THE BRIARCLIFF
Location: The address of the Briarcliff Hotel is 3674 Briarcliff Boulevard in Colorado Springs, Colorado, fifty miles south of Denver.
Description of Place: An intimidating four story structure with a four story clock tower on top, the Briarcliff is a Georgian-style stone structure containing over 200 rooms and twenty suites as well as full luxuries. The interior entails the opulence of the upper class elite with high ceilings, parquet floors, arched entry ways, grand furnishings and valuable antiques. Accommodations include meeting rooms, dance halls and two grand ballrooms. The hotel also has a full-service, world class-spa, state-of-the-art fitness center with indoor and outdoor pools, a golf clubhouse, restaurants and lounges and golf and tennis pro shops.
Ghostly Manifestations: Up until 1987, when writer David Hall faked his murder here, the Briarcliff might have been fated to be one of the most obscure haunted hotels in Colorado, forever trapped in the shadow of the far more notorious Overlook Hotel, sixty miles north in Sidewinder, Colorado. The hotel staff is not apt to talk publicly about the hauntings, preferring more to boast about about its more material attractions. Truth be told, haunted hotels are usually very popular and attract far more guests than their more earthly counterparts. There has yet to be a serious examination of the Briarcliff, and most of the stories coming from the location have been collected by covert means by interviewing employees both past and present.
To hear the most stories of the Briarcliff, all one has to do is seek out Rich Walker, who has been part of the maintenance staff since 1955 before the hotel reopening. Tenuously linked to Hall's faked murder, Walker was exonerated of prosecution for turning over state's evidence against Hall, and that's all he will ever tell about that moment of his life.
"The Briarcliff is alive." Walker is quick to remark. "The halls reverberate with sounds long after night falls, shadows pass through the location on a regular basis reflected by mirrors and windows and the ballroom rings alive with energy. It's basically a giant speaker, round you know, amplifying every sound in there. It's like a giant beast, with columns, mirrors and windows all through the damned place."
"If the Briarcliff has a heart, it's the Great Hall." The Great Hall is the vast room directly beyond the entrance way where guests congregate or peruse the artwork on the walls. The ceiling is twenty feet above, supported by arches and decorated with sculptures and paintings. The painting of John Warrenfield is at the north end with his wife's portrait at the south end. "I've been in there several times at night and seen shadows scurrying along the walls just out of the side of my eye. They always vanish when I try to look directly at them, and that painting of John Warrenfield creeps me out to this day. I don't know why, but it intimidates me, as if he's looking at me, and when you look at it, you get the feeling his spirit is in it, looking back from it."
According to Walker, Susan Warrenfield, the granddaughter of the hotel builder, has seen her grandfather's spirit several times in the great Hall, even once becoming so unnerved to be in there that she can running out convinced that he had chased her from right out of his painting. Susan is also the assistant manager and she tries to stifle all the stories coming out about the hotel's alleged hauntings. Several guests stay with success without experiencing a thing, but every so often, there's an odd report of water taps turning on unattended, sounds of rapping at a door where no one is and even of doors quickly locking behind guests. A few guests have described the sound of piano music from the main floor music room, but when anyone goes in there, there is no one there. In fact, piano music comes from places of the hotel where there are no pianos.
"I'd describe it as that old tinny, pre-Prohibition-era music as you'd hear from the old fashioned Victrola players." Rich Walker adds. "Guests standing up in the tower have heard it up in the tower and have come down looking for it. One gentlemen asked the front desk for the name of the tune so he could get a copy of the sheet music, but no one had any idea what music he was hearing."
Some guests of David Hall in the hotel have
admitted to having traumatic and distressing dreams from emotional and soul-wrenching
periods of their lives. Whether this is to suggest the hotel's atmosphere plays
on the fears and tragic memories of its guests is undetermined, but one of his
guests leapt from his bed and ran screaming into the hall that his room was on
fire, but no signs of scorching or smoke was found, and the false alarm was
attributed to a very lucid and humiliating dream. Publisher Jordan White felt he
was visited by the apparition of his son, who had died in adolescence without
ever visiting the Briarcliff. Even while wide awake, he heard his son's voice
calling him. Other images have been more horrific, such as the image of a person
falling from the tower or the presence of a body on the ground.
"In 1987..." Susan Warrenfield
discreetly admits. "I saw and heard the ghost of my grandfather plummeting
to his death. Seven other people saw and heard it at the same time and rushed to
where the body would have landed, but there was nothing there. Just a patch of
dead grass which hasn't grown correctly since my grandfather committed suicide
in 1936."
Despite
the hotel’s efforts to keep the hauntings under wraps, stories leak out, but
despite how good they are for business, the main staff prefers to highlight
their service, restaurant and amenities to attract guests. If a potential guest
asks about the hauntings over the phone, the admissions clerks are advised to
quickly disavow the subject and recommend the local color and activities. In
1998, Susan Warrenfield was approached by a film-maker doing stories on local
historic hotels.
