Four Nights at the Stanley Hotel. The Bathroom Light Was On (I'd Turned It Off). (Ep. 2 of 3)

The bathroom light was on. 

I had turned it off before I went to bed. I know that the way I know my own name. I've turned off the bathroom light in a thousand hotel rooms across this country. 

It was on.  And it was moving. 

Night Two at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado. Six guests in the entire building. Off-season. The week before partial winter closure. In Episode One, I gave every strange thing that happened a reasonable explanation. The notebook. The shoes. The sound in the hall. 

Night Two, the explanations started coming harder. 

In this episode: what a maintenance worker wrote in 1962 and then filed away and never mentioned again. A chef who won't go into his own basement after ten o'clock. A housekeeper who watched someone disappear from a fourth-floor corridor — and finished her shift anyway. A room that had been empty all week. And what happened at 2:17 in the morning when I finally ran out of reasonable things to tell myself. 

I'm not a ghost hunter. I don't perform fear for an audience. I'm an investigator who goes to places that have things wrong with them and tries to explain what's there. 

Night Two at the Stanley, I couldn't find the right explanation. 

Episode Three drops soon. Subscribe so you don't miss it.

 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

Welcome to Stuff That Scares Me. Three off-season nights at the Stanley Hotel. Episode 2, Night 2. The bathroom light was on. I had turned it off before I went to bed. I know that the way I know my own name. I always turn off the bathroom light. I've turned it off in a thousand hotel rooms, and I have never, not once, left it on. But it was on. Not a sliver. Not a crack under the door suggesting something low wattage. On full. The light I had turned off was on. And the light was moving. Not flickering. Not the random pulse of a failing bulb. Moving. The way light moves when something is passing between the source and the floor. Slow. Deliberate. Back and forth. Like someone pacing. I've got pixes. I got up, gathered my courage, and stepped to the bathroom door. As I reached for the knob, I thought about everything that had happened in this building in the past 36 hours. The employee binder. The kitchen door Marcus wouldn't open after ten o'clock. Rita on the fourth floor. The corridor I'd walked an hour earlier. The room that had been empty all week. I thought about all of it. And then I opened the door. Have got pixes of I'm Wallace Cole. This is stuff that scares me. Episode two of three off season nights at the Stanley Hotel. If you're just joining us, in episode one, I arrived at the Stanley and Estes Park, Colorado, during the last week of off season before partial winter closure. Maybe six guests in the entire building. I walked the hotel, talked to staff, spent the first night with a vacuum sound that stopped when I opened the door, and found my notebook closed and my shoes aligned beneath the radiator when I came back inside. Things that had explanations, things I gave explanations. Night two The explanations started costing more effort than they were worth. Here's how the day went. The first night your body works just to calibrate. The elevation, the dry air, the specific acoustic signature of a building you don't know yet. By the second morning the calibration has happened and you wake up feeling settled, like the building has processed your arrival. Filed you somewhere. That's the wrong word filed. But it's the word I keep coming back to. The PR contact had arranged access to the historical archives, not a complete archive. The Stanley's documentation has gaps the way old buildings histories always have gaps, but enough. Old photographs, guest registers from the early decades, and a binder. I want to tell you about the binder. It had been compiled by a previous manager who had spent considerable time collecting employee accounts. Incident reports, essentially. Short, factual, written by people describing something that had happened to them at work, and wanting to note it without making too much of it, without editorializing. The handwriting on some of them careful and deliberate, the kind of handwriting people used when they wanted to be taken seriously. The accounts were undramatic. That's the first thing that struck me. These weren't ghost stories, there was no performance in them. They read like maintenance logs. 