I Stayed in the Haunted Hotel That Inspired ‘The Shining’

It’s hard to imagine a hotel more firmly ingrained in pop culture than The Stanley Hotel. Even if you don’t know it by name, you likely know it by reputation: It’s the hotel where, on one fateful night, Stephen King roamed the empty halls and dreamed up one of the best horror tales ever written.  But even before it was “The Shining” hotel, people were calling it the most haunted hotel in America.

I spent a weekend there this October, and had some truly chilling moments — but, of course, that’s exactly what I was hoping would happen.

If you visit the hotel in Estes Park, Colorado — even if you don’t know anything about “The Shining” or the hotel’s outsized reputation as a delightfully spooky destination — you’d likely sense that there’s something special about this place. As you ascend the mountains that lead up to Rocky Mountain National Park, and then drive down into Estes Valley, there’s a real sense of building anticipation. And once you’re in the valley, you’ll see it: a majestic white hotel with a red roof, set against a pine-covered mountain with a serene lake below. During the day, The Stanley is a beacon to weary travelers, hungry diners, and appreciators of grand, historic hotels. At night during spooky season, it glows a sinister red, a harbinger of what you’ll find inside: REDRUM.

“It has just got a sense of place and belonging where the customer honestly believes it’s theirs,” Stanley Hotel owner John Cullen told Travel + Leisure. “Everybody leaves here with a story they can tell.”

I’ve stayed in a lot of allegedly haunted locations before, like the Mount Washington Hotel in New Hampshire and the Queen Mary, a cruise ship-turned-floating hotel in Los Angeles. They accept their spooky reputations — any staffer at the Mount Washington can tell you a story of a paranormal experience, and the Queen Mary offers ghost tours — but The Stanley goes a step further to embrace its haunted legends. The Colorado hotel doesn’t just offer ghost tours; it hosts recreations of Victorian seances, shows by master illusionists, and regular lectures by visiting paranormal experts.

The Stanley is also home to the “frozen dead guy” who inspired the annual Frozen Dead Guy Festival, which Cullen described as “sort of a winter festival, sort of a Burning Man” that brings in 10,000 revelers every March to see Bredo Morstoel, a cryogenically frozen Norwegian man whom The Stanley adopted when too many visitors were overwhelming his original resting place. There’s a Frozen Dead Guy Tour, in addition to historic daytime hotel tours and those aforementioned ghost tours. Cullen said that 184,000 people take a tour of the hotel every year.

You could definitely visit The Stanley for a scare-free stay and not see any ghosts. In my three nights there, I didn’t experience anything overtly supernatural, other than attending lectures by paranormal investigators Amy Bruni of Kindred Spirits and Greg and Dana Newkirk from Hellier. But you definitely couldn’t miss a certain air of mystery about the place, largely inspired by the legend of Stephen King’s infamous visit.

The story goes like this: King and his wife Tabitha checked into the hotel for one night in late September 1974, not realizing it was the last night of service before closing down for the season. They were the only guests in the hotel, and they stayed in Room 217, the Presidential Suite. It was purely serendipity that that particular room is among the hotel’s most haunted. In 1919, a gas explosion severely injured a chambermaid in that room, but she healed — with hospital bills paid by the hotel — and worked there for the rest of her life. Today, her ghost is rumored to be so attached to the hotel that she tidies up the space — whether living guests want her to or not.

By King’s stay, the hotel had fallen on hard times. It looked nothing like it does today, thanks to hundreds of millions of dollars in renovations and an enormous resurgence in interest, due in large part to the book King wrote after his visit, and the mini-series adaptation of “The Shining” that King filmed there in 1997. (He famously did not like the Kubrick version.) “That night, I dreamed of my three-year-old son running through the corridors, looking back over his shoulder, eyes wide, screaming… I woke up with a tremendous jerk, sweating all over, within an inch of falling out of bed.” King wrote of The Stanley on his website. “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.”