"I
thought he wanted a promotional history of the hotel," Warrenfield says,
"But, no, he wanted sensationalism and ghost stories." The young
filmmaker even gave Susan a photograph taken at a July 4th celebration. Shared
by a former guest, it was meant to be a solo shot of young boy, but one of the
hotel’s resident ghosts was ready for its close-up. While the photo subject is
of an eight-year old boy, to the back is the shadowy outline of a woman in an
old style of dress. She looks real except for the fact that there is light
shining through her. According to legend, when Amelia Warrenfield was alive, she
loved children very much and had story times for children of guests.
Since
then, Natalie Radford, the Briarcliff’s public relations director, has become
the hotel’s newly minted storyteller. With the assistance of a local
journalist named Ted Scherbatsky, they conducted some research on the building's
history running straight from the gory murders and into its years as the
abandoned reputed haunted hotel. After a few months of hosting the sessions,
Radford found herself the Briarcliff's go-to source and record on every
paranormal occurrence; the staff would always keep her updated on bizarre
occurrences and her story sessions were often two-way with employees offering their
own renditions, experiences and second-hand accounts. Much of the info came from
second and third hand experiences and was kept apart from regular hotel business
under the auspices of research for a non-existence book.
Her
catalog of tales runs like a thorough crash course in every kind of haunting.
"The best stories are from when it was closed [after World War II].”
Radford was courteous enough to share her research with CGS. “High school kids
used to sneak in and would see people walking around with their feet floating
above the ground or they'd get tapped on the shoulder and see immaterial guests
in Big Band period apparel."
She
also recounts a story about Catholic schoolgirls walking past the closed
Biltmore and seeing a woman waving from the tower. "Babies crying through
the walls, noise from a party that wasn't happening, a man who came to the clerk
at the front desk who then vanished." Radford adds. In recent times, a
popular report is that of people disappearing into thin air. "Oh, they
always vanished," she says with familiarity. "The piano player once
told me she looked up and saw a man waving at her. She looked down for a moment
and then he was gone."
From
speaking with psychics, Radford is familiar with the theory that ghosts and
hauntings are the product of unfinished business. "They have to wander
because they have yet to reach their ending," she explains. The stories
surrounding the hotel clock tower where John Warrenfield point to the love-lost
hotelier still trying to tie up loose ends.
Rich
Walker reports that the Briarcliff’s lone original elevator often rises to the
top floor unprovoked, even though the floor requires a card key. "I used to
joke, 'It's Old Man Warrenfield. He wants company,'" He laughs. His weekly,
Thursday night poker sessions with the other maintenance and cleaning staff
employees became mini-conventions for those obsessed with the hotel's haunted
legacy. They secretly compare and exchange stories from guests and varying
details of those stories. One of the dishwashers used to work for the
Hotel
Tipton in Boston; one groundskeeper has family who once stayed in
Manhattan’s Dolphin
Hotel. They all have lively debates on the comparisons in locations.
Eventually,
the Biltmore grew disinterested in the stories for fear of scaring away
superstitious guests. The poker game tradition finally came to a close, but for
people like Radford, Susan and Scherbatsky, the verdict is still out on the
legitimacy of the Briarcliff's haunted legacy and history.
"I’ve never seen anything I thought was
paranormal," she says, "But such strange things have told to me by
friends and family I know and trust."
History: The hotel was built around 1905 to 1907 by John Warrenfield as a gift
to his wife as most men of industry do. John Warrenfield had been a captain of
industry who started as a lawyer, became a judge and retired to a leisurely life
as a hotel financier. However, despite all his work, he reportedly caught his
wife in bed in
bed with another man and killed them both, later taking his life by jumping to
his death from the clock tower. The hotel stood empty and abandoned for twelve
years, its deed held in limbo by the courts until 1958 when it reopened through
the Warrenfield heirs. The renovation closed off the Warrenfield's old bedroom
as well as the original staircase to the tower. Modern additions over the years
include an Olympic-class swimming pool, a second golf course and an on-site
casino. The hotel has been guest to celebrities such as Jack Nicholson, Angelina
Jolie, Reese Witherspoon, Elizabeth Montgomery, Robert Conrad, Clark Gable and
cult horror actress Nora McGuire as well as politicians and presidents such as Jimmy
Carter and William Howard Taft. Local writer David Hall based his novel,
"The Resort," on the Briarcliff. A motion picture, "Beyond the
Law" (1993), about the rivalry between Al Capone and Lucky Luciano was
filmed here in 1993.
Identity of Ghosts: In addition to John Warrenfield's forlorn, love struck
phantom, there have been a few other sightings of phantom employees reported as
well as non-existent guests in empty rooms seen from balconies and drifting
through hallways including a spectral nun, an African-American coachman in a
dark suit, an empty wheelchair rolling through unused corridors and even
poltergeist activity in the kitchen. The identity of these extraneous revenants
have yet to be identified and are likely place memories rather than surviving personalities, but at least one of them may be Amelia Warrenfield
herself. A few guests have reported seeing tears running down her portrait in
the Great Hall.
Source/Comments: Perry Mason: the Case of the Sinister Spirit (1987) - Architecture and
history based on the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs, Colorado where the
movie was filmed. Phenomenon based on the Haw Branch Plantation in Amelia,
Virginia and the Miami Biltmore in Coral Gables, Florida.