I Spent Four Nights at the Stanley Hotel. Here's What Happened. (Ep. 1 of 3)

The Stanley Hotel inspired Stephen King's The Shining. Stephen King stayed in Room 217 and left with a nightmare that became a novel. Jim Carrey stayed in Room 217 and left in the middle of the night — and has never said why.

I stayed four nights. Off-season. Mostly alone.

This is Episode 1 — Nights One and Two. The staff said things. The hotel said things. Some of it I can explain.

Some of it I can't.

Stuff That Scares Me is hosted by Wallace Cole — raised in haunted Appalachia, where the old folks knew things they wouldn't say out loud.

 This episode is a work of narrative horror inspired by the history, folklore, and public reputation of the Stanley Hotel. Certain characters, conversations, events, and experiences have been fictionalized or dramatized for entertainment purposes. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Four off season nights at the Stanley Hotel Episode one Nights one and two If you've ever heard something move in the dark and wanted to hear it again, you already know why you're here. I'm Wallace Cole. I grew up in the Appalachian Mountains of rural West Virginia. Very rural, where the fog lays long and the old folks knew things they wouldn't say out loud, not because they didn't believe them, because they did. I've carried that into some dark places. What I found those places, I bring back here and tell you about it. Some of what you'll hear is documented, one hundred percent true. Some is based on real events, some is simply possible. All of it is stuff that scares me. Welcome to my podcast. Let's talk about my stay at the Stanley Hotel. No, I didn't stay in room two hundred seventeen. I want to get that out of the way because that's the first thing everybody asks. Did you stay in two hundred seventeen? And the answer is no. I was on the fourth floor, different floor and different room. The fourth floor has its own reputation, separate from two hundred seventeen, separate from the lobby accounts and the concert hall and the basement. Guests report the sounds of children up there, running, laughing, a ball bouncing down the corridor in the middle of the night. No children registered, no explanation on record, just the fourth floor, doing what the fourth floor does. I'll tell you where two hundred seventeen fits into this story, it fits in on night two, and when I get there, you'll understand why it matters that I wasn't in it. One thing you need to know is that I'm not a skeptic, not after growing up where I grew up, not after the things I've seen and experienced in the mountains, while hunting, and even at home. I know there are things out there that don't fit the categories we've built for them. I've known that since I was a boy. What I went as was a witness, someone who pays attention to what's happening and tells others about it. I went hoping the Stanley would give me something real to tell you, and it did. I stayed four nights, these three episodes will tell you what happened. But before I tell you about the Stanley, I need to tell you about a cabin in West Virginia, because that's where this story actually starts. My family had a hunting cabin in southern West Virginia, four hundred and seventy acres of ridge and hollow, timber country, the kind of land that's one thing in daylight and something else after dark. A family friend owned another ten thousand acres that abutted ours and we had permission to hunt it all. When you walked out past the property line, you were in ten thousand acres of mountain wilderness with no other human beings in it. I spent a lot of nights in that cabin as a teenager. The rhythm of it was practical and specific. You went up in the evening, got the wood stove going, ate whatever somebody brought, and went to bed early because you were getting up before dawn to be in the woods before first light. The dark was just the dark. That was part of the deal. One of those trips I was fifteen or sixteen, I had a paperback copy of The Shining with me. Somebody had said it was the scariest thing they'd ever read, and I had decided to see for myself. I want to tell you something about reading that book in that place for the first time. The cabin sat on the side of a mountain with ten thousand acres of solid woods outside the window and nothing between me and it but single pane glass. And there's something about King's Overlook Hotel, isolated, formal, operating on its own logic in the middle of a mountain wilderness, that fit where I was sitting in a way I wasn't prepared for. Not identical. The cabin was nothing like the overlook, but the quality of the isolation was the same. The sense that the dark outside maybe had its own will. I read maybe a hundred pages that first night before I put it down, not only because I was frightened, though I was, but because something about that book fit that place in a way that made reading it feel less like entertainment and more like paying attention to something that was already there. I finished it in two more sittings on the drive home. It scared me both times. King has said he wrote the book partly out of fear of what isolation might do to a man, fear of losing himself, fear of what the solitude of serious work might reveal. That's the