The road bends around lodgepole pines and suddenly there it is — four stories of white Georgian Revival rising against Colorado’s Front Range, symmetrical windows and cream-painted wood set against raw stone and elk country. The Stanley Hotel has stood above Estes Park since July 4, 1909. F.O. Stanley built it after the dry mountain air cured the tuberculosis his doctors had given months to kill him. His wife Flora’s seven-and-a-half-foot Steinway occupied the music room. The hotel had 142 rooms. F.O. Stanley died in 1940 at ninety-one. Neither he nor Flora entirely left.
In the autumn of 1974, Stephen King arrived with his wife Tabitha, nearly alone in a hotel days from closing for winter. Carrie had just been published. They dined in an empty room served by a single bartender, then retired to Room 217 — the one the hotel would become famous for. That night King dreamed of a fire hose chasing his young son through the corridors. He woke, lit a cigarette at the window, and by the time he finished it, The Shining was complete in his head. It was published three years later.
The hotel’s documented strangeness predates King by decades. Elizabeth Wilson, the head chambermaid, entered Room 217 to light gas fixtures with a candle. The leaking gas ignited. The explosion sent her through the floor. She survived and never, by most accounts, left. Flora Stanley’s Steinway has been witnessed moving on its own in an empty music room. F.O. himself appears in the billiard room and bar — tall, formally dressed, vanishing when approached. The Stanley discloses its case files openly and calls it history.
Story Source: www.stanleyhotel.com
Address: 333 E Wonderview Ave, Estes Park, CO 80517
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