This article is being written in the Stanley Hotel high up in the Rocky Mountains of Estes Park, Colorado. If that name doesn’t ring a bell, you might be more familiar with its literary nom de guerre: The Overlook Hotel from Stephen King’s 1977 horror novel The Shining. Should you need a refresher, The Shining tells the story of Jack Torrance, a recovering alcoholic with anger issues who accepts a position as the winter caretaker of the historic hotel ostensibly to finish a play he has been struggling to complete. His wife Wendy and son Danny accompany him on his journey knowing that the trio will soon be snowbound in this 140-room hotel all by themselves.
Unknown to his parents, Danny (or “Doc” as he is known) possesses psychic abilities (referred to as a “shining”) which include reading minds, premonitions, and clairvoyance. In short, Danny sees dead people. While moving into the hotel on closing day, the family meets chef Dick Hallorann who shares his own “shining” ability with Doc. It doesn’t take long before Danny starts seeing ghosts and frightening visions and his own “shining” is empowering the paranormal activity, turning echoes of past tragedies from the hotel’s history into dangerous threats. Soon, the winter snowfall leaves the Torrances cut off from the outside world.
When the resident ghosts fail to penetrate Danny’s “shine,” they turn their attention to his father Jack. To make sure they have Jack’s full attention, the spirits cause a healthy dose of writer’s block to set in. Jack’s primary job at the Overlook is to “dump” the boiler by regularly venting the steam to prevent the hotel’s implosion. Jack starts his downward slide by first finding an old scrapbook in the basement detailing the hotel’s dark history then by venturing into the Overlook’s previously empty, unstocked bar to find a bartender named Lloyd who is most happy to serve him. As things get worse, Wendy tries to leave, and Jack smashes the CB radio (the only communication with the outside world) and sabotages the snowcat vehicle (the only way off the mountain). Jack then encounters the ghost of the hotel’s previous caretaker, Delbert Grady, who murdered his family years before. Grady urges Jack to do the same so that the Torrance family can cross over to the dark side of the hotel to join the Grady family and a bevy of past guests doomed to remain in the Overlook for all eternity.
The Shining was one of the first novels I bought with my own money and the first book I ever raced home to read every day after school. There is a lot going on in this book. If you’ve only seen the Stanley Kubrick/Jack Nicholson movie, then you need to read the book. Or find the 1996 Shining miniseries starring Rebecca De Mornay and Steven Weber, which is truer to King’s original vision and was filmed on-site at The Stanley. While the movie connection is what usually draws people to the Stanley and the Rocky Mountains certainly cast a spell on every visitor, the real star of the show is the hotel itself.
The sprawling Colonial Revival hotel is located about five miles from the entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park. Spoiler alert, the park really doesn’t have much of an entrance, therefore you see people parking at gas stations, jumping out of their vehicles, and randomly snapping photos of the snow-capped “Longs Peak” mountain from their parking space. Should you choose to drive around a bit as we did, you’ll encounter moose eating shrubbery in resident’s yards, or holding up traffic by harumphing awkwardly as they trot across the road, and mountain goats standing casually on the berm of the roadway without a care.
The Stanley rises majestically from the Estes Valley and easily dominates the surrounding mountainside. The stark white exterior has the effect of a light switch being suddenly flipped on when you see the massive building for the first time. After conquering the challenge of finding a parking space, you walk up the hill and into the lobby. As you would expect, the woodwork is rich and dark in an English Tudor style accented by fireplaces, leather chairs, and a central double staircase that leads up to “the rooms” — gulp. The check-in desk looks more like a coat check closet and is staffed by one lone employee who stands before a wall of obsolete ceremonial gold room keys and dolefully announces that “check-in time is promptly at 4:00.”
The delay allowed us time to explore the grounds and look for the hidden gems we knew had to be there. The hedge row maze is just outside the door. We are informed that it is not original but that so many people asked to see it (based on the movie) that they’ve been trying to grow one for a decade now (the local wildlife keep eating it so it is a work in progress). There is a ballroom, a music room, a billiards room, a restaurant, a concert hall, and a bar in the main building. The hotel was opened on July 4, 1909, and the adjacent Lodge building was opened a year later. But trust me, you want to stay in the hotel, not the lodge.
The Stanley was built by F.O. Stanley, the namesake of the Stanley Steamer (the motorcar, not the carpet cleaner). Stanley, who relocated to Colorado after being diagnosed with T.B. and told he had but a short time to live, built this hotel first for his family, staff, and visiting friend, then as a resort for upper-class Easterners and a health retreat for sufferers of pulmonary tuberculosis. The hotel is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. I could fill two or three columns talking about the rich history of the place, but instead, I’ll talk about what I assume you want to hear: Stephen King and the ghosts of the Stanley Hotel.
The Stanley Hotel is known for being one of the most haunted hotels in the United States, and they owe that designation principally to Stephen King. In 1974, King was working as a professor at the University of Colorado 40 miles away in Boulder when he decided to visit the hotel for a weekend just as the season was ending. At the time, the property was “a decaying vision of opulence” with peeling wallpaper, broken cement, missing tiles, frayed carpet, and inoperable lighting fixtures. The hotel was empty after closing for the winter season on the very day that King showed up. Regardless, the budding author talked his way into a stay as the snow began to fall. Fortuitously, the Kings were the only guests at the hotel that night. They pretty much had the run of the place, but King wasn’t convinced they were actually alone. Stephen King stayed in room 217. It remains the most popular room in the hotel today.