literary reading. What a fifteen year old takes from it on a West Virginia mountainside is simpler and stays longer. Some places are patient. They've been waiting long enough that waiting is just what they do. The horror isn't that they attack, the horror is that they have time. Thirty years later, I was standing in the building that made it. I was in Colorado for work originally. A contact in Denver who knew the documentary work I'd been doing arranged for me to stay at the Stanley after I mentioned wanting to see the place that gave King the idea for the shining, that was all it was supposed to be. A quiet interlude in a historic hotel, off season atmosphere, maybe a few strange stories from staff. Honestly, I expected ninety percent of it to be marketing. The drive in from Denver is Route thirty six through the foothills, and the Rockies come up in front of you fast, not the way mountains announce themselves in most places, building gradually on the horizon. These just appear all at once, like a wall that's been there since before anyone was around to notice it. Estes Park sits at about seventy five hundred feet, the Stanley is higher. By the time I came through the mountain pass, the road was already getting slick. You could feel winter settling in. The kind of cold that doesn't just sit in the air, it presses, and the higher I got, the emptier everything became. Less traffic, fewer lights, more snow collecting along the shoulders. One thing the photographs of the Stanley never communicate correctly is where it sits relative to the town. The town is below, the hotel is above. You don't arrive at the Stanley naturally, you climb toward it. By the time it came into view through the trees, dusk was already settling over the mountains, and I had this feeling, not dramatic, just there, that I was arriving somewhere after everyone else had already left. The Stanley is beautiful, that's the part people don't expect me to say first. It isn't gothic, it isn't rotting, it doesn't look like anything is wrong with it. White Georgian revival walls, long red roof lines, the architecture of old money and mountain air, the kind of place people once arrived at by train wearing wool coats and polished shoes. But off season changes it. Half the exterior windows were dark when I pulled in. Certain wings already looked shut down for winter. Snow collecting against parts of the building that nobody was using anymore. And outside, almost no sound except the wind. Big hotels are supposed to feel alive, even quiet ones. The Stanley felt like a place still technically operating, after most of the life had already drained out of it. I sat in the car for a moment before I went inside, looked at those dark windows, thought about that cabin in West Virginia, about single pane glass and ten thousand acres and the feeling of something on the other side of it that had been there longer than I had. Then I got my bag and went in. The lobby was warm when I stepped inside, radiator heat, old carpet, one clerk behind the front desk, no line, no crowd, just faint instrumental music drifting from somewhere deeper in the building that I couldn't quite locate. The clerk was mid fifties, professional, calm, not theatrical, not mysterious, that matters. If he'd acted spooky, I'd have written off everything he said. He acted like a man doing his job in a building he'd long since made his peace with. He checked me in, looked at the weather outside, then he said People don't sleep especially well up here their first few nights. I said altitude, he said altitude. Then, after just a beat, usually, at the time I took that as a reasonable observation. Estes Park at seventy five hundred feet, thin air, dry cold, headaches, strange dreams, people mention it constantly up there, and by the time I got to my room I already had a dull pressure behind my eyes from the elevation. I thought about the way he said usually later that night. I thought about it again on night two. By the end of night four, I understood it. Freelan Oscar Stanley built the hotel in nineteen oh nine, same Stanley of the Stanley Steamer Automobiles. He was an inventor before he was a hotelier, and the automobile money is what made the building possible. Tuberculosis brought him west originally. The mountaineer was supposed to save his life. It did, he lived to ninety one. The Stanley has operated continuously since nineteen oh nine, with one interruption during World War II when the Army took it over as a training facility, over a hundred years of guests, over a hundred years of staff, over a hundred years of the particular experiences that old isolated mountain hotels accumulate, quietly, layer by layer, without announcing it. I want to tell you about the building before I tell you about the nights, because the building is the story, the individual incidents, the things that happened in my room, in the corridors, in the hours when the hotel had mostly gone quiet, those are symptoms. The building is the condition. The fourth floor hallway was almost completely empty when I went up to my room that first evening. Long corridor, muted lighting, old patterned carpet that absorbed my footsteps completely. I could walk the length of that hall and hear nothing of my own movement, radiator pipes