Room 217: The Hotel that Wrote 'The Shining'

In Episode 6 of Really Scary Real Estate, Amanda goes deep inside the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado, the most famous haunted hotel in America. Covering the full story of inventor Freelan Oscar Stanley and how tuberculosis led him to build one of the most beautiful mountain hotels in the West, the 1911 gas explosion that started the haunting of room 217, the October 1974 night Stephen King checked in and had the nightmare that became The Shining, and a room-by-room tour of every documented paranormal location in the building, from the fourth floor children's corridor to Flora Stanley's piano to the underground tunnels where something breathes in your ear in the dark. Plus the real estate story behind the hotel's $400 million acquisition in 2025.  

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Transcript

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It is October 30th, 1974. You are in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado at 7,500 feet above sea level. The air is thin and sharp and cold in a way that gets inside your chest. Outside the season is ending. The aspens have gone bare. The roads are beginning to ice at night. You are standing in the dining room of a Grand Mountain hotel. The tables around you are all set. White linen, silver, the full formal arrangement. But every chair is turned upside down on its table. The room is completely empty. Prerecorded orchestra music is playing somewhere above your head, coming from speakers you cannot see, filling the empty room with the sound of a party that ended long ago. You are the only guest in the building. You are the only guest who has been in the building for days. The hotel closes for winter tomorrow. There is one housekeeper, one bartender. That is the entire staff. After dinner you walk the hallways, 142 rooms, corridor after corridor of closed doors. The carpet absorbs your footsteps. You cannot hear yourself move. And then somewhere down a hallway you cannot see the end of. You hear a child calling out to someone. You turn around. The hallway is empty. You go back to your room, room two seventeen, you get into bed, you lie in the dark and listen to the wind come off of the mountain, and somewhere between waking and sleep, a nightmare begins. A fire hose on the wall comes alive and it goes after your son. You wake up in a cold sweat, you go to the balcony, you light a cigarette, you stand in the dark at 7,500 feet, and you let the nightmare keep running in your head. Because something about it feels important. Something about this building feels like it has been waiting for you. The man standing on the balcony was Stephen King, and the book he was started writing that night would become The Shining. And the building that gave it to him has never been the same. Welcome to Really Scary Real Estate. I'm Amanda Janae, and today we are going inside the Stanley Hotel. Really Scary Real Estate where haunted history meets property values. Every week I dig into the dark side of real estate, the hauntings, the histories, the disclosures nobody wants to make, and the people brave enough to sign on the dotted line anyway. I'm Amanda Janae. Let's get into it. And the story of how this hotel came to exist is stranger than anything that has happened inside it. Freelan Oscar Stanley, known as F.O., was born on June 1st, 1849 in Kingsfield, Maine. He and his identical twin brother, Francis Edgar, came from a modest family. Their father was a farmer and a teacher, but F.O. and Francis grew up with the gift of making things, literally making things with their hands from scratch. At nine years old, they opened their first business selling maple sugar. At ten, they were making toy violins. Their great uncle had been a luthier and a craft ran in the family. As adults, the Stanley Twins became serious inventors. Their first major commercial success was the Stanley dry plate process, a method for coating glass plates used in photography that made the plates cheaper, higher quality, and longer lasting than anything previously available. The Stanley dry plate became so dominant in the photography market that in 1904, Eastman Kodak paid them $540,000 for the rights. That is the equivalent of more than $17 million today. The twins were set for life. And then they turned their attention to automobiles. In the late 1890s, the Stanley Brothers designed and built a steam-powered automobile, the Stanley Steamer. In 1898 and 1899 alone, they sold 200 of them, more than any other American automobile manufacturer in those two years. They set a land speed record in 1906 of 127 miles per hour and a steam-powered car. In 1899, F.O. and his wife, Flora, drove one of their Stanley steamers to the summit of Mount Washington in New Hampshire, the highest peak in the Northeast. At the time, it was believed to be impossible for any vehicle to make that climb. F.O. Stanley was not a man who believed in limits. In 1903, F.O. was 53 years old and he had tuberculosis, a severe reoccurrence of an illness that had plagued him for years. His doctor told him not to make plans beyond six months. Tuberculosis in 1903 was not a disease you recovered from. It was a disease you managed on your way to dying. The recommended treatment of the error was clean, dry air and mountain sunlight. So F.O. and Flora traveled west to Colorado, arriving in Denver in March of 1903 with F.O. Stanley's steamer arriving via a rail a month later. On the recommendation of a physician named Dr. Sherman Grant Bonney, they made their way to