King has always been clear that The Overlook from “The Shining” isn’t directly inspired by The Stanley, and that he didn’t experience anything otherworldly there. “Some of the most beautiful resort hotels in the world are located in Colorado, but the hotel in these pages is based on none of them,” the author writes on the second page of “The Shining,” just after the dedication. “The Overlook and the people associated with it exist wholly within the author’s imagination.”

So while he was inspired to write about a hotel filled with sinister, murderous ghosts at The Stanley, he isn’t writing about the hotel in that book. But you tell that to the people who buy wine glasses with REDRUM (Danny Torrance’s recurring warning about “murder”) engraved on them, keychains with antique keys to Room 217, or stickers of typewriters that say “all work and no play,” the line Jack Torrance repeats over and over as he loses his mind. Fans have stolen the room number plaque to Room 217 so many times that there are replicas for sale, as well.

Those same people wander the hedge maze built after so many visitors asked where the hotel’s was, expecting to see it because The Overlook has one in the film. They sit at the antique wooden bar in The Cascades, the hotel’s fine dining restaurant, and order Redrum Punch, or retire to the wine bar for a glass of 217 Cabernet made for the hotel in Napa Valley. They watch the hotel’s dedicated television channel that plays both the Kubrick and the King versions of “The Shining” on a 24-hour loop.

Today, Room 217 is the Stephen King Suite. It’s filled with his books, including a hardcover copy of Black House which fans have turned into a journal detailing their experiences in the room, writing notes to slip between the pages of their own spooky encounters. The most die-hard King followers address their notes to “fellow Constant Reader,” the term he uses to refer to his fans, before detailing experiences of doors opening and closing on their own, lights flickering on and off, or shadow figures appearing in darkened corners.

There’s another way to step into “The Shining” for fans of the film. “The Shining” Suite in the caretaker’s cottage is a faithful recreation of Room 237 from Kubrick’s “The Shining” (it was changed from 217 in the film adaptation).  The carpets are that unmistakable geometric pattern, and the furniture is iconically midcentury. The only thing that’s out of place is an oil painting of Stephen King hanging on one wall. In the closet, a safe guards an original screen-used axe from Kubrick’s movie, which cost the hotel $250,000 at auction.

“And of course, you can’t have a ‘Shining’ bedroom without…” Cullen said as he opened the bathroom door for me to reveal a mint green room, with a tiled floor leading to a bathtub with sheer shower curtains hanging ominously from above. It’s an exact, to the detail, replica of the bathroom from the movie, the scariest scene in one of the scariest movies of all time. I’ve read “The Shining” probably five times, and I’ve seen furniture move on its own in a haunted hotel room at the Mount Washington, so not many things truly creep me out. But the sight of that bathroom was positively chilling, and it took me a few minutes to steel my nerves to walk inside.

“The Shining” Suite is only available to stay in one weekend a year, and it’s booked through an auction. “It went for $100,000 for one weekend, and 100 percent goes to charity,” Cullen said, adding with a laugh: “We have the lowest-occupancy hotel room ever built.” You might not be able to book the room to stay in, but you can definitely see it — “The Shining” tour runs every day, and it includes other spooky tales, like the real-life origin of the spectral twins in their blue dresses from the book.

I loved my stay at The Stanley Hotel, but I will admit: I wanted to experience more ghosts on my visit. There are tales of a ghostly Flora Stanley, hotel founder F.O. Stanley’s wife, who’s rumored to play her beloved piano in the concert hall, and of a security guard who died nearly 20 years ago but still patrols that building at night. Mr. Stanley’s ghost has been seen at the reception desk. The lobby stairs are a common place for people to report seeing glimpses of people who aren’t really there (or are they?), and on the fourth floor, people often say they hear children running and playing when there are none around. And then, of course, there’s Room 217. If you want to try your luck sleeping there, you’ll have to put some planning into it — that room sells out months in advance and is booked years out for Halloween night.