ticking softly behind the walls, and every other sound. The distant settling of old wood, the wind finding gaps in old window frames, traveling farther than it should have. Carrying. My room was smaller than I expected, not uncomfortable. Old hotel comfortable, heavy furniture, tall windows, floors with a slight lean to them that you didn't notice until you set something down and it rolled, the kind of room where you automatically lower your voice without knowing why. I unpacked a few things, left my notebook open on the desk and went back downstairs to walk the hotel before it got too late. That first evening was honestly pleasant, I want to say that clearly, because the accounts that ring most false are the ones where the narrator is frightened from the first frame. I wasn't frightened, I was interested. What I noticed was the ratio, fully lit in the public areas, lobby, dining room, the main corridors, fully staffed, but the further you moved from those centers of activity, the more the ratio shifted, more closed doors, more darkened wings, housekeeping carts already covered and parked for the night in their alcoves off the corridor, sections that were still technically part of the operating hotel, but operating in a different way, quieter, less observed. The carpet in some sections was original, or close to it, deep red pattern, the kind that makes no sound underfoot. You walk a long corridor in near silence, and the only things you hear are the radiator behind the walls and the wind against the end windows and your own breathing. I talked to three staff members that first afternoon, a maintenance man who'd been at the Stanley for eleven years. He said he'd heard things in the basement mechanical spaces he couldn't explain, and had stopped trying to. He said it without drama, the way a man describes a condition of his employment he's made his peace with. A dining room supervisor who'd worked there six years. She'd seen a child standing near the piano in the ballroom area after closing. By the time she looked directly at the space, the child was gone. She'd decided it was peripheral vision and the lighting. She said she still mostly believed that. She put weight on that word, mostly, and a housekeeper named Rita. Rita had been making beds in this building for twenty two years. I asked her about the things that get reported. The documented accounts, the stories. Whether she'd experienced anything she couldn't explain. She looked at me, the way a woman looks when she's answered a version of this question more times than she can count. She said, Most people come up here wanting ghost stories, the ones who stay long enough, stop asking for them. I asked her why. She said, Because after a while you understand it isn't a story, it's just the hotel, it's how the hotel is. I wrote that down, I still have the notebook. The most documented single incident at the Stanley is a chambermaid named Elizabeth Wilson nineteen eleven. Gas had been leaking in room two hundred seventeen. Something ignited it. She survived, thrown by the blast, but not killed, and she recovered and came back to work at the Stanley and kept working there for years. Room two hundred seventeen has had more reported unusual activity than any other room in the building. Guests who had no knowledge of the room's history reporting the same specific experiences, luggage repositioned, faucets running when they wake, the presence of someone in the room who isn't visible. The consistency is what interests me as a documentarian, not the individual accounts, any individual account can be explained a dozen ways. The pattern is harder to dismiss. Same room, same type of experience, same specific details from strangers who didn't compare notes before they got there. Stephen King stayed in two hundred seventeen in nineteen seventy four. He and Tabitha were nearly the only guests. The hotel was preparing to close for the season. He had a nightmare about his son being chased through the corridors. Woke up, went to the window, lit a cigarette, and looked out at the empty parking lot. By the time he finished it, the book was largely formed. King has told that story himself, more than once. I'm not embellishing it. There's one more account I want to give you before we move on from two hundred seventeen. It doesn't come from a guest register or an employee incident report. It comes from nineteen ninety four, when the Stanley served as a filming location for Dumb and Dumber. Jim Carey was staying at the hotel during production. He specifically requested room two hundred seventeen, the same room King had. I don't know whether that was curiosity or something else, but he asked for it and he got it. He checked out in the middle of the night, three hours, according to people who worked there at the time, left the hotel and refused to return for anything other than filming. He has never publicly said what happened in that room. Not once, not in thirty years of interviews. And then, twenty years later, he approached a pair of filmmakers about making a found footage horror movie, set behind the scenes of the Dumb and Dumber sequel, built around what the cast and crew experienced at the Stanley during the original production. The studio passed. The film was never made. But think