Estes Park, Colorado, in June and settled into a friend's cabin. By the end of that summer, F.O. Stanley had gained weight, his cough had subsided, his energy had returned. The mountaineer had done what his doctors could not. The man who had been told he had six months to live walked out of that Colorado summer healthier than he had been in years. He lived to 91. Overjoyed and overwhelmed by what SS Park had given him, FO made a decision he would return every summer for the rest of his life. But the little mountain town, charming as it was, lacked the sophistication that he and Flora were accustomed to. There was no grand hotel, no concert hall, no infrastructure worthy of the upper class East Coast society they lived in. So he decided to build one. First, he needed the land. The best land in the valley had been claimed years earlier by a man named Windham Thomas Wyndham Quinn, the fourth Earl of Dunraven, an Anglo Irish nobleman who had arrived in the Estes Valley in the 1870s and claimed 15,000 acres in what amounted to a flagrant abuse of the Homestead Act and preemption rights. He had tried to turn the entire valley into a private hunting preserve. The local ranchers hated him. When he finally gave up and left in 1884, he was not mourned. F.O. Stanley purchased the land from Dunraven's representatives in 1908. One of his early ideas was to name the hotel the Dunraven in honor of the previous landowner. The local signed to petition 180 names on a piece of buckskin, asking him to name it for himself instead. He did. Construction began in 1907. FO worked with Denver architect T. Robert Wigner on a Georgian revival design. White clapboard siding, soaring ceilings, a main staircase that commands the lobby like something out of a different century. The main building in the concert hall was completed in 1909. The materials came from across the region, lumber harvested from the surrounding forests, granite quarried near the confluence of the local rivers, non-local materials brought by rail, and then by mule-drawn wagon up the mountain. The hotel opened on July 4th, 1909, and it was unlike anything anyone in Estes Park has ever seen. It had electricity, running water, indoor plumbing, a telephone in every room. In a remote mountain valley in 1909, those were extraordinary luxuries. Evo has built a hydroelectric plant in the mountains to power the hotel, then extended that electricity to the entire town of Estes Park. He also built water pipe systems that brought running water down from the mountains and extended those to the town as well. The Rockefellers stayed at the Stanley, Teddy Roosevelt stayed at the Stanley, the unsinkable Molly Brown, survivor of the Titanic, stayed at the Stanley. There was one thing the Stanley Hotel did not have when it opened. Heat. FO had designed it as a summer resort only, and the heat was not part of the original plan. The hotel would not have central heating until 1979. For 70 years, the only warmth in the building came from fireplaces on the first floor. Imagine spending October in that building at 7,500 feet, no heat, wind coming down off the mountains, 142 rooms, and outside, winter beginning to close in. That is the building Stephen King walked into on October 30th, 1974. Here is something most people don't know about the Stanley Hotel. Stephen King did not create the haunting. The haunting was already there. Reports of strange phenomena at the Stanley Hotel date back to its earliest years of operation, and the building's paranormal reputation has its own history that begins long before King's October night in room 217. The land itself, before the Stanley existed, before F.O. Stanley arrived, before Lord Dunraven tried to claim the valley, before the first settlers reached Estes Park, the Ute and the Arapeho peoples lived and moved through this land. The valley was sacred to them. It was a place of healing, of ceremony, of spiritual significance. When settlers arrived, that history did not disappear. It went underground, and the land, according to those who study these things, carried it forward. The hotel is built on a high concentration of limestone and quartz, both minerals that some researchers and investigators believe amplify or conduct paranormal energy in ways that other geological formations do not. Whether you believe that or not, it is a fact that the Stanley's paranormal activity is reported throughout the entire property, not just in one or two rooms. It's throughout the building. Two years after the hotel opened, on the night of June 25th, 1911, a severe storm rolled through Estes Park. The flood it brought knocked out the power to the entire valley, including the Stanley's hydroelectric plant. F. O. Stanley arranged for the acetylene lanterns to be distributed to every room in the hotel so guests would not be left in the dark. The head chambermaid, a woman named Elizabeth Wilson, was assigned to go room by room, lighting the lanterns. She was efficient, experienced, professional. She had been with the Stanley since it opened. When she reached room two hundred seventeen, something was wrong that she could not see. Gas had been leaking into the room, an invisible accumulation filling the space from floor to ceiling, undetectable by smell in the dark. Elizabeth Wilson walked into room two hundred seventeen with a lit candle. The explosion that followed tore through the southwest wing of the hotel. An observer on the property reported seeing a bathtub launched into the air. Approximately 10% of the hotel structure was damaged, and Elizabeth Wilson was blasted through the floor of