Stanley Steamer, Tuberculosis, and the Hotel That Scared Stephen King

Freelan Oscar Stanley arrived in Estes Park in the summer of nineteen oh three in one of his own steam-powered automobiles, having been told by his physician that he was dying of tuberculosis and should try mountain air. Stanley was fifty-four. He was the co-inventor of the Stanley Steamer, one of the most successful early American automobiles, a man of considerable means and considerable stubbornness. He arrived, the air agreed with him, and he decided not to die.

He spent the next several years building things. He funded improvements to the road into Estes Park, which at the time was rough enough to discourage anyone without a very good reason to come. He built a hydroelectric plant on the Fall River to provide power. On July fourth, nineteen oh nine, the Stanley Hotel opened: Georgian Colonial Revival architecture, roughly fifty rooms at the time (the hotel has since grown to one hundred forty), the first hotel in Colorado with electricity throughout, built for the kind of guests who expected certain standards and were willing to pay for them. Stanley lived in and around the hotel until his death in nineteen forty at age ninety-one.

In the fall of nineteen seventy-four, a writer named Stephen King and his wife Tabitha were the only guests at the Stanley during the last week the hotel was open for the season. King wandered the empty corridors in the evenings. He had a nightmare in which his three-year-old son was being chased through the halls. He sat up in the bathroom after the nightmare, as he later described it, and by the time he went back to bed the outline of the novel was there.

The novel was published in nineteen seventy-seven. The hotel has leaned into its connection to The Shining with enthusiasm. Room two hundred seventeen is, by most accounts, the most requested room at any hotel in Colorado.