In Brief
In the fall of 1974, Stephen King and his wife were the only guests at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado, the night before it closed for winter. He slept in Room 217, dreamed his son was chased through the halls, and woke with The Shining whole in his mind.
The Full Story
The Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado is the most famous haunted hotel in America, and the reason is one empty night in the fall of 1974. Stephen King and his wife Tabitha checked in on the last evening before the hotel closed for winter, and they were the only guests in the building.
They ate dinner alone. Every chair but theirs had been turned up onto the tables, and taped orchestral music played down the empty corridors. "It was like God had put me there to hear that and see those things," King later said. That night he dreamed his three-year-old son was running through the halls, screaming, chased by a fire hose. He woke in a sweat. By his own account, he had the whole book in his head by morning. The book was The Shining. The fire hose became the snake-like thing that chases the boy through the Overlook. King's room was 217.
Long before King, 217 had its own story. On June 25, 1911, a gas explosion tore through the room when head chambermaid Elizabeth Wilson walked in with an open flame after newly laid pipes leaked. She lived, with two broken ankles, thrown clear from the second floor. The lore says she went back to work, and guests now report her still tidying 217, moving luggage, unpacking bags, switching the lights on and off.
The hotel was built by F.O. Stanley, who came to Estes Park in 1903 to outrun tuberculosis and built a resort instead. It opened July 4, 1909. His wife Flora is said to still be at the ballroom piano: staff report hearing music in the empty room and watching the keys move on their own.
Other rooms hold other things. In 401, guests describe an unfriendly male presence, unseen hands, doors opening and closing. In 407, a shadowy figure tied to the old Earl of Dunraven. And the fourth floor draws the most reports of all, most of them children, laughing in a hallway no one is standing in.