room 217, falling directly into the dining room on the floor below. She survived. She recovered. She returned to work in 1913. And she continued to work at the Stanley Hotel until 1950. Elizabeth Wilson worked at the Stanley Hotel for nearly four decades after nearly being killed by it. And when she died of natural causes years later, she apparently did not leave. Room 217 has been one of the most reported paranormal locations at the Stanley ever since. Guests who stay there, and the room books weeks in advance consistently report the same experience. They return from dinner or from the bar or from a ghost tour and find their belongings rearranged, luggage unpacked, clothing folded, placed in drawers, personal items moved from where they were left. Not in a frightening way, in a careful way, attentive way. As if someone who worked in hotels for 40 years had simply continued doing what she always did. Guests have also reported the lights turning on and off in the room without explanation. The faucets running on their own, a sense of presence beside the bed at night, and multiple guests have reported, independently, waking to find the bed covers being adjusted, tucked more tightly around them by hands. They cannot see. Elizabeth Wilson apparently is still making her rounds. When the Stanley Hotel operated as a summer resort in its early decades, wealthy families came for the season. Entire households traveled together, parents, children, nannies, servants, and in that era children were, as they said, to be seen and not heard. The adults occupied the grand public rooms and the lower floors. The nannies were housed on the fourth floor. The children ate in a separate windowless room apart from the adults. The fourth floor of the Stanley Hotel is, by the weight of reported evidence over more than a hundred years, the most paranormally active area in the building. And the most common reports from the fourth floor are not of shadows or figures or cold spots. They are of children. Guests staying on the fourth floor have been awoken by the sound of children running in the hallway. The specific, unmistakable sound of small feet moving quickly across carpeted floors. The sound of laughter. The words just out of reach. When they open their door, the hallway is empty. This has been reported for decades by guests who were not aware of the hotel's reputation before they arrived. By guests who specifically did not believe in ghosts and had no expectation of experiencing anything unusual. By staff who had worked the fourth floor for years and stopped being surprised by it. Stephen King heard children in the hallway on the night he stayed at the Stanley. This was before the hotel became famous, before the ghost tours, before the reputation solidified into what it is today. He reported hearing a child calling out to someone, a nanny, perhaps, on the second floor corridor. He turned around. The hallway was empty. He put it in the book. Wyndham Thomas Wyndham Quinn, the Lord Dunraven, never set foot in the Stanley Hotel. He sold the land before it was built and left Colorado years before F.O. Stanley broke round. He died in Ireland in 1926, without ever having visited the building that stands on the land he once claimed. And yet, 401 at the Stanley Hotel is reportedly haunted by him. Lord Dunraven's presence in room 401 is one of the most frequently reported paranormal claims at the hotel, and one of the most specific. Multiple guests have described seeing a man and in Victorian-era clothing standing in the corner of the room near the bathroom door. Witnesses have asked directly whether the presence would respond, and the lights in that corner have reportedly turned on and off an apparent response to those requests. In one documented account, a couple told the presence they were aware of it would only be staying two nights and asked if it would please not disturb them. And the activity in the room subsided for the rest of their stay. Women staying in the room 401 have reported being touched inappropriately, forcefully, by something they could not see. The accounts are specific enough and consistent enough that the hotel's tour guides address room 401 with particular emphasis. The Ghost Hunter's television crew, during their investigation of the property, identified room 401 as their most active location. Why Dunraven would be in a hotel he never visited on land he was forced to give up, and a building that was built by a man who represented everything he failed to keep? That is a question I genuinely cannot answer. But the reports are there, and they are consistent, and Lord Dunraven apparently is a man who does not leave places gracefully. It is October 30th, 1974. Stephen King is 27 years old. His first novel, Carrie, was published earlier that year. He is working on a new project, a massive book. Called the Stand and living in Boulder, Colorado, about an hour south of Estes Park. He and his wife Tabitha decided to take a weekend away from their children. They drive north into the mountains. The season is late, the roads are getting bad. They find themselves in Estes Park looking for a place to stay. And there, on the hill above the town, is the Stanley Hotel. They pulled in. The hotel was closing for the winter the next day. There were no other guests. The staff had been reduced to a skeleton crew, a housekeeper and a bartender. King would later recall that when they asked at the front desk if they could check in, there was a long pause before anyone answered. They were given room two seventeen. They went to dinner in the dining room. Every