The Stanley Hotel

History

In 1903, Freelan Oscar Stanley’s doctors told him he was dying of tuberculosis and had only three months to live. F.O. Stanley was a wealthy New England inventor, best known for the Stanley Steamer, the steam-powered car he built with his twin brother, Francis. He came west for Colorado’s dry air, drove one of his steam cars from Lyons up to Estes Park, and made a remarkably quick recovery. He lived another 37 years.

In October 1907, Stanley began building a grand resort on a hillside overlooking the town, facing Longs Peak, and he probably designed much of it himself. He meant to call it the Dunraven, after the Earl of Dunraven, a sportsman who had once dreamed of turning Estes Park into his private hunting reserve. Locals petitioned him to name it after himself instead. The Stanley opened in June 1909 with 88 guest rooms and an all-electric kitchen, powered by Stanley’s own hydroelectric plant on the Fall River. Fleets of Stanley Steamers carried guests up from the railroad depots at Loveland, Longmont, and Lyons. Stanley meant it as a summer resort, so the main building had no heat and opened only from June to September. It didn’t get heat until 1984.

Stanley sold the hotel in 1926, took it back at a foreclosure sale in 1929, and sold it again almost at once. He still came for lunch and concerts, and to sit in his favorite rocker on the veranda, until he died in 1940. After 1966, the Stanley changed hands every few years and slowly ran down.

In late September 1974, Stephen King and his wife spent a night there. “We were the only guests as it turned out,” King remembers on his official website. The hotel was closing for the winter the next day. That night, King dreamed of his three-year-old son running through the corridors and screaming. “He was being chased by a fire-hose,” he writes. King woke with a jerk, lit a cigarette, and sat looking out the window at the Rockies. By the time the cigarette was done, he writes, “I had the bones of the book firmly set in my mind.”

The book was The Shining, published in 1977, and its Overlook Hotel stands in for the Stanley. That same year, the Stanley was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film of the book wasn’t shot here, but a 1990s TV miniseries, made with King’s input, was. After new owners bought the hotel in 1995, it leaned into The Shining and its ghosts. The Colorado Encyclopedia says King’s room has become the hotel’s most-requested.

Hauntings & Lore

The Stanley tells its own ghost stories, and they pay. Jesse Freitas, the hotel’s archivist, told the Estes Park Trail-Gazette in 2014 that its tours brought in “over one million dollars” a year. The TV ghost hunters have come too. Ghost Hunters broadcast a six-hour live investigation from the hotel on Halloween 2006, and Ghost Adventures investigated it in a 2010 episode.

The Housekeeper in Room 217

Freitas told the story to Barb Boyer Buck of the Trail-Gazette, Estes Park’s local paper. In 1911, he said, Room 217 was the hotel’s Presidential Suite, an L-shaped room that took up the space of today’s Rooms 215 and 217. On the evening of June 25 that year, as he tells it, a thunderstorm cut the power, and the staff set about lighting the backup acetylene gas lamps. A chambermaid, Elizabeth Wilson, walked into Room 217 with a lit candle. Gas had been leaking, and in those days, Freitas said, it had no smell. “As soon as she entered the room, there was an instant explosion.”

The blast, he said, threw her down into the hotel’s MacGregor Dining Room, directly below. She broke both ankles but recovered, and Stanley paid her medical bills. She came back as head chambermaid and worked at the hotel until she died in the 1950s. After that, by Freitas’s account, she began to haunt the room. She folds guests’ clothes and puts them away. If an unmarried couple has the room, she may climb into bed with them and try to force them apart.

The hotel tells it the same way today. Its website says she unpacks guests’ belongings and neatly lines up their shoes.

Five Papers, Five Stories

The newspapers of 1911 couldn’t agree on what happened. Buck went back to “five different Colorado news accounts” of the explosion and found five different stories. The Denver Times reported the next day that the chambermaid was Elizabeth Lambert and that she had been fatally injured. A Fort Collins paper named her Lizzie Leitenbergher. None of the five mentioned a thunderstorm, and no employee records from that time survive at the hotel. “This is the most paranormal story we tell because it’s such a mystery,” Freitas said.

Something from the room did survive. In February 2014, pieces of Room 217’s wallpapered drywall and carpet turned up under the hotel, found while the hotel’s engineer was checking the air handlers. They matched a photo of the room from before the explosion. “To think that millions of people have walked by those pieces,” Freitas said, “and no one knew they were there.”

Ask for Room 217, which the hotel books as the 217 Spirited Grand King.

The Night Watchman in the Concert Hall

The Concert Hall went up in 1909 as the hotel’s Casino, a hall for dancing and entertainment, not gambling. It stands on its own, a short walk east of the main hotel, and the hotel still puts on concerts there.

In a 2016 story for Afar, the travel magazine, Kyana Moghadam took the hotel’s ghost tour through it. Her guide, Abbey, told the group about its ghosts. One is Lucy, “a girl who dislikes having her photograph taken.” Hers was the only room on the tour where guests were asked not to take pictures. Another is Paul, “the night watchman who loves cigarettes and booze and tells hotel guests to get out of his room when it’s past curfew.”

Moghadam snapped a photo in Lucy’s room without thinking, then stepped into Paul’s, “an unmarked space across the hallway that looked like a storage closet.” Standing in front of a dresser mirror, she felt her chest grow heavy, “as if someone was sitting on it,” and she couldn’t breathe. She left quickly. When she told Abbey what had happened, the guide said Paul had died of a heart attack, and that “most guests experience chest pains when they step into his room.”