UnspecifiedCredit: Penny Bradfield
David Wroe on a Shining example of a haunted hotel.
IT COULD have been the start of a horror story. "Have you been up to the old Stanley Hotel?" the shopkeeper asked me. The woman didn't have a hunched back or a glass eye or anything like that. In fact she was brimming with American friendliness.
Nevertheless, it sounded like the last thing a person hears before they're catapulted into a nightmare of ghosts and ghoulish madness.
We'd admired from a distance the grand, rambling set of white buildings perched on the hillside above Estes Park, a pretty little town nestled in the Colorado stretch of the Rockies but had no inkling of its national fame. The storekeeper explained it was one of the top haunted hotels in the US and the inspiration for Stephen King's novel, The Shining.
I know the protagonists in horror stories always seem to have death wishes, the way they wander voluntarily into spooky, obviously dangerous places but we couldn't pass up an opportunity like this, so we drove up and inquired about a room for the night.
"It's the second most haunted hotel in the United States," the young woman at the front desk confirmed. "How do you measure hauntedness?" I asked.
She explained it had been judged as such by various psychics and by the Ghost Hunters, a cable program on the Sci-Fi channel. (It is ranked behind the Myrtles Plantation, near New Orleans.) The infamous Room 217 from The Shining was being renovated so the receptionist suggested a room on the fourth floor. "That's where most of the paranormal activity occurs," she said.
Now, I am a sceptic on the grounds that if I were dead and therefore freed from the shackles of corporeality, I would use my powers more wisely than moving furniture around and blowing small gusts of wind. That said, there is nothing more fun than having the life scared out of you by a good horror story. I would love to have my scepticism shattered; life would be far more interesting were it filled with the kind of supernatural mayhem that goes on in Stephen King's novels.
It came as a disappointment, therefore, when Stephanie, the Stanley's chirpy tour guide, told us there was no evil, malevolent presence at the hotel, only "good spirits". "Actually, we haven't had any bloody murders here or anything like that," she said, ruining the fun completely. By good spirits she meant the likes of Lord Dunraven, whose austere portrait hangs in the hotel lobby.
The fourth Earl of Dunraven was a Scotsman who through various unscrupulous business practices came to own most of the land around Estes Park when it was a small, frontier community in the late 1800s. Eventually his neighbours ran him out of town in 1888 and never saw him again. But before he left, Dunraven sold a piece of land to F. O. Stanley, a wealthy photographic and automotive pioneer, who later used it to build the Stanley Hotel between 1907 and 1909.
So, despite having left town and probably died about 20 years before the hotel was built, Dunraven now haunts the fourth floor, with a special emphasis on stealing the wedding rings of honeymooners and groping the female housekeepers. (Several housekeepers had quit after having their bums pinched by the rascally Dunraven, Stephanie told us.)
Until the early 1960s, when it fell into two decades of decline before being revived, the Stanley was a retreat for the rich and famous. Children were not permitted in the main parts of the hotel so the fourth floor was set aside as a nursery. Dunraven favoured the fourth floor, Stephanie said, because that was where the young nannies could be found.
After Dunraven, the most prolific spirits are a pair of children, a brother and sister, who used to stay on the fourth floor in the 1930s. Both died of tuberculosis and are now often seen playing in period clothing. In room 420, considered the most haunted room in the hotel, guests on the cusp of sleep have heard a small girl whisper in their ear, "Goodnight".
Next, a couple of drifters - a boyfriend and girlfriend - came to the hotel in the late 1960s and began sleeping in the disused concert hall. The man abandoned his girlfriend after the management refused to let the couple sleep indoors. She froze to death one night and has, ever since, haunted the Concert Hall.
The story that really made the hotel famous was the one in which a drunken Stephen King stumbled up and down the darkened passageways looking for his room. It was October 1973, the last day of the season before the hotel shut down for the winter. King and his wife, Tabitha, were the only guests that night. They were stuck in Estes Park because a road that winds up into the Rocky Mountain National Park, was closed.
After a session in the hotel bar, King got lost. As he wandered around looking for his room, he hit upon the idea of a young family who take the job of caretaking a hotel during the winter, when it is snowed in. He changed the name of the hotel to The Overlook and wrote a story in which the spirits and the isolation drive the father, Jack Torrance, to homicidal madness.
It's easy to see how the Stanley could inspire such a tale. The old, white weatherboards and the striking red roof conjure up an American mountain gothic atmosphere. Inside, the passageways are long and the staircases angular.
It is also a beautiful place, with exceptional views of the soaring, snowcapped Rockies in the distance. Franklin Roosevelt stayed there, as did Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash. I would have paid a fortune to meet the ghost of Johnny Cash. On a less stirring note, the Aspen scenes from the Jim Carrey film Dumb and Dumber were also filmed at the Stanley. Carrey stayed in Room 217 and, according to Stephanie, came down in the middle of the night insisting he be moved. He has never explained what happened.
Nothing happened to us, even though we were in room 418, practically the paranormal epicentre. My pants went missing at one stage but turned up exactly where I had misplaced them, under some towels in the bathroom. The toilet flushed oddly and the ceiling fan kept spinning after I turned it off but that was it.
The hotel plays Stanley Kubrick's film of The Shining on a constant loop on its TV system. It is a genuinely frightening piece of cinema, owing to Jack Nicholson's maniacal performance and Kubrick's genius, although King was unhappy with the way Kubrick changed the storyline and sidelined his central theme of a man's battle with alcoholism. Kubrick also used a different hotel, the Timberline Lodge in Oregon, for outside shots and built a sound stage in England for the interiors.
Nevertheless, a couple of days after we were at the Stanley, horror fans voted Kubrick's film the scariest of all time.
Fast facts
Getting there: American Airlines, Air Canada and Cathay Pacific fly from Melbourne to Denver.
Getting around: Hire a car in Denver for a taste of sweeping Rocky roads, a pleasure to drive on.
Visas: No visa needed for a stay of 90 days or fewer.
Sleeping: From $139 for a low-season double room at The Stanley.
Currency: $1A = $US0.76
Contacts: http://www.stanleyhotel.com
Tips: Estes Park is probably the best little town in this area but nearby Fort Collins is also recommended. Dress warm.
Safety: Watch out for snow warnings. Don't worry too much about ghosts.
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