You almost get used to Julia, restless as she is. You’d think a hard-core party girl would get tired of whooping it up after more than a hundred years, but guests at the Fairplay Hotel still hear her dancing on the creaky parlor floor long after midnight.
And she’s still ticked off about something. A few months ago, she hurled a TV off its stand. A few days later, she flung a makeup bag against a bathroom wall.
If you’re looking for a cuddly ghost, you should drive right past Fairplay and see what you can find in the resort towns 23 miles farther down the road. There’s nothing cute about Julia or her town, and you wouldn’t believe how refreshing that is. Fairplay has its curio shops full of Western doodads and dolls that sit on shelves, but its percentage of preciousness is remarkably low. Self-sufficiency pervades the town, as if people are still eking out a living in them nearby hills.
That’s why the feed store also rents videos, and the river-rock Family Store has not yet been turned into a historical reproduction of a Family Store. It’s probably why you can buy a high-calorie muffin on almost every corner – how else will you make it through the blizzard?
No artificial charm added
And it’s why the vintage Fairplay Hotel has never morphed into a Brown Palace, a Boulderado or a Jerome. Oh, it’s old – its most recent incarnation, rebuilt after a fire, dates to the 1920s. It’s just not brimming with Olde Worlde Charm. And that can be a good thing.
I arrived the morning after the annual Harvest Ball, an ancient tradition, even though no high-protein hay has been reaped around here in 20 years. A few bales of straw and festive ribbons were still set up; a very few humans were stirring, as the party had gone on past 4 a.m., with a crowd in Victorian costumes dancing up a storm to Reverend Peyton’s band.
No one stopped us as we walked down the hallways, pushing open the doors of guest rooms featuring iron bedsteads, bare light bulbs and banged-up antique dressers – one of the strangest combinations of authentic atmosphere and not-so-thorough housekeeping I’ve ever seen. Not to put too fine a point on it, but if you’ve always had a dance-hall-girl-
meets-gunfighter fantasy, you know where to act it out.
Hide that fifth ace
At the Silverheels Lounge, one or two men were starting to drink, or possibly continuing from the day before. It’s hard to find a taciturn, Doc Holliday-type saloon these days, even on the high plains, and this was it – the perfect place for a dangerous card game in a back room. There was just one 21st-century touch: Red Hook ESB on tap. If you’re going to modernize, that’s the way.
But they’re probably not going to modernize. Owners Julia (no relation to the ghost) DeVillaz and David Meredith took possession a little more than a year ago, intending to restore the hotel to its former glory, assuming it had some.
“You’re not going to believe how hard it’s going to be,”
DeVillaz remembers being told. And she’s been cooking, busing, chambermaiding and registering guests ever since, reclaiming the guest rooms one at a time. It may be exhausting for her, but the sheer scope of the project helps the hotel retain a mystique that has intrigued a lot of visitors over the years.
“Killed my first elk today”
I first came here 23 years ago, long after midnight. A redheaded woman was descending the grand staircase in a see-through gown, and no one in the parlor even looked up. Three years later, I returned for the first annual Harley Ladies Run, as raucous a weekend as I’ve ever survived. The guest book reveals other over-the-top visits. A guy who spotted Bob Hope eating lunch here in the 1940s. A man who boarded here for a summer in the 1970s, and brings his family back each year, trying to recapture his youth. And here Steve Marcus wrote, quite recently: “I killed my first elk today on my first day ever to elk hunt. If it gets any better than this, I don’t want to know about it!”
And plenty of people come here just to experience Julia the Ghost. They are seldom disappointed.
Robin Chotzinoff is a freelance writer who lives in Evergreen.
