Ghost Trails / Reel Roads: The Stanley Hotel — Where the Nightmare Became the Novel

Estes Park, Colorado

The man who invented the Stanley Steamer came to Estes Park in 1903 to die.

Freelan Oscar Stanley had made his fortune twice over — first by co-developing a dry photographic plate process with his identical twin brother Francis that they eventually sold to George Eastman for what would amount to tens of millions in today’s dollars, then again by building one of the most celebrated steam-powered automobiles in the world. He was a genuine American inventor, the kind history produces once in a generation. And in the winter of 1903, his doctor told him tuberculosis would claim him within months.

So F.O. Stanley went west, as Americans did then when they wanted clean air and a dignified exit. He and his wife Flora settled into a friend’s cabin in Estes Park, Colorado, and something unexpected happened. The mountain air cured him. Completely. He gained 29 pounds that first summer and returned every year afterward, living to 91 and outlasting his own prognosis by nearly four decades.

Grateful to the valley that saved his life, Stanley decided to give something back. What he built was a white Georgian Revival hotel on a hillside at 7,800 feet, with panoramic views of Lake Estes and the Rockies stretching in every direction. It opened on July 4, 1909, powered by Stanley’s own hydroelectric plant — one of the first fully electrified hotels in the world. Every room had a telephone. Running water flowed from Black Canyon Creek. Flora’s piano sat in the concert hall, a gift from her husband to mark the opening, and for years guests reported hearing her play it beautifully.

What Stanley almost certainly did not anticipate was that the hotel he built to celebrate life would spend most of its legacy in conversation with death.

The Accident That Started Everything

Two years after the doors opened, on the evening of June 25, 1911, a severe storm knocked out the Stanley’s electrical power. The head housekeeper, Elizabeth Wilson, began making her rounds through the hotel, lighting gas lanterns in each room in preparation for the outage. What neither she nor anyone else knew was that a gas line on the second floor had been leaking. When Wilson entered Room 217 and struck a match, the resulting explosion was heard over a mile away in the town of Estes Park. Witnesses reported seeing a bathtub launched into the air. An estimated ten percent of the hotel sustained damage. Elizabeth Wilson was blown clean through the floor and landed in the dining room below.

She survived. That alone is remarkable. She recovered, returned to work, and by most accounts continued in her role at the Stanley until her death years later. But guests in Room 217 began reporting strange things not long after. Luggage moved. Lights switched on and off without explanation. Unmarried couples sleeping in the same bed described feeling a cold force pressing between them, as if someone deeply disapproving were trying to separate them. The reports have continued steadily for over a century.

Today, the hotel’s most requested accommodation is that very room, now officially called the Stephen King Suite. You cannot book it online. You have to call. And the waiting list for staying in October stretches months into the future.

The Ghosts That Predate the Legend

It would be easy to assume that the Stanley’s haunted reputation was constructed backwards from Stephen King, retrofitted onto a hotel that needed a marketing angle. But the paranormal activity reported here predates King’s visit by decades, and it covers nearly every floor of the building.

F.O. Stanley himself is said to still keep an eye on things. Staff and guests have reported seeing a well-dressed man in the hotel bar late at night, someone who doesn’t quite match any guest they can account for. His wife Flora is the more musical presence — appearing in the concert hall she loved, sometimes as a visual apparition seated at the piano, sometimes as music that has no visible source.

The fourth floor draws the most consistent paranormal attention and has the strangest explanation for it. In the Stanley’s early years, wealthy families arrived for the summer season with their children and nannies in tow. The children dined separately in a windowless room. The nannies lived on the fourth floor. Guests today report children’s laughter echoing in empty hallways, small figures glimpsed at the end of corridors, and lights that cycle on and off regardless of how many times the bulbs are checked. Room 401 is particularly well documented. When the Ghost Hunters television crew filmed there, investigator Jason Hawes woke from sleep to watch a locked closet door swing open by itself in an otherwise empty room.

Room 407 belongs to a different kind of ghost entirely — one reportedly seen peering through the window from outside, despite the fact that the room sits well above ground level. Local lore identifies this presence as Lord Dunraven, the Anglo-Irish nobleman who owned the land before Stanley bought it. Dunraven’s history in Estes Park was controversial enough that when Stanley suggested naming the hotel after him, 180 residents of the town signed a petition written on buckskin asking him not to.

The grand staircase in the main lobby has its own mythology. Some guests and psychics have described it as a vortex — a place where the membrane between this world and whatever lies adjacent runs unusually thin. The photographs that come out of that staircase are, by any reasonable accounting, difficult to explain.

One Night, One Dream, One Novel

In late September of 1974, Stephen King and his wife Tabitha drove north from Boulder, where King was living while working on another project. The Stanley was about to close for the winter. By the time the Kings arrived, the staff had already begun the shutdown. The dining room tables were already set with upside-down chairs. Pre-recorded orchestra music played through speakers into an empty room. The Kings were the only guests in the entire hotel.

They ate dinner alone, serenaded by music echoing through vacant corridors. Then they went upstairs to their room — the only one that still had linens on the bed. Room 217.

King has described what happened next in interviews and on his own website. He wandered the halls. He absorbed the atmosphere of an enormous, beautiful, utterly empty building in the mountains in late autumn. And when he finally slept, he dreamed of his three-year-old son running through the corridors screaming, being chased by a fire hose that had come alive.

He woke in a panic, lit a cigarette, and sat at the window looking out at the Rockies. By the time the cigarette was finished, he had the bones of the book in his head. He wrote to a friend that the Stanley had seemed, as he walked its halls that night, “the perfect, maybe the archetypical, setting for a ghost story.”

The Shining was published in 1977. It became one of King’s most celebrated novels, the story of Jack Torrance, a writer who takes a caretaker job at an isolated mountain hotel called the Overlook and slowly descends into madness as the building’s dark history takes hold of him. Room 217 features prominently. The novel’s Danny Torrance, like the son King dreamed of, runs in terror through the hotel’s corridors. The fire hose that strangled King’s sleeping son became one of the book’s most visceral horror devices.

Two Films, One Hotel, and a Director Who Never Visited

The story of The Shining on film is itself a study in two very different visions.

Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 adaptation is now considered one of the greatest horror films ever made, though it was a modest box office performer on release and King loathed it. Kubrick, working with a script that departed significantly from the novel, never filmed at the Stanley. His exterior Overlook was the Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood in Oregon. His interiors were constructed on soundstages at Elstree Studios in England, with design inspiration drawn partly from the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite. The room where Jack Torrance’s darkness crystallizes became Room 237 — a number Kubrick changed at the request of the Timberline Lodge, whose management was concerned guests would refuse to book a room associated with a horror film. Room 237 does not exist at the Timberline Lodge. Room 217 does exist at the Stanley, and it books months in advance.

King, dissatisfied with how far Kubrick had strayed from his story, took matters into his own hands in 1997. He wrote the screenplay for a three-part ABC miniseries himself and insisted on a crucial distinction from the Kubrick version: it would be filmed at the actual Stanley Hotel. The miniseries, directed by Mick Garris, is widely considered less artistically daring than Kubrick’s film, but it gave the Stanley something Kubrick’s version never did — a permanent visual record of the building that started everything. Props from the production remain in the hotel’s basement today, including the handbuilt dollhouse modeled after the Stanley itself.

There is an interesting footnote that connects the two films through the hotel. A pet cemetery on the Stanley’s grounds, where owners traditionally buried their animals, has reportedly produced its own ghost sightings over the years. A golden retriever named Cassie and a white cat named Camanche have been glimpsed wandering the rooms and grounds by guests who later discover the animals had been dead for years. King stayed in Room 217 in 1974. His novel Pet Sematary, about a cursed burial ground that returns animals and people from the dead, was published in 1983. Whether the hotel’s animal graveyard planted a seed in his imagination no one can say. But it’s the kind of detail that makes you sit with it for a while.

What It’s Like to Go

The Stanley Hotel today is a fully restored, genuinely beautiful hotel that earns its reputation on both ends of the spectrum — historic elegance and genuine atmosphere. It sits at the entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park, which means your days can involve elk at sunrise and alpine trails through country that stops your breath, and your evenings can involve a ghost tour through tunnels beneath a 116-year-old building where the lights go off and the only thing between you and whatever is down there is a guide with a flashlight and a story.

The hotel runs several tour options. A 90-minute history and paranormal walking tour covers the public spaces, the tunnels, and the documented lore of each haunted location. A Night Ghost Tour goes deeper — lights out —into areas most day visitors never see. For the genuinely committed, a five-hour paranormal investigation gives you the run of the property with equipment and a lead investigator. All tours book online through the hotel’s tour page, and for October visits, booking several months ahead is not overcautious —it’s necessary.

The spirited rooms — 217, 401, 407, 418, and 428 — are priced at a premium and book far in advance. Room 217 requires a phone reservation rather than online booking. If you want to sleep where Stephen King dreamed one of the most famous nightmares in American literary history, plan ahead. Every room in the main hotel has a channel that plays Kubrick’s version of The Shining on a continuous loop, which is either a delightful amenity or a deeply unsettling one depending on your constitution.

The hotel added a hedge maze to the front grounds in 2015, a nod to Kubrick’s adaptation. It’s worth noting that King’s original novel featured topiary animals rather than a maze, so the hedge maze is actually a tribute to the film version that King publicly criticized. The hotel seems to enjoy this irony. So does the internet.

Estes Park itself is worth building a full weekend around. The town sits at the gateway to Rocky Mountain National Park and has excellent restaurants, galleries, and the kind of unhurried mountain pace that reminds you why people have been making the trip since F.O. Stanley first drove his steam car up from Lyons in 1903. In spring and fall, elk wander through the streets with complete indifference to traffic.

The Stanley was acquired in May 2025 by a public-private partnership called The Stanley Partnership for Art Culture and Education, for a reported $400 million, with plans that include preserving the historic character of the property while expanding its cultural programming. As of now, the hotel continues to operate as it has, with all tours and overnight stays available.

Before You Go

Room 217 (the Stephen King Suite): Call the hotel directly at (970) 577-4000 to check availability. Rates typically run $329 to $399 per night before taxes, and the room does not appear in the standard online booking system.

Ghost and paranormal tours book through the Stanley Hotel’s official tour page. Prices and availability vary by season. October books out first.

The hotel sits at 333 Wonderview Avenue, Estes Park, Colorado, approximately 70 miles northwest of Denver. The drive takes just over an hour and the road through Rocky Mountain National Park is one of the most remarkable approaches to any hotel in the country.

If you’re building an itinerary, pair the Stanley with a morning in the park — elk are most visible at dawn and dusk — and give yourself at least two nights. One to explore. One to listen.

For a deeper look at the Stanley through a cinematic lens — the filming locations, the rooms worth booking, the drive up, and how to plan a full pilgrimage — our companion post, Reel Roads: Room 217 and the Hotel That Dreamed Up The Shining, covers the Stanley from the cinematic traveler’s perspective.

The Shining (novel, 1977) and Doctor Sleep (2013) are both available wherever books are sold. Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film adaptation is streaming on Max. The 1997 Stephen King miniseries is available on Peacock. Watch both. They are entirely different experiences, and both are better for knowing where the story actually began.