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 I had stripped the previous afternoon. Hospital corners done properly. Better than I would have done it myself. A night manager in nineteen fifty nine. Music audible in the concert hall at two in the morning. Music stopped as I inserted the key. Part two Backstage After the archives, the PR contact took me through the parts of the hotel most guests never see. The kitchen first. The Stanley's kitchen has been running since nineteen oh nine. Updated over the decades, obviously, but the bones of it original. High ceilings, industrial everything. The kind of space that smells like a hundred years of meals even when nothing is cooking. You breathe in there and you're breathing something accumulated, something the walls have been holding on to. The chef's name was Marcus, nine years at the Stanley. He had the particular economy of movement that belongs to people who spend their working lives in tight professional spaces. Nothing wasted, nothing performed. He showed me around without narration. This is where we receive cold storage, the prep line. Off season the kitchen runs on a skeleton crew, two line cooks for dinner, one for breakfast, Marcus overseeing it all. The contrast between the kitchen's 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, he said, 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. September, he said, then first week of September. Then quieter, though some nights it doesn't feel like it. I asked what he meant. He looked at me with the same expression Rita would use later that afternoon, not amused, not theatrical, just weighing something, deciding how much to give me. He said Equipment runs sometimes, off hours, not malfunctioning, just running. Like somebody's in here. We've had it checked, nothing wrong with any of it. He showed me a door at the back of the kitchen, heavy, old, leading down to the basement mechanical spaces below. I don't go down there after ten o'clock, he said. That's not a rule anybody made. It's just something I decided. I asked him why. He looked at the door for a moment. The way you look at something you've made a private arrangement with. Like the tunnel was deciding what to do with what I'd given it before it returned it. The carriage house, original to the nineteen oh nine campus, the dimensions of a space built to house Stanley steamer automobiles that shuttled guests up from the train depots in Loveland and Longmont. It still knew what it was built for, you could feel it in the proportions. Each space the same story. Fully operating infrastructure running at reduced capacity. A machine built for one scale operating at another. That image stayed with me through the rest of the afternoon. A machine built for one scale, operating at another, for reasons of its own. Part three. Here's what I've come to believe. Kubrick made a masterpiece. Technically flawless. The framing, the steady cam work, the way he uses symmetry and space to produce unease. As a film it's extraordinary. But it gets the horror wrong. King has said this himself. From the moment Jack Nicholson appears, Jack Torrance is already gone. There's no fall. The Overlook doesn't do anything to him because there's nothing left to do. We already know how the movie is going to end. In the book, Jack Torrance is worth saving. That's the whole point. He's a recovering alcoholic who loves his family and is trying to be a better version of himself. The Overlook exploits him. That's a tragedy. The ninety seven miniseries got that right. Watch it after you read the book. See the Kubrick film if you want. Just see it as a Kubrick film, not as the Shining. I say all of this because walking this building for two days had clarified something for me. The overlook in the novel is frightening because it targets the self destruction Jack's been fighting. It doesn't create the impulses, it finds and exploits them. As I walked around the Stanley, I couldn't help but wonder what it might find in a man who makes his living looking at strangeness and in most cases explaining it away. A man who was finding the strangeness of recent events harder to explain than usual. Because some things are hard to explain. It was probably the altitude and the isolation and the imagination of a man in a large lonely building in November. Probably. Rita I found Rita in the third floor linen room mid afternoon, folding towels with the focused efficiency of someone who has done this so many times it no longer requires conscious attention. twenty two years at the Stanley. She gave me fifteen minutes and she didn't waste any of them. 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, she said. I asked what happened there. She said two years ago, November, about this time of year, I was doing the evening turndown on the occupied rooms. Three rooms had guests. I'd done two of them, and I was coming out of the linen closet at the end of the corridor when I 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, grey hair up, long dress, not a nightgown, a dress, the kind nobody wears anymore. She came out of four hundred 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, Rita's voice was matter of fact. She wasn't there. Like somebody turned off a light. One second she was walking, next second the corridor was empty. I asked what she did. I finished the turndown service. She folded another towel. Checked four hundred twelve, empty. Reported it to the night manager as a possible unauthorized guest. He logged it, nothing came of it. I asked if it frightened her. She thought about that for a moment. It confused me, she said. 