The Stanley Hotel
Near Estes Park, Colorado
That gleaming white hotel standing above town is the Stanley, one of the most famous resort hotels in the American West. It opened on the fourth of July, nineteen oh nine, and it was the dream of Freelan Oscar Stanley, the inventor of the Stanley Steamer automobile. Stanley built it in the elegant Colonial Revival style, with a grand pillared entrance and sweeping views of the mountains, Lake Estes, and Longs Peak beyond.
When it opened it catered to the wealthy, offering electric lights, telephones, and running water at a time when those were luxuries. It cost a small fortune to build. Stanley wanted something worthy of the setting he had fallen in love with.
What makes the Stanley legendary today, though, is not just its architecture. It is a story about a ghostly atmosphere that inspired one of the most famous horror novels ever written. A young author and his wife checked in one autumn night in nineteen seventy four, nearly alone in the enormous building as it prepared to close for the season, and the writer left with the bones of a story already forming in his mind.
We will get to who that was, and what he wrote, in just a moment.
