Wheeler-Stallard House Museum

A Queen Anne Victorian home built in 1888 by Jerome B. Wheeler, the same mining magnate who built the Hotel Jerome. Now serves as the Aspen Historical Society museum, showcasing the town's silver mining history and Victorian-era life.

The Wheeler-Stallard House is a Queen Anne-style Victorian home built in 1887 by Jerome B. Wheeler, the same Macy's co-owner who built the Hotel Jerome, as his private residence in Aspen. Wheeler intended the house to be a grand family home on an entire city block, but his wife Harriet refused to leave their existing mansion in Manitou Springs, and the Wheeler family never actually lived in the house. The building sat largely unused until Edgar and Mary Ella Stallard moved in around 1905, eventually purchasing it in 1917. The Stallard family occupied the home for forty years before it was acquired by the Aspen Historical Society, which opened it as a museum in January 1969.

The museum maintains the main floor in the style of a late-nineteenth-century parlor, with period furnishings and decorative arts, while the second floor houses rotating local history exhibits. The building's haunted reputation is quieter than some of Aspen's more famous paranormal locations, but visitors and staff have reported subtle phenomena consistent with a Victorian house carrying well over a century of history. Cold drafts move through rooms with no apparent source, and some visitors describe a heaviness or sense of presence in certain areas of the house, particularly on the upper floor. The fact that Wheeler built this elaborate home as a labor of love that his wife rejected adds a layer of melancholy to the building's atmosphere -- a grand gesture that went unrequited, leaving the house to be inhabited by others while its builder watched from across the mountains. Whether any of the spirits belong to Wheeler himself, the Stallard family, or earlier occupants remains a matter of speculation among Aspen's ghost tour community.