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, set a towel on the shelf. The ones who should be frightened are the ones who come up here wanting the hotel to perform for them. The ghost tour energy. A woman alone with a book who looked up once, held my eye for a moment that went about two seconds too long, and looked back down. The dining room felt larger with fewer people in it. Not in a mathematical way, in the way of a room returning to its natural state. Like the guests were the anomaly, like the empty tables were what the room was actually for. The desk clerk came through once during dinner, not the one from check in, the younger man covering the evening shift, and paused at the edge of the room, looked at the occupied tables, counted them, made a note on a small pad, moved on. Professional, unhurried, doing what the hotel required. I watched him do it, and I thought that's what the building does too. Counts, notes, continues. After dinner I walked. The building was different on the second evening, not dramatically, subtly, the way a person is different on the second day you know them. Not changed, but more fully themselves, less on display. The performance of hospitality thinning slightly, the building underneath it showing through. I went to the concert hall tunnel, stood in it for a few minutes, said something into the dark, and listened to my voice come back off the stone, that same quality from the afternoon, the tunnel deciding what to return to me and what to keep. Thought about the night manager in fifty nine who heard a waltz at two in the morning and recognized it from his grandmother's piano. Whether the recognition made it better, whether being able to name a thing helps when the thing has no business being there. I stood there in that below grade corridor with the rest of the building above me, and the mountain above that. And I thought about what this building might find in me, given enough time. What the inventory of Wallace Cole looked like from the hotel's side of the ledger. The reasonable explanations I've reached for in a hundred difficult places, the framework I carry everywhere. What it looks like from outside that framework, from somewhere old and patient and operating, watching a man work very hard to stay on the sensible side of things. The building was not performing for me. It was operating. And I had become part of its count. Part six Night two I went to bed at ten thirty. I slept. I woke at twelve forty with the certainty that someone had just left the room. Not a sound, just 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 left it, even when you didn't hear them go. Something in the air, something in the temperature. The way the dark sits differently. Lamp on. Check the room, check the bathroom. Door dead bolted the way I'd left it. Everything in order. Notebook open on the desk exactly where I'd left it. Lamp off. Inventory. Second night, unfamiliar building, the mind still mapping new acoustics, flagging sounds for review. Nothing flagged correctly. Back to sleep. Woke at 151, same certainty. Room empty, door locked. Filed it, back to sleep. And then, at 217. Suddenly, eyes open, fully present. The way you wake when something has changed in the room. And there was a pressure. Not pain, a heaviness. The kind that sits on your chest when you're not fully out of sleep, except I was fully out of sleep. I was completely awake, and the pressure was there anyway, sitting on me like the room itself had decided to get closer. I've experienced sleep paralysis once, in my twenties, after a period of extreme sleep deprivation. I know what it feels like. The heaviness, the sense of something present, the complete and convincing feeling of not being alone. You list the possible explanations in order of likelihood. You hold on to the most reasonable one. You breathe carefully. You wait for your pulse to settle. I ran the inventory. I lay there and I listed every reasonable explanation, and I held on to all of them, the whole reasonable stack, and none of them changed what I was looking at. You know the feeling of a door you've locked a hundred times in the same house, and one night you check it, and it's locked, and you walk away, and then you go back and check it again. Not because you think it's unlocked, because something in you won't accept the answer. That's where I was. I got up. The floor was cold through my socks. The room at that hour had a specific compressed quality. Not dark exactly, the curtains holding some gray ambient glow from outside, but close, like the air had thickened while I was lying in it. Like the room had been doing something while I was asleep and hadn't quite finished when I woke up. I crossed to the bathroom door, stood in front of it, put my hand on the handle. And here is what I hadn't told you yet. The light under the door wasn't steady. It was moving. Not flickering. Not the random pulse of a failing bulb or a loose fixture. Moving. The way light moves when something is passing between the source and the