chair in the room was upside down on the table except for theirs. Orchestral music played overhead from somewhere unseen. King and his wife ate their meal in complete silence, surrounded by upturned chairs and a dining room designed to hold hundreds of guests entirely alone. After dinner King walked the hallways. In interviews over the years he had described the hotel in that state empty, end of season, the winter closing in as genuinely unnerving in a way he was not prepared for. Not frightening exactly, more like oppressive, like the building had a weight to it that had nothing to do with architecture, like the past was present in a way that the unusual noise and activity of a full hotel keeps you from noticing. He heard a child calling out somewhere on the second floor. He turned. Nobody there. He went back to room two hundred seventeen. He and Tapitha got into bed, and that night Stephen King had the nightmare. A fire hose on the wall of the hotel corridor came alive, it uncoiled, and it went after his three year old son Danny, who ran screaming down the empty hallway trying to get away from it. King woke up suddenly to his heart pounding. He sat at the edge of the bed for a moment, then he went to the balcony and lit a cigarette and stood in the dark, while the rocky mountain sat enormous and indifferent in front of him. And in that space, between the nightmare and the cigarette, in the cold air at seventy five hundred feet, the entire story assembled itself. A man, a hotel, a sun with a gift for sensing things the man cannot, an isolation that becomes madness. A building that is alive in some way the buildings are not supposed to be. He went back inside and started writing notes. The Shining was published in 1977. It dedicated more than 500 pages to the story of the Torrance family and the Overlook Hotel, a fictional property that borrows its bones from the Stanley, but grew into something specific to King's imagination. The Stanley is not the Overlook, but the Overlook could not have existed without the Stanley. Stanley Kubrick directed the 1980 film adaptation starring Jack Nicholson. Kubrick did not film at the Stanley. He built his Overlook on a sound stage in England, borrowing visual elements from various American hotels, including the Timberline Lodge in Oregon from exterior shots, and the Alwani Hotel in Yosemite from some interior details. In the film, the infamous haunted room number was changed from 217 to 237, reportedly because the owners of the Timberline Lodge, which was used for exterior shots, worried that Guest would refuse to book room 217 if the film made it famous. The Stanley, of course, had the opposite problem. After the film, Guest specifically requested room 217, and it became the most booked room in the hotel. King himself has said he preferred the 1997 television administration adaptation, which he wrote himself and which actually filmed at the Stanley Hotel. It is the only screen version set in the real building. Room 217 appears on the screen. The hallways appear on the screen, the staircase, the ballroom, the concert hall, they are all there, visible, recognizable. The Stanley Hotel plays the uncut, R-rated version of the 1980 Kubrick film on a continuous 24 hour loop on the in-room television in every single guest room. Not just in the haunted rooms, not just near Halloween, and every room all the time you can check in on a Tuesday in March and turn on the television, and Jack Nicholson is already there waiting. That is a hotel that has made peace with what it is. The Stanley Hotel had been investigated by ghost hunters, ghost adventurers, my ghost story, paranormal witness, and dozens of independent paranormal research teams over the past three decades. What I want to do in the segment is walk you through the building the way a ghost tour would, but slower with more detail, and let you build your own picture of what is actually being reported there. Room 217, Elizabeth Wilson's room. We have already talked about Elizabeth Wilson and the explosion of 1911, but I want to give you the full picture of what is reported in this room because it goes beyond luggage being unpacked. Room 217 is on the second floor of the main building in the southwest corner, the corner that was most damaged by the 1911 explosion. The room has been renovated many times over the course of more than a century. Nothing physical remains from Wilson's era, but guests report phenomena so consistently that the Stanley has essentially built a tradition around it. Beyond the unpacked luggage, which is the most commonly reported and most benign experience, guests have described hearing a woman humming in the room when they are alone, feeling someone sit on the edge of the bed in the night, finding personal items moved to locations where they clearly were not placed. One guest reported finding all of their shoes arranged neatly in a row in the closet, toes facing outward when they had left them scattered near the door. A couple staying in the room reported that they had been arguing before they went to sleep. They woke up with their bed covers arranged differently than they had placed them, pulled up more tightly around both of them, separately, as if someone had come to each side of the bed and tucked them in. The argument, they said, felt different in the morning, less sharp. Several guests have reported that being woken by the smell of lavender, a scent associated with Elizabeth Wilson by the hotel's historical records. Stephen King stayed in 217. He requested 217 specifically for his return visit to the Stanley