about that for a moment. Twenty years later whatever happened in that room was still with him. Still present enough that he wanted to make something out of it. Still unresolved enough that found footage, the format built on the idea that something real was captured, felt like the right container for it. I want to be straight about what that is and what it isn't. The middle of the night checkout is a staff account, second hand. Carey himself has never confirmed the details publicly. I'm not presenting it as documented fact. What I'm presenting it as is this a man who has made a career out of being the loudest person in any room, checked into two seventeen, and came out the other side with something he chose to keep entirely to himself for thirty years, and then tried to make a movie about it instead of talking about it. That tells me something. What I kept thinking about as I walked the Stanley that first afternoon was something simpler than the mythology. That fifteen year old in a West Virginia hunting cabin had understood something before he had the vocabulary for it. King didn't invent the feeling the Stanley produces. He recognized it. He walked into a building that was already doing something, already operating on its own logic in the dark above a mountain town, and he recognized it from somewhere inside himself. Walking those corridors in November. I understood why that cabin in West Virginia kept coming back to me. The book fit the place I'd read it in, because King had understood the place. I had dinner in the dining room, one of maybe four occupied tables, and went back to walking the hotel around nine o'clock. A building at night is a different thing from the same building in the afternoon. The staff presence thins, the ambient noise drops away. What's left is the structure itself. Old buildings have sounds, everyone who spent time in them knows this, thermal expansion and contraction, radiator pipes, wind finding gaps in old window frames, the particular acoustic behavior of large spaces with high ceilings and heavy carpet. I've spent enough nights in old places to know that inventory, to be comfortable in it. The Stanley's version of that texture was denser than most, more varied, more layered. Twice that first evening I heard what sounded like piano music, faint, distant, not loud enough to follow cleanly. Old fashioned, the kind of piece that belongs to an era of hotel entertainment that doesn't exist anymore. The first time I heard it, I turned toward it and walked in the direction it seemed to be coming from. By the time I reached the corridor leading toward the concert hall, it was gone, not faded. Gone. The way a signal disappears between stations. The second time I heard it, I didn't walk toward it. Around ten o'clock I realized I hadn't seen another guest in nearly forty minutes, not in the halls, not on the elevators, nowhere, just employees appearing and disappearing quietly through side corridors, and the hotel settling around me, old wood, pipes, wind, things that sound normal separately. Together, started feeling organized. The first thing that genuinely gave me pause happened a little after midnight. I was at the desk writing notes. King history, room layout, staff quotes from the afternoon, and I heard what sounded like a vacuum cleaner somewhere down the fourth floor corridor. Housekeeping at midnight. Unusual not impossible. I almost didn't pay attention to it. Then I noticed it wasn't moving. That's what made it odd. A vacuum cleaner sounds like something working its way up and down a corridor. Forward, pause, back, forward. This one was stationary. Same distance, same volume, same rhythm, for several minutes. I got up and opened the door to look. The sound stopped immediately. No cart, no employee, no movement in either direction, just the hallway, long and quiet and empty, the deep red carpet running to the end of it, the half light, nothing else. I stood there longer than I probably should have. Then I told myself, echo from another floor. Old buildings do strange things with sound. Frequencies travel in ways the architecture doesn't predict. That explanation satisfied me for about five minutes, right up until I got back inside and noticed my notebook. I know how small that sounds. It is small. That's exactly why it bothered me. Dramatic things are easy to dismiss, small things aren't. I had left the notebook open on the desk, open to the page I'd been working, pen in the gutter the way I always leave a working notebook. It was closed, squared neatly in the center of the desk, the pen resting alongside it parallel to the edge, my suitcase had been moved slightly closer to the wall, both shoes aligned side by side beneath the radiator. Perfectly straight, I stood there and went through the inventory, housekeeping, possible. Though I hadn't requested turndown service and the corridor had been empty when I checked the vacuum sound, my own absent mindedness, possible sawam, though I had a clear memory of leaving the notebook open, the building's vibration from wind moving things on the desk. Possible if the notebook had been near the edge, which it hadn't. I picked it up. My notes were undisturbed, nothing added, nothing missing. Just closed, squared, pen parallel to the edge, shoes