. Visitors and employees have described feeling suddenly dizzy or disoriented in that stretch of corridor and in the rooms themselves, a sensation reported often enough that it has become the hotel’s signature complaint. Room 310 has its own small reputation: guests say the light there operates itself, switching on or off with nobody near it.

The basement is the other place people single out, and the descriptions there are less specific and more atmospheric. Those who go down report an unwelcoming feeling, a sense of being somewhere they should not linger. That is subjective by definition, and old hotel basements are gloomy places at the best of times, but the consistency of the reaction is what keeps it in circulation.

The Woman in the Yellow Dress

The Pollard’s best known presence is a female figure in a yellow dress, and she is the one guests claim to see most often. Sightings place her in the hallways rather than in any single room. What sets her apart from the usual glimpsed-and-gone apparition is that people describe smelling her as well as seeing her: a trace of perfume in a corridor, sometimes lingering after the figure has gone, sometimes arriving with no figure at all.

No name has ever been convincingly attached to her, and no documented death at the hotel has been offered up to explain who she might have been. She exists entirely in the telling, which is worth stating plainly. It is also, in fairness, why she has lasted: a woman in a yellow dress and a drift of scent is a far more durable story than a bare cold spot.

The Prankster in the Bar and the Pollard Children’s Monkey

The rest of the Pollard’s cast is lighter in tone. The bar is said to be the territory of a male figure dressed in 1920s clothing whose reputation is for mischief rather than menace: small tricks and minor surprises aimed at staff and drinkers, nothing that has ever frightened anyone off a barstool.

Stranger, and by some distance the most distinctive story the hotel has, is the ghost monkey. Local lore holds that it was a pet belonging to the Pollard children, and that it still makes itself known by leaving tiny handprints on the glass of the front door. Small prints on a much-handled door are not hard to explain in a working hotel, and the tale has the shape of an old family anecdote that grew in the retelling. It is also unrepeatable anywhere else, which is why staff keep telling it.

Booking a Room at the Pollard Hotel

The great advantage of the Pollard over most haunted buildings is that you can simply book it. It is still an operating hotel with modern comforts layered into an 1893 brick shell, and the ground floor is open to anyone who wants a drink or a meal without paying for a bed. If the ghost stories are the reason you are going, ask for the third floor and be specific about the 309 to 312 range, though understand that the hotel is under no obligation to place you there and the stories come with no guarantees.

Red Lodge itself sits at the northern end of the Beartooth Highway, so the hotel picks up a mix of seasonal mountain traffic, history-minded travellers and people who came purely for the yellow dress. Ask the staff what they have seen. The answer will depend entirely on who is behind the desk that night.

See The Pollard Hotel for Yourself

Sources

• National Register of Historic Places Nomination – Washington Avenue Soldier's Monument and Triangle
• Sculpting Doughboys: Memory, Gender, and Taste in America's World War I Memorials
• Si (official site)
• Wikipedia: Pietro Montana

Address: 2 North Broadway Avenue

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