decades later. He has said in interviews that something about the room sits differently in his memory than any other hotel room he has ever occupied. He is not a man who says things like that lightly. The fourth floor, the children's floor. We covered the general phenomenon of the children on the fourth floor earlier. But I want to go room by room here because the reports from specific rooms on the fourth floor are some of the most detailed and consistent in the building. Room 407. Multiple guests have reported waking in the night to the sensation of being tucked into bed. Covers pulled up, adjusted, smoothed by an unseen presence. Others have felt someone sit on the foot of the bed and switched on the light to find an indentation on the mattress that remained for several seconds before fading. In one reported account, a man woke to see a figure standing near the bathroom door, a woman in period clothing. He asked if she was there. She was gone before he could finish the question. Room four hundred eighteen. The room receives the most reports of children's activities specifically. Guests have heard children's voices coming from inside the room, not the hallway, but the room itself. When they are the only occupant, the sound of small feet on the floor, the sensation of a small hand touching their arm in the night. One guest reported waking to find that several items on the desk have been rearranged in a pattern, a circle with the smallest items in the center, that she said looked like something a child might do. Room 428, the cowboy room. Several guests have reported waking to see the figure of a man in cowboy attire standing over the bed, or standing in the corner near the window, watching them sleep. The figure by all accounts does not interact and does not threaten. He simply watches. There are no rooms above room 428, no floor above at all, and yet multiple guests in 428 have reported hearing footsteps and furniture moving directly overhead, above a ceiling that has nothing above it but sky. The Grand Staircase, the Vortex. The main lobby staircase at the Stanley Hotel is one of the most visually dramatic features of the building. It rises from the center of the lobby, splits into two flights at the first landing, and carries guests up through the heart of the building. The palladium window above the landing floods it with the mountain light in the morning. It is the kind of architectural feature that stops people mid-stride. Investigators and tour guides refer to the area around the staircase as the vortex. The theory, and this is a paranormal theory, so take it for what you will, is that the staircase area functions as a kind of spiritual transit hub. The mirrors in the lobby, positioned to face each other, create what some investigators describe as an infinite reflection corridor that allows spirits to move through the building rapidly. The energy here is described as unusually active, unusually concentrated. Photographs taken at the top of the staircase had produced some of the most widely circulated alleged paranormal images from the Stanley. A figure at the top of the stairs, a woman in a full-length image and period clothing, appears in a photograph taken by a guest during a tour. The room was confirmed empty. The guide was behind the photographer. The figure is clear enough that it has been analyzed by multiple independent researchers, none of whom have produced a definitive non-paranormal explanation. Flora Stanley, FO's wife, the woman whom the concert hall was built, the woman who played piano there for the guests of the hotel's golden age, is reportedly the figure most commonly associated with the staircase. Guests and staff have reported seeing a woman in Victorian dress on the landing at top of the stairs, looking down at the lobby, as if watching over a party she hosted a century ago. The concert hall, Flora's piano. FO Stanley built the concert hall in 1909 as a gift for Flora. She was an avid pianist despite a progressive loss of vision in her later years, and he wanted her to have a proper stage for her music. The hall somewhat resembles Boston Symphony Hall in its interior proportions, elegant, acoustically intentional, designed for music to fill it completely. Flora Stanley is reported to still be playing. Guests and staff have heard piano music coming from the concert hall when the hall is confirmed empty and locked. The sound of piano keys moving, not a recording, not music from another room, but the actual mechanical sound of piano keys being depressed, has been reported on multiple occasions when no one is in the building. Several people have reported actually seeing a woman seated at the piano bench in the concert hall, playing, and assumed she was a guest or a performer, only to realize as they got closer that she was not fully solid, that there was something wrong with the way the light moved through her, that she was not quite there in the way that people are supposed to be there, and then she was gone. A former employee of the hotel, not a ghost tour guide, not someone in the business of amplifying the paranormal reputation, told investigators that she had passed the concert hall late at night more than once and heard music playing inside. She had gone to investigate. The hall was always empty, always locked, the piano was always silent, but the music had been real. She was certain of it. A second ghost associated with the concert hall is a man named Paul. Paul was a former employee of the hotel, a utility worker, someone who covered whatever tasks needed doing. One of his responsibilities was