straight beneath the radiator. I told myself housekeeping. I told myself fatigue. I checked the deadbolt before I turned out the light twice. I came down to breakfast the next morning, feeling more rested than I had any right to. That first night in a strange place at elevation, your body works hard just to calibrate. By the second morning, the calibration has happened. You wake up feeling settled, like the building has accepted you as a temporary occupant and is done processing you. That's the wrong word. Accepted. But it's the word I keep coming back to. The hotel's contact had arranged access to some of the Of the historical material in the building's archive, not a complete archive. The Stanley's documentation has gaps the way all old buildings' histories have gaps, but enough. Old photographs, guest registers from the early decades, a binder of employee accounts compiled by a previous manager who had apparently spent considerable time collecting them. The accounts in that binder were undramatic. That's the first thing that struck me. These weren't ghost stories in the campfire sense, they were incident reports, short, factual, written by people describing something that had happened to them at work, wanting to note it without editorializing. A bellman in nineteen thirty one, luggage in room two hundred fourteen repositioned during a period when the room had no registered guest and the floor was unstaffed. A housekeeper in nineteen forty seven found a bed made in a room she had stripped the previous afternoon. Hospital corners, done properly, better than she would have done it herself. A night manager in nineteen fifty nine, music audible in the concert hall at two in the morning. He investigated. The hall was locked and empty. The music stopped as he inserted his key. He noted the specific piece, a waltz, old fashioned, the kind of thing played at Saturday evening dances in the hotel's early years. He recognized it because his grandmother had played it on the piano when he was a child. And at the bottom of the binder, a maintenance worker, nineteen sixty two, six words, something in this building is working overtime after hours. Not haunted, not supernatural, just operational. Beyond its visible staff, beyond its registered guests. The hotel, continuing, I thought about those nine words for a couple of minutes. A practical man, the kind who fixes what needs fixing and doesn't invent problems. He'd written nine words, filed them, and gone back to work. That has got to be one of the most frightening things I discovered in the Stanley Hotel's documented history. Something in this building is working overtime. After hours. That afternoon, the hotel's contact took me through the parts of the building most guests never see. The kitchen first, the Stanley's kitchen has been running since nineteen oh nine, updated over the decades, but the bones of it original, high ceilings, industrial everything, the smell of a hundred years of meals and the walls even when nothing is cooking. The chef's name was Marcus, nine years at the Stanley. He had the particular economy of movement that belongs to people who work their whole lives in tight professional spaces. Nothing wasted, nothing performed. He showed me around the way he'd show a health inspector around. Matter of fact, this is where we receive. This is cold storage, this is the prep line. Off season, the kitchen was running on a skeleton crew, two line cooks for dinner service, one for breakfast, Marcus overseeing everything. The contrast between the kitchen scale, built to feed hundreds, and the reality of feeding maybe a dozen guests was something he described with professional resignation. Big machine for a small load, but you keep it running, easier than stopping and starting. I asked him how long it had been since the kitchen ran at full capacity. He said September. Then after a moment, first week of September, then after another moment, quieter. Though some nights it doesn't feel like it. I asked him what he meant. He looked at me, not amused, not theatrical, just weighing something. Then he said We come in some mornings, find the kitchen already running, freezers turned down, gas ovens on, pots on the range, full of water, boiling, like someone chasm in to get breakfast started. Maybe someone who never quite left. He said it's rare, but it happens. I asked him if he'd ever caught anyone that might have done it. He looked at me the way a man looks when the question misses the point entirely and said no. He showed me a door at the back of the kitchen, heavy and old, leading to the basement and the mechanical spaces below. He said, I don't go down there after ten o'clock. That's not a rule anybody made, it's just something I decided. I asked him why. He looked at the door. Sometimes late in the evening it sounds like somebody working down there, moving things around, adjusting. He turned back to his prep station and finished with Except maintenance doesn't work nights in the off season. The rest of the backstage tour covered the underground tunnel connecting the main building to the concert hall, long, narrow stone corridor below grade, sound behaving wrong in there in a way that takes a few seconds to stop being unsettling. Your voice comes back to you at the wrong