Denver Union Station

Denver's historic train station, originally built in 1881 and rebuilt after an 1894 fire. The Beaux-Arts center section dates to 1914. Redeveloped in 2014 as a transit hub with the Crawford Hotel, restaurants, and shops.

Denver Union Station first opened its doors on June 1, 1881 -- a five-hundred-foot depot crowned by a 180-foot clock tower that made it the tallest building in the American West. On March 18, 1894, an electrical fire started by a chandelier in the ladies' room destroyed the central hall and the iconic tower, claiming lives in the process. The station was rebuilt twice, and the current Beaux-Arts central section, designed by Denver architects Gove and Walsh in carved granite, opened in 1914. Through two World Wars and the great age of American rail travel, millions of passengers passed through its doors -- soldiers shipping out, families reuniting, drifters riding the rails. Not all of them left.

The most well-known spirit is the three-fingered hobo, a ghost who was regularly seen on the train platforms waiting for incoming arrivals. According to station lore, the living man was an elderly vagrant who fell or rolled onto the tracks one night and was struck and killed by a train. His apparition would follow passengers in from the platforms and was known to bother ticket agents during slow periods, appearing and disappearing suddenly throughout the station. A confused male traveler from what appears to be the 1930s has been witnessed pacing the great hall, befuddled about which train to take, roaming back and forth until he suddenly vanishes. He is believed to be a passenger who died in the station while waiting for a train that never came.

A distinctly militaristic presence occupies one of the platforms -- an entity that has never been visually confirmed but is strongly felt by visitors and staff, conducting itself with the bearing of a former active-duty officer still waiting for deployment. Unlike the other spirits, this presence is described as reassuring rather than frightening, a guardian watching over nighttime travelers. In the clock tower, a maintenance worker adjusting the clocks for daylight saving time around the year 2000 emerged visibly distressed, claiming to have seen the apparition of a young girl in nineteenth-century clothing walking inside the tower tunnel. The girl is speculated to be one of the victims of the 1894 fire.

During RTD's FasTracks renovation that transformed the station and surrounding nineteen acres into a modern transit hub, construction workers reported persistent paranormal encounters: papers going missing from locked offices, unexplained music echoing through empty corridors, and the unmistakable sense of being watched. The Crawford Hotel, which opened inside the renovated station in July 2014 and was named after Denver's first mayor William Crawford, inherited the building's full supernatural history. Guests report apparitions in period traveling clothes, the sound of phantom trains on quiet nights, and unexplained footsteps in empty hallways. Rooms overlooking the train platforms are said to offer the highest chance of encounters, with activity peaking between midnight and four in the morning. The hotel acknowledges the stories without advertising them -- management prefers the phrase "historic character" to "haunted" -- but the spirits of Union Station have been part of its identity for over a century, and they show no signs of departing.