The Stanley Hotel

On the night of October 30, 1974, a young writer and his wife checked into a grand white hotel in the Rocky Mountains on the last night before it closed for the winter.

The season was over. The staff was packing up. Most of the rooms were already shut, the chairs turned up on tables in the dining room, the halls dim and quiet. The couple were, as far as anyone can tell, the only guests in the building. They ate dinner alone in the enormous dining room while an orchestra played to empty tables. Afterward the writer wandered the deserted halls and had a drink at the bar, served by a bartender named Grady.

He was assigned Room 217.

That night, he would later say, he dreamed that his three-year-old son was running through the corridors of the hotel, screaming, chased by a fire hose that had come to life. He woke up drenched in sweat, lit a cigarette, sat in a chair looking out the window at the Rockies, and by the time he finished it he had the bones of a novel in his head.

The writer was Stephen King. The novel was The Shining. And the Stanley Hotel has never been the same.

The Man Who Came to Die

Long before it became the inspiration for the Overlook Hotel, the Stanley was the dream of a dying man.

Freelan Oscar Stanley was a New England inventor who, with his identical twin brother Francis, had made a fortune — first from a photographic dry plate process they sold to Eastman Kodak, and then from the Stanley Steamer, a fast, elegant steam-powered automobile. In 1903, F.O. Stanley was diagnosed with tuberculosis. His doctors told him he might have months to live and sent him west, to the clean, dry mountain air of Colorado, as so many consumptives were sent in those days.

He arrived in the little valley town of Estes Park, at the edge of the Rockies, and fell in love with it. Within a summer, his health began to improve. Within a few years, he was building a hotel.

The Stanley opened on July 4, 1909: a gleaming white Colonial Revival palace on a hillside overlooking the valley, with views of Longs Peak and the mountains that are now Rocky Mountain National Park. It had electricity, telephones and running water in a place where none of those things had been common. Stanley brought wealthy guests up from the train station in a fleet of his own steam-powered “mountain wagons.” His wife, Flora, an accomplished pianist, had a music room with a Steinway grand piano, where she played for guests.

F.O. Stanley lived to be ninety-one. He died in 1940, a year after Flora. For many visitors and staff, the couple never really left.

The Chambermaid

Room 217 has a history that has nothing to do with Stephen King.

On June 25, 1911, a storm knocked out the hotel’s electricity. A chambermaid named Elizabeth Wilson was sent to Room 217 with a candle to relight the backup acetylene gas lamps. A gas leak had filled the room. When she struck a match, the room exploded.

The blast blew a hole in the floor. Elizabeth Wilson fell through it into the MacGregor Dining Room below. She broke both ankles but survived. F.O. Stanley, deeply shaken, paid her medical bills and kept her on staff. By some accounts, she worked at the hotel for many more years.

Since then, Room 217 has been considered the most haunted room in the hotel — and the ghost, most people say, is Elizabeth.

Guests who have stayed in 217 report that their belongings have been put away while they were out of the room. Luggage has been unpacked; clothes have been folded. Lights turn on and off. Unmarried couples who stay in the room have reported that a presence seems to slip between them in the bed, as if a proper chambermaid of 1911 still disapproves. Some guests say they have been tucked in at night by unseen hands.

It’s a gentle haunting, as hauntings go. Elizabeth seems to still be doing her job.

The Fourth Floor

If 217 is famous because of a book, the fourth floor is famous because of the people who work there.

In the hotel’s early years, the fourth floor was where children and nannies were housed, along with some staff. Today, guests on that floor — especially in Room 418 — report hearing children laughing and running in the hallways late at night. Some say they’ve heard a ball bouncing. Housekeepers have told of finding impressions on beds in empty rooms, as if someone had been sitting there, minutes after they finished making them. In Room 401, guests report that the closet door opens on its own. In Room 428, there are stories of a tall man standing at the foot of the bed.

In the music room, staff and guests have heard the Steinway piano play by itself, late at night, when the room is locked and empty. Some have seen a woman in Edwardian dress at the keys. Flora, they say.

And in the billiard room, which was F.O.’s favorite room in the hotel, people report seeing a tall, distinguished man in old-fashioned clothes, sometimes near the bar, sometimes in the lobby, sometimes walking the halls — and occasionally in photographs where he wasn’t when the shutter clicked.

The Overlook and the Stanley

The Shining was published in 1977. It told the story of Jack Torrance, a recovering alcoholic and failed writer, who takes a job as the winter caretaker of the remote Overlook Hotel in the Colorado Rockies with his wife and young son — a boy with psychic powers who can see the hotel’s dark history. The novel was a sensation. Three years later, Stanley Kubrick turned it into one of the most famous horror films ever made.

Kubrick didn’t film at the Stanley. He shot the exterior of the Overlook at Timberline Lodge in Oregon and built the interiors on soundstages in England. King, who famously disliked Kubrick’s film, later wrote and produced a television miniseries of The Shining in 1997 — and filmed it at the Stanley.

Ever since, the hotel has embraced its role. The Shining plays on a loop on a television channel in the guest rooms. There’s a hedge maze on the grounds, added in 2015, though King’s novel had topiary animals instead. Room 217 is booked months, sometimes years, in advance.

It would be easy to say the ghost stories started with the book, and that a hotel this famous for a horror novel would inevitably attract stories. But staff accounts of strange happenings at the Stanley go back further than King’s visit, according to the people who have worked there longest. And when you consider what drew Stephen King’s imagination that night — an empty hotel, an echoing dining room, a bartender at a deserted bar, a long hallway in the dark — it’s hard not to wonder if something in the building was speaking to him.

The Night Before Halloween

There’s a detail I’ve always loved about King’s stay. He and his wife checked in on October 30, and checked out the next morning — Halloween.

The staff closed the hotel for the season shortly after. The doors were locked. The heat was turned down. And for the rest of the winter, the long corridors and the empty dining room and Room 217 sat silent in the snow, with no one inside.

At least, no one living.