interval, like there's a half beat of lag that shouldn't be there. The manor house, the scaled down version of the main building, added after the first season, originally the only fully heated structure which allowed year round operation before the main building could sustain it. Lower ceilings, quieter. The kind of rooms built for people who needed the mountain but not the grandeur of it. The carriage house, original to the nineteen oh nine campus, now repurposed, but still built to the dimensions of a space that once housed Stanley steamer automobiles, shuttling guests from the train depots in Loveland and Longmont. Ma, I found Rita mid afternoon in the third floor linen room, folding towels with the focused efficiency of someone who has done this specific task so many times it no longer requires conscious attention. She gave me fifteen minutes, I asked her what she had personally experienced in this building over twenty two years, that she hadn't been able to explain. She didn't hesitate. The fourth floor. I asked what had happened there. She said two years ago. November. About this time of year. Evening turned down on the occupied rooms. Three rooms had guests. She'd done two of them and was coming out of the linen closet at the end of the corridor when she saw someone come out of room four hundred twelve. Room four hundred twelve was not one of the three occupied rooms that night. She said, a woman, older, gray hair up, long dress, not a nightgown, a dress, the kind nobody wears anymore. She came out of four twelve, walked about ten feet down the corridor toward the staircase, and then she wasn't there. I asked, she went into another room? No, she wasn't there. Like somebody turned off a light, one second she was walking, next second the corridor was empty. I asked what Rita did. She finished the turndown service, checked 412, empty, reported it to the night manager as a possible unauthorized guest. He logged it, nothing came of it. I asked if it had frightened her. She thought about that for a moment. It confused me. There's a difference. When something frightens you, you want distance from it. When something confuses you, you want to understand it. I've been here twenty two years, and I still don't understand it, but I stopped being frightened of it a long time ago. She paused, then she said The ones who should be frightened are the ones who come up here expecting the hotel to perform for them, the ghost tour energy, the wanting something to happen energy. The hotel doesn't perform, it doesn't care what you expect, it just is what it is. By dinner there were three guests in the dining room, down from the night before, a couple near the window who spoke quietly and didn't seem to notice me. A woman alone with a book who looked up once, held my eye for a moment, and looked back down. The dining room felt larger with fewer people in it. That's a fact about space, but it felt like something else too, like the room was returning to its natural state, like the guests were the anomaly, and the empty tables were what the room was actually for. After dinner I walked. The building was different on the second evening, not dramatically different, subtly, the way a person is different on the second day you know them, not changed, but more fully themselves, the performance of hospitality thinning slightly, the building underneath it showing more, more wings at half power, more covered housekeeping carts, the lobby still lit, but the perimeter of it darker than the night before. I went to the concert hall tunnel, stood in it for a while, recited the Gettysburg Address to hear my voice echo back to me at that wrong interval, and thought about the night manager in nineteen fifty nine who heard a waltz at two in the morning and recognized it from his grandmother's piano. I thought, what would the hotel play back to me? What tune would it find buried in my soul? I didn't hear anything in the tunnel. Just my own voice coming back a second late. I went to bed at ten thirty, tired in the particular way of a mind that's been processing things it hasn't fully resolved. I slept, I woke at twelve forty with the certainty that someone had just been in the room. Not a sound that woke me, not a movement I'd registered, just the certainty. The specific quality of a space that has recently been occupied by a presence that is no longer there. The way a room feels different after someone has just left it, even when you didn't hear them go. I turned on the lamp, checked the room, checked the bathroom, checked the door, dead bolted. The way I'd left it, everything in order. Nothing disturbed. I turned the lamp off, lay back down. Second night, the building sounds are more familiar now, but the mind is still mapping them, still building its picture of what normal is in this specific environment. Go back to sleep. I went back to sleep. I woke at one fifty one. Same certainty. Room empty, door locked, everything in order. Back to sleep. And then, at two hundred seventeen in the morning, I woke up the way I haven't woken up in a long time. Suddenly, eyes open, fully present, the way you wake when something has changed. Nothing had changed in the room that I could see. The upper corners, all four of them, not one, all four, had a quality to the darkness that was different from the darkness in the rest of the room, pale, grey white. The corners of the room were glowing, not a reflection from outside, the curtains were drawn, no light source I could identify, just glowing, and there was a pressure, not pain, a heaviness. Sitting on my chest and pressing me down into the bed, I tried to move and couldn't. I was completely awake. I was sure of it. I want to be honest about what I thought in that moment. I thought, sleep paralysis coupled with high altitude, I could move my eyes. I looked around and noticed the bathroom light. It was on. I had turned it off before I went to bed, I know that. I always turn off all the lights. I like darkness for sleeping. No night lights. I've turned off the bathroom light in a thousand motel rooms and hotel rooms across this country, and I have never once left it on. The bathroom light was on. Not a sliver, not a crack under the door suggesting a night light. Full, warm, exactly as bright as it had been when I was standing in front of the mirror at ten o'clock before I reached over and switched it off and went to bed. The pressure began to ease after a few minutes. Just the altitude. The corners resolved back to ordinary dark. Just the altitude. I lay there looking at the line of light under the bathroom door and decided what to do about it. I did not get up immediately. I am a practical man. I've been in difficult places in my life. I've spent nights in the deep booger woods of West Virginia, activity all around, and come out with my hair and faculties intact. I don't rattle easily. I'm telling you that I lay there for several minutes before I got up, because some part of me, somewhere under the practical surface, did not want to open that bathroom door. I was the kid in the cabin all those years ago. At length I got up, put on my confidence, and went to the bathroom door. I opened it, empty, of course, ordinary, toiletries in their places, towels on the rack, nothing disturbed, the light on for no reason I could determine, no timer, no motion sensor. I stood there for a moment, then I turned it off, went back to bed. I did not sleep for a long time. I kept thinking about that single pane of glass between me and those ten thousand acres of West Virginia wilderness. At three in the morning I gave up trying and got dressed. I wasn't ghost hunting, I wasn't trying to provoke anything or find anything or document anything for the channel. At that moment I was a man who couldn't sleep in a building that was making it difficult on purpose. I needed to walk. The fourth floor corridor at three in the morning is a different thing from the fourth floor corridor in the evening. No staff, no movement anywhere, just the long hall and the deep red carpet and the muted light and the radiators ticking in the walls on their own schedule. I walked the length of it, found the stairs at the end of the hall and took them down to the third floor. I walked the length of that hall and took the stairs to the second floor, and started walking, and then I noticed the door, room two hundred seventeen. My heart did something uncomfortable. The door was not open, it was ajar, not the way a door is ajar when someone hasn't pulled it all the way shut, the way a door is ajar when someone has pulled it most of the way shut and left a deliberate gap. A few inches, and through that gap, warm lamp light. The specific amber quality of a bedside lamp in a room where the overhead light is off. I stood there, twenty feet from the door, the hall completely quiet, nothing moving anywhere. I slowly walked toward it. When I was about five feet away the door moved. It opened another inch. Was that a shadow I could see? And then the door closed all the way. I heard the snick of the latch. I stood in that corridor for a long moment. Then I went back to my room, checked the deadbolt, lay down on top of the covers with the lamp on. I didn't need any more dark tonight. In the morning I stopped by the front desk. I said, Was anyone staying in room two hundred seventeen last night? The clerk, not the one from check in, the morning shift, looked up, a small hesitation, not theatrical, just a moment. He said, That room's been empty all week. I thought about what that maintenance worker said. Something in this building is working overtime after hours. That's nights one and two. I want to tell you what I told myself standing in that corridor at three in the morning, old buildings, off season staff, a door with a faulty latch, a bathroom light on a worn switch, a man who closed his own notebook in a moment of fatigue he doesn't remember. All of that is possible, all of it is reasonable. I'm not ruling any of it out. Any one of those things alone is nothing. But altogether, maybe they're a little more than nothing. Maybe they are something. I've been in a lot of old buildings. I've on purpose spent time and places with documented histories of things that can't be explained, and in my own life, my childhood, those mountains, things I'll get to on this channel, I've experienced quite a bit of something. I know the difference between nothing and something. The Stanley is something. I had two nights left. The hotel in retrospect was getting oriented. This is stuff that scares me.