HAUNTED PLACES / COLORADO

THE STANLEY HOTEL,
ESTES PARK.

The Stanley Hotel has stood above Estes Park, Colorado, since 1909, and since 1974 it has been the hotel where Stephen King found The Shining. Here is its history, what guests and staff report, the television visits, and how to run a session there.

The history

Freelan Oscar Stanley made his name with his twin brother Francis, building the Stanley Steamer, the steam car sold by their Stanley Motor Carriage Company. In 1903, at 53, he came to Colorado with tuberculosis and a doctor's warning that he had months to live. A summer in Estes Park, at the edge of what later became Rocky Mountain National Park, turned his health around. He came back every year, and decided the valley needed a hotel.

In June 1908 Stanley and a partner, Burton D. Sanborn, completed the purchase of land once held by the Earl of Dunraven, an Anglo-Irish nobleman who had claimed some 6,400 acres there in the 1870s. The National Register record names Stanley himself as architect. The hotel opened in the summer of 1909 with 140 guest rooms, a white Colonial Revival building with a red roof, electric from the kitchens to the lamps and powered by a hydroelectric plant Stanley built on the Fall River that year.

Flora Stanley died in 1939 and F.O. Stanley in 1940. The hotel was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on May 26, 1977, for its architecture and its part in the commerce and social history of the valley; the listing was widened into a district in 1985.

In the autumn of 1974 Stephen King and his wife Tabitha spent one night at the Stanley as it closed for the season, in Room 217. Wikipedia and the hotel both record that stay as the inspiration for The Shining, published in 1977. Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film was shot elsewhere, but the 1997 miniseries, directed by Mick Garris and written by King, was filmed at the hotel from March 1996. A hedge maze went in on the front lawn in 2015, a nod to Kubrick's film.

Frank Normali owned the hotel from 1974 to 1995 and began its restoration. John Cullen's Grand Heritage Hotel Group bought it in 1995 and ran it for thirty years. In May 2025 it was sold to the Stanley Partnership for Art Culture and Education, a public-private partnership backed by a state authority, with Cullen staying on as chair and chief executive. Today the hotel runs 220 rooms across four buildings.

What people report

The story told most often is about Room 217. On the evening of June 25, 1911, by most accounts, a storm cut the power and staff lit the backup acetylene lamps. Gas had leaked into the suite where Room 217 now stands, and when the head housekeeper, Elizabeth Wilson, came in with a light, the room exploded and threw her through the floor into the dining room below. She broke both ankles, recovered, and worked at the hotel for decades; one Denver newspaper puts the explosion in the 1920s, so the date is not settled. Guests in Room 217 have since described waking to find their clothes folded and their bags packed. Staff and tour guides tell it as Mrs. Wilson still keeping house.

The fourth floor is where visitors point most. Guests describe children running and laughing in the corridor with no one there when they look; the Denver Gazette notes that no child is recorded as having died in the building. Tour guides and visiting investigators single out Rooms 401, 407 and 428; Room 401 is linked in those accounts to Lord Dunraven, Room 428 to a figure guests call a cowboy.

Downstairs, the music room piano is said to play with no one at the keys, and the accounts give it to Flora Stanley, a pianist. F.O. Stanley is described in the billiards room, at the bar, and behind the reception desk as guests check in. The hotel itself says guests, staff and visitors have shared stories of unexplained experiences throughout the property.

Accounts of hauntings here are folklore and entertainment, not verified events.

On television

Ghost Hunters filmed at the Stanley for an episode first aired on May 31, 2006, and returned for a Halloween special that year. Most Haunted filmed there in 2008; the episode aired in the UK on 11 November 2008 as part of Most Haunted USA, which ran on Travel Channel in the United States that winter. The Ghost Adventures episode on the hotel aired on Travel Channel on October 15, 2010, and Project Fear visited in 2025.

The 2006 episode is online: watch the Ghost Hunters visit on the show's official channel.

Visiting and running your own session

The Stanley is a working hotel, open all year, and it welcomes visitors for dining, tours, concerts and events without a room; day visitors pay to park. Tours are booked separately: a daytime Historic Tour, a Shining Tour, and the night-time Stanley Ghost Tour, built, in the hotel's words, around its documented hauntings and folklore. Most run 60 to 75 minutes. Tours do not enter occupied guest rooms, and the outside of Room 217 can be seen on select tours but is not guaranteed. Check the hotel's site for the schedule and tour policies, and book ahead for weekends, summer and October.

The hotel's published rules cover professional and commercial photography and video, which go through its sales office; it posts no rule about a phone on a tour, so ask your guide before you record. Only trained service animals are allowed inside. Remember that people are sleeping behind those doors, and that the stories are about real people who lived and worked here. Keep your voice down after dark, do not knock on doors, and leave Room 217 to whoever has booked it.

For a session, you want somewhere still. If you are staying, your own room is easiest: set the phone on a wooden surface away from the television and anything charging, and let it learn the room before you ask anything. Otherwise a quiet lounge in the off hours or the front porch early in the morning beats a lobby full of people and their phones.

Try a session there

Run a Spirit box session at the Stanley with Spooky Box. Your phone's sensors decide the moment and chance decides the word, each word shows its reason, and you can record the session as audio or video and replay it from any word.

Read next

• The Queen Mary, Long Beach: a 1936 liner turned hotel, another place you can sleep in.
• Waverly Hills Sanatorium, Louisville: a 1910 hospital for the disease that brought F.O. Stanley west.
• Taking a phone on a ghost hunt: what its sensors can and cannot measure, and how to run a session.
• The Spooky Box home page, and every place on this site.

Sources

• The Stanley Hotel, Wikipedia: the history, King's 1974 stay and the ownership record.
• National Register of Historic Places, reference 77000380: the National Park Service listing record.
• The Stanley Hotel, frequently asked questions: the hotel on visiting, tours, Room 217 and photography.
• The Denver Gazette, October 2019: Stephanie Earls on the hotel's stories.

Questions

Spooky Box is paranormal entertainment. It uses device sensor activity and a word engine to create atmospheric sessions. Generated words and sensor readings do not establish the presence of spirits or verified communication.