The Shining and the Overlook Hotel
Near Estes Park, Colorado
The writer who checked into the Stanley Hotel on that autumn night in nineteen seventy four was Stephen King. He and his wife Tabitha arrived at the end of October, just as the hotel was about to close for the winter. By most accounts they were nearly the only guests in the building, and they stayed in room two hundred seventeen.
King wandered the long empty hallways, ate dinner in a grand dining room set for one couple, and heard the wind moving through a place built for hundreds. He later said that by the time he finished a single cigarette that evening, he had the bones of a novel firmly set in his mind. That novel was The Shining, published in nineteen seventy seven, the terrifying story of a family alone in the haunted Overlook Hotel through a long mountain winter.
The Overlook is fictional, and the famous nineteen eighty film by Stanley Kubrick was shot elsewhere. But the Stanley Hotel is where the idea was born, and it has leaned into that legacy ever since, hosting ghost tours and film screenings. Room two hundred seventeen is now one of the most requested rooms in the American West.