During his stay, King wandered the empty halls and visited the billiard room and bar. It was in the bar where King met a longtime hotel employee named Grady who served King free drinks (he had cashed out the register and closed the books for the year) and told him tales about the hotel. Only novelist King knows how many, if any, of Grady’s stories made it into his novel. But there can be no doubt that Grady made an impression on the young professor. Incidentally, The Stanley is home to a popular Pet Cemetery with ghost stories of its own. In 1983 King wrote another novel called Pet Sematary. Coincidence or inspiration?
King did experience one “thing” while at The Stanley that made it into this, his third novel. On his Web site, King recounted: “I dreamt of my three-year-old son running through the corridors, looking back over his shoulder, eyes wide, screaming. He was being chased by a fire hose. I woke up with a tremendous jerk, sweating all over, within an inch of falling out of bed. I got up, lit a cigarette, sat in the chair looking out the window at the Rockies, and by the time the cigarette was done, I had the bones of the book firmly set in my mind.”
Rhonda and I stayed in room 302 of the Stanley Hotel. The Stephen King room is booked months in advance and almost perpetually unavailable. On June 18th (Father’s Day) we took a midnight ghost tour of the Stanley Hotel. Our tour guide was a young lightning-fast talking transplant from Jonesboro, Arkansas named Reagan. He had come to the Rocky Mountain region to cut trails for hikers before finding himself leading tours at The Stanley. A nervous young man with hair down to the middle of his back, he reminded us of Don Knotts in The Shakiest Gun in the West and he appeared to be comfortable with that perception. He jumped two or three times during the tour when the sound of unexplained water permeated an area or when exterior doors were rattled without triggering the motion-detecting lights above them.
Reagan shared stories and ghostly tales as we traveled from room to room, but pictures were his true forte. He explained that he and his fellow tour guides spent a lot of time in the hotel before and after tours trying to capture photos to share with their guests. And I must admit, some of his photos (shown on a handheld tablet) were compelling. To his credit, Reagan debunked a few of the urban legends about the hotel and his stories were not contrived. He spoke of the ghosts of long-time employees residing in the “green room” used by performers playing the Opera House (Melissa Etheridge was playing there the next weekend so I hope she made it through without incident) along with the ghosts of the hotel’s resident-pets buried in the pet cemetery near the wedding chapel and waterfall.
The highlight of the tour was traveling through the tunnels underneath the hotel which are strictly off-limits to guests. It was here that Reagan displayed a photo he captured on a recent tour in those very tunnels. It was the image of a few tour guests completely unaware that a grimacing devil figure was hovering above them. The photo was interesting to be sure and the figure looked as real as you or me. As he slowly walked the line of 18 tour guests, Reagan shook his head and looked away while repeatedly saying, “I can’t look at it. I don’t like this one. I don’t like this.” It was a good tour, we enjoyed ourselves, and learned a lot.
However, there were some problems that I will share here in case you should ever find yourself visiting The Stanley Hotel. When the grim desk clerk said 4:00 p.m., she meant 4:00 p.m. So the line of guests winding through the lobby resembled the Haunted Mansion line at Disneyworld for the entire 45 minutes we waited to check in. The parking is nuts and makes no distinction between guests paying $400 a night or visitors paying $10 to visit. On the plus side, the drive from Indianapolis is a snap. Once you are past St. Louis (or Kansas City as we traveled) the speed limit through Kansas and eastern Colorado is 75 mph, the terrain is flat, and the traffic light. The Colorado mountains are beautiful and there are plenty of places at The Stanley where one can isolate, relax and view the scenery.
My advice? Stay at The Stanley if it is in your budget (it was my our anniversary gift to each other) but if you want to take a tour without breaking the bank, simply show up any time during the day, pay the $10 visitor parking, walk the grounds, eat at the snack bars, shop in the stores, and buy a $30 ghost tour ticket. Bring your camera and have a ball. Be prepared though, the place is crawling with ghosties, some of whom run through the halls on the second and fourth floors and camp out on the grand staircase landing into the wee hours of the morning hunting for ghosts. We encountered one such group while they were making an EVP recording and one actually asked, “Are you a sheep?” as we passed.
At the end of our tour, the grand lobby was deserted except for a lone employee closing down the bar. Rhonda and I sat in the leather chairs by the fireplace and reflected on our night. All the while we wondeed where all the people that had been choking the halls and byways throughout the day had gone. We were alone. Just then, we saw flashes of light coming from the billiard room that was the site of the bar where Stephen King encountered Grady nearly half a century before. In unison we turned towards the massive wooden doors, our fingertips slowly tightening their grip on the tufted leather armchairs. No sound, just flashes of light. After what seemed an eternity, the door opened, and out stepped the source. It was Reagan, our tour guide, hanging around after hours, snapping pictures for future tours.
NEXT:-PART II of The Stanley: Stephen King’s Shining Hotel
Al Hunter is the author of the “Haunted Indianapolis” and co-author of the “Haunted Irvington” and “Indiana National Road” book series. His newest books are “Bumps in the Night. Stories from the Weekly View,” “Irvington Haunts. The Tour Guide,” and “The Mystery of the H.H. Holmes Collection.” Contact Al directly at Huntvault@aol.com or become a friend on Facebook.