enforcing an 11 p.m. curfew for guests. Guests who linger in the concert hall late at night have reported hearing a disembodied voice telling them to get out. The voice is described as male, authoritative, and not particularly friendly about it. Paul apparently takes his curfew enforcement seriously from beyond the grave. There's also Lucy. Lucy was a homeless woman who sought refuge in the concert hall, sleeping there on cold nights when she had nowhere else to go. At some point Lucy died. The records are unclear on when or how. She associated with the concert hall by investigators who had reported a gentle, sad female presence in the building. Not threatening, not active. Just still there, still taking shelter. The underground tunnels. Beneath the Stanley Hotel runs a network of caves and underground passages. Tunnels that were used by staff and workers to move around the property without being seen by guests. The tunnels connected the main building to the outbuildings. They run beneath the grounds in the dark, low ceiling, smelling of stone and mountain earth. The tunnels are the final stop on the Stanley Late Night Ghost Tour. They are not accessible to the general public without a guide. What is reported in the tunnels is different from the rest of the hotel. The activity in the main building is by and large benign. The feeling of an old place that has kept its people. The tunnels feels different. Darker in the literal sense, obviously, but also in the experiential sense. Investigators describe a heaviness down there that is absent in the rooms above. Cold spots that do not correspond to any ventilation or geological explanation. The sound of movement and passages that have been confirmed empty. On multiple occasions, reported by different investigators in different visits over many years, the sound of someone breathing very close to your ear in the absolute dark when you are confirmed to be alone. The tunnels are where guests most frequently report physical sensations. Being touched, being grabbed, feeling a hand on their shoulder. The hotel's guides are trained to keep groups together in the tunnels for exactly this reason. People get disoriented, people get frightened, and people run. Whatever is in the tunnels beneath the Stanley Hotel, it is not giving tours. FO Stanley himself. So Freelan Oscar Stanley died in 1940 at 91 years old of a heart attack in Newton, Massachusetts. He and Flora are both buried in Maine. His aberration has been reported at the Stanley Hotel since the 1940s. Guests and staff had reported seeing a tall, distinguished man in Edwardian-era clothing in the lobby on the staircase, in the billiard room, the Pennon Room, which was originally a smoking and billiards room for male guests only, where no women were permitted for the first 35 years of the hotel's operation. F. O. Stanley, by all accounts, loved this hotel. He spent money on it freely. He once said, I come out here in the spring and bring $30,000 and I go back in the fall with $10,000 or $15,000. The hotel never made a profit during his ownership. He did not care. He built it for joy, for flora, for the value that has saved his life. He gave it everything. It is not difficult knowing that to understand why he might still be in it. The real estate. First, in May of 2025, the Stanley Hotel was acquired by the Stanley Partnership for Art, Culture, and Education. And it's a public-private partnership involving the Colorado Educational and Cultural Facilities Authority. For $400 million, this is one of the largest historic hospitality transactions in Colorado history. The new ownership structure is designed to preserve the hotel's historic character and public accessibility while funding the restoration and ongoing operation of the building. Second, that $400 million acquisition price was built almost entirely on the back of a single overnight stay in 1974. Stephen King checked in on October 30th. He had a nightmare. Value. Third, room 217, the most requested, most booked, most written about room in the building, commands a premium rate of $400 to $500 per night and books weeks in advance year-round. The room that Elizabeth Wilson was nearly killed in, the room that Stephen King had his nightmare in, the room that Jack Nicholson made famous in the Kubrick film, except not really because Kubrick changed the number to 237, but room 217 is a revenue generating machine built on a gas explosion in 1911 and the horror novelist Insomnia in 1974. That is all I have to say about the real estate today. The building deserves the rest of the time. The Stanley Hotel is not haunted in the way that Amityville is haunted or the La Lauri Mansion is haunted. There is no tragedy at the core of this building. Nobody was murdered here. Nobody was tortured here. The worst thing that happened here was an accidental gas explosion that injured a woman who then returned to work and spent 40 more years in the building she had almost died in. The Stanley's haunting, if it is a haunting, is something closer to loyalty. Evo Stanley built the hotel in gratitude to a valley that saved his life. He poured money into it for decades. He electrified an entire mountain town because his hotel needed power. He brought water down from the mountains because his hotel needed water. He built a concert hall for his wife. He turned a rustic summer retreat into one of the finest hotels in the American West. And he did all of it not to make money. It never made money, but because he loved it. Flora Stanley played piano in a concert hall her husband built for her, for guests she welcