Hotel de Paris Museum

The story

Before Louis Dupuy was Georgetown’s premier Victorian host, he was Adolphe François Gérard: a French seminary dropout, disgraced New York journalist caught plagiarizing, and U.S. Army deserter hiding out in the Rocky Mountains. In 1875, after surviving a severe silver mine explosion in neighboring Silver Plume, he bought a modest bakery building on 6th Street using funds raised by sympathetic locals. Rather than keeping a low profile, Dupuy built an opulent provincial French inn and restaurant in the middle of a rough mining boomtown, serving fresh oysters, fine French wines, and epicurean meals at 8,500 feet elevation.

When Dupuy died of pneumonia in 1900, his obituary finally exposed his true name, but the building itself froze in time. His housekeeper, Sophie Gally, inherited the property before dying shortly after, and subsequent owners preserved the interior until the Colonial Dames of America acquired it in 1954. Today, roughly 90 percent of the hotel's original contents—over 5,000 items, including steam radiators, gaslights, kitchen ranges, imported wine casks, and china—remain exactly where Dupuy left them.

Then there is the element the staff addresses with straight faces: the residual haunting. Visitors and workers regularly report seeing a courteous gentleman dressed in 1900s Victorian attire who directs lost tour-goers down the hallways, alongside unexplainable wafts of pipe tobacco, roasting coffee, curry, and fresh bread drifting through rooms where cooking ceased decades ago. You didn't hear it from us, but if you feel a phantom tug on your shoulder near the steep cellar stairs, staff attribute that to Sophie keeping guests from taking a spill.