The Stanley Hotel

In 1911, a gas explosion blew chambermaid Elizabeth Wilson through Room 217's floor. She kept working for decades. Guests say she never stopped.

On June 25, 1911, head chambermaid Elizabeth Wilson walked into Room 217 with a lit acetylene lamp. A gas leak had been building in the dark all evening. The explosion blew her through the floor into the MacGregor Dining Room below and broke both her ankles. She survived. She kept working at the Stanley Hotel for decades after. Guests in Room 217 say she never stopped.

The Stanley sits on a bluff above Estes Park with Longs Peak behind it, a white Colonial Revival pile that opened in 1909. Freelan Oscar Stanley built it as a high-altitude cure for his own tuberculosis, funded with money from the Stanley Steamer automobile. Stephen King famously stayed in Room 217 in October 1974 and left with the outline of The Shining, but the hotel's ghost stories pre-date King by decades and don't need him. The documented incident is Wilson's. (Local Colorado papers at the time called her Elizabeth Lambert; Wilson is the name that stuck.)

She's the oldest and most specific haunting here. Guests in 217 wake up to find their suitcases unpacked. Lights flick on and off. Unmarried couples have described a cold pressure between them in the bed, something that feels like disapproval. Staff who worked with her in the 1920s and 1930s described her as protective of the rooms she ran, and the pattern fits.

The fourth floor is the other hotspot, and the fourth floor belongs to the children. Room 418 sits on what the staff call the "children's hallway." Guests complain about kids laughing and running in the corridor outside, open the door, and find nothing. Inside 418, guests wake up to body impressions on the sheets next to them. The room makes sounds when it's empty.

Then there's the ballroom. F.O. Stanley gave his wife Flora a Steinway for the hotel's opening, and she performed there for guests in the early years. Staff and visitors have reported music coming from the empty ballroom for decades. Several people have watched the piano keys depress on their own. A smaller number say they've seen a woman in an Edwardian dress sitting at the bench before she dissolves. F.O. himself shows up too, usually in the lobby or the billiard room, often in formal evening wear.

None of this requires believing the hotel is evil. It isn't. The Stanley has always been a resort, a place built for music and dancing and rich guests breathing thin mountain air, and its ghosts behave accordingly. Flora plays. F.O. checks on the bar. Elizabeth Wilson keeps unpacking bags. The children run in the hallway at night.