The Stanley Hotel

The story

The Stanley Hotel overlooks Estes Park, Colorado, about 5 miles from the gateway to Rocky Mountain National Park, facing Lake Estes and Longs Peak. Its Georgian Revival buildings, today about 140 rooms, were the project of Freelan Oscar Stanley, born in Maine in 1849. With his twin brother Francis he made a fortune from inventions: the 1977 National Register nomination credits them with a photographic dry-plate process sold to George Eastman and, most famously, the Stanley Steamer, a steam car that set a land speed record in 1906 (the nomination says 1907).

In 1903 Stanley suffered a dangerous relapse of tuberculosis. Like many "lungers" of the era he sought dry mountain air, first in Denver and then, on the advice of Dr. Sherman Grant Bonney, in Estes Park for the summer. He recovered so well that he came back every year, and by 1907 he decided the valley needed a grand hotel for the well-off easterners of his circle and for health-seekers. Work on the original 48-room hotel began that year. The sources disagree on the land: Wikipedia says it was bought in 1908 through agents of the 4th Earl of Dunraven, an Anglo-Irish peer who had claimed some 15,000 acres of the valley for a failed private hunting preserve, while the nomination says it came from the MacGregor Ranch. Dunraven was so disliked that when Stanley suggested naming the hotel after him, 180 people signed a buckskin petition urging him to use his own name.

The hotel opened in 1909, on June 23 according to the nomination or July 4 according to Wikipedia. The Rocky Mountain News found it "simply palatial". It was among the first fully electrified hotels in the country, kitchen included, powered by a hydroelectric plant on the Fall River that also brought electricity to the town. Guests rode up from the rail depot in Lyons aboard Stanley-built steam Mountain Wagons. Billiards was Stanley's great pleasure, though he neither smoked nor drank. A concert hall, which legend says he built for his wife Flora, opened the same year, and the Manor House followed in 1910 or 1912 depending on the source. Stanley also helped shape the town, from its water and power companies to the reintroduction of elk from Montana. Guests over the years included John Philip Sousa, Theodore Roosevelt, Molly Brown, Enrico Caruso and Bob Dylan.

Stanley admitted he spent more each summer than the hotel earned. Wikipedia says he sold it in 1926, bought it back from foreclosure in 1929 and sold it to Denver hotelier Roe Emery in 1930; the nomination mentions a single sale in 1929. He died in 1940 at the age of 91. A restoration from 1974 to 1995 added heating to the main building and recovered lost furniture. The hotel joined the National Register in 1977. In 2025 it was sold for a reported $400 million to new owners who announced a three-year, $60 million expansion with 64 new rooms and a new lobby.

The legend

Wikipedia notes that the Stanley had a quiet early history and that its haunted fame grew mainly in recent decades, thanks to Stephen King. In 1974 the writer, who was living in Boulder at the time, checked in with his wife for the closing night of the season, when the hotel was almost deserted. "We were the only people in that hotel," he later said on The View. Legend holds that a nightmare in Room 217 gave him the idea for The Shining, published in 1977 and filmed by Stanley Kubrick in 1980, though Wikipedia only says 217 was the room he was allegedly given, and King's own accounts of the night vary.

Room 217 has a real incident behind its ghost story. On June 25, 1911, after a flood had knocked out the power, gas lighting was in use; a leak filled Room 217, and when head chambermaid Elizabeth Wilson walked in and lit a candle, the gas exploded, with enough force, the story goes, to send a bathtub flying. She survived and returned to work at the hotel. After her death, guests began to say that she still tends the room: they wake to find it tidier than they left it, clothes folded and luggage packed or unpacked, and lights switching on and off. She is said to frown on unmarried couples, who report a cold presence sliding into bed between them. The period record is less tidy than the legend. Wikipedia notes that 1911 newspapers disagree on details, the Fort Collins Express of June 29, 1911 contradicts the claim that she was blown from the second floor to the first, and an editor in Lancaster could not find her in local directories. Dates such as 1917 or the 1920s that appear online are wrong.

On the fourth floor, guests describe children laughing and running in the halls and objects moving as if someone were playing, but find no one; the stories connect these sounds with the nannies and young children once lodged up there. One account names a ghost boy, "Billy", who plays with guests' hair, and another mentions the ghosts of a cat and a dog connected with a pet cemetery on the grounds; each rests on a single source.

The founders are said to stay too. Guests claim to feel or glimpse F.O. Stanley in the billiard room and the bar. Flora is credited with late-night piano playing in the music room, and a 2013 travel blog described a rose scent that a psychic at the hotel attributed to her. Photographs said to show figures circulate as well, including a 2016 picture of a shape in a window.

Television made the hotel a fixture of ghost hunting. Ghost Hunters investigated it in season 2, episode 22 (May 2006), broadcast a live Halloween special from the hotel on October 31, 2006, and compiled highlights in season 3, episode 5. Ghost Adventures visited in season 4, episode 5, aired October 15, 2010.

The skeptical case is straightforward: the 1911 sources do not match the Room 217 legend, the ghost stories appear only in later retellings, and King's version of his stay changes from one telling to the next.

What remains today

The 1909 main hotel, the concert hall, the Manor House and the Carriage House all survive; the 1977 nomination found them essentially unaltered, except that the Carriage House had been converted from a garage into a motel unit in 1950. Inside, the music room with its picture windows and classical plasterwork contrasts with the dark-wood former smoking lounge, now the Piñon Room, and the billiard room beside it. The original ochre siding was painted white around 1935. The concert hall, whose stage has a trap door for theatrical entrances, was extensively repaired in the 2000s. The hotel runs a restaurant, a spa and lodging.

Visiting

The Stanley is a working hotel, open to guests and diners. The hotel runs its own Stanley Ghost Tour: a 60-minute walking tour with a storyteller, $35 at last check, limited to 20 people and to ages 8 and up. Tours never enter guest rooms, the night tour stays off guest floors, and ghost tours finish in the cave and tunnel system beneath the hotel. Other tours focus on history and The Shining. Check the official website for current prices and schedules, especially with the expansion under way. Room 217 and the fourth floor are guest accommodations, so respect other guests and do not roam guest corridors without a reservation.

Sources

1. National Register nomination #77000380 (texte intégral) — U.S. National Park Service · Public record
2. National Register of Historic Places file (NRHP #77000380) — U.S. National Park Service · Public domain (U.S. government)
3. Wikimedia Commons category : Stanley Hotel (Estes Park) — Wikimedia Commons
4. USGS 1:125000-scale Quadrangle for Longs Peak, CO 1915 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1915 · Public domain (USGS)
5. USGS 1:24000-scale Quadrangle for Estes Park, CO 1957 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1957 · Public domain (USGS)
6. USGS 1:250000-scale Quadrangle for Greeley, CO 1958 — U.S. Geological Survey, 1958 · Public domain (USGS)
7. "Get Your Ghost On at Haunted Historic Hotels of America" — Hotel Scoop (travel blog, Oct 2013) — Hotel Scoop (travel blog, Oct 2013; weak source
8. "List of Ghost Adventures episodes" — Wikipedia — Wikipedia
9. "List of Ghost Hunters episodes" — Wikipedia — Wikipedia
10. Official website
11. "The Stanley Ghost Tours" — The Stanley Hotel (official) — The Stanley Hotel (official
12. "The Stanley Hotel's haunted reputation and how it inspired The Shining" — Scripps News / WPTV (Kyle Hicks) — Scripps News / WPTV (Kyle Hicks
13. Wikipedia article — Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Text written by AI from the sources above and checked by a separate AI fact-check (how we work). Images: credits and licenses under each picture.