floor. Slow, deliberate. Back and forth. Like someone pacing. I've got pixes on I open the door. Empty. Ordinary. The single overhead bulb burning for no reason I could determine. Toiletries in their places, towels on the rack, the tile floor cold even through my socks. The mirror showing me exactly what I did not want to see at two hundred seventeen in the morning, which was just myself, a man in a hotel room at the Stanley, pale and awake and gripping a door handle a little harder than necessary. I stood in the doorway for a moment, turned the light off, stood in the dark, listened. The radiators ticking in the walls, the wind outside low and patient, the particular silence of a building that is not actually silent, that is, in fact, full of the sounds of its own operation, but that has nothing in it that belongs to another person. Nothing. I went back to bed. I did not sleep for a long time. Part seven The Hallway Around three in the morning I gave up on sleep and got up to walk. The fourth floor corridor at three in the morning in a nearly empty off season hotel is a particular experience. Lighting at half power, yellow and institutional, the carpet swallowing every sound so that your own footsteps disappear the moment you make them. You're moving through the building without leaving any noise of it behind you. And that has a quality I'm not sure I can fully describe. Like the building is erasing your passage as you go. Like it doesn't want a record of you being here. No other guests visible, no staff, just the long corridor and the closed doors on both sides, and the radiators ticking in the walls on their own schedule. Like walking through a building that has stopped pretending it's there for you. I walked the full length twice, checked the stairwell, looked out the window at the end of the hall at the parking lot below, three cars, the mountain behind them, snow on the peaks lit faintly by whatever light the overcast sky was holding on to. A world out there that was cold and still and indifferent in the way that large natural things are indifferent, and somehow that indifference was a relief after the specific close attention of the room I'd come from. On my way back I passed room two hundred seventeen. The door was open. Not wide, an inch, maybe two, just ajar, a thin line of warm light at the edge, not the sharp white of an overhead light. Soft amber, bedside lamp. No sound from inside, no television, no voices, no movement. I stopped. You know what the desk clerk had told me the night before when I'd asked, casual, like it had just occurred to me, whether two hundred seventeen was occupied. That room's been empty all week. I walked toward the door. Slowly, not with the energy of someone investigating, with the energy of someone who has decided to look at something they're not entirely sure they want to see. Ten feet away I stopped again. The lamp glowed through the gap, the edge of the bed, white linens, just visible, a shadowed interior, nothing moving. I stood there. And then it moved. Not dramatically, not swung open, not slammed. The door moved another inch, slowly, deliberately, the way a door moves when someone on the other side has shifted their weight. When someone sitting on the edge of a bed has leaned slightly forward and the change in the floor's pressure changed the air in the room, and the door answered that. Because something was. And it had just, very deliberately, very quietly, told me it was done with the conversation. Part eight morning I came down to breakfast at eight. The specific tiredness that comes from a night where sleep was less rest than a series of interruptions between long periods of lying very still and thinking very carefully. The kind of tired that lives behind your eyes. The desk clerk from the evening shift was still there, apparently covering for someone who hadn't come in. He brought me coffee without being asked. Patient Operational A machine built for one scale, running at another, for reasons of its own. Something in this building keeps working after hours. Wallace Cole Episode two close I've told you what I can tell you about night two. I've given you the reasonable explanations alongside the things I experienced. I've tried to be careful about the difference between what I know and what I inferred and what I simply could not account for. The bathroom light, the light that moved, the corners at two hundred seventeen, the door in the corridor that closed itself on a room that had been empty all week. None of those things require a supernatural explanation. Sleep paralysis is real. Altitude does things to the mind. Old buildings have old HVAC systems and old pressure dynamics and old doors that move on their own schedules. I know all of that. What I also know is that by the morning of day three, the explanations were costing me something. The effort of maintaining them, of holding the framework in place against the accumulating weight of small, specific, inexplicable things, had become noticeable. They're a big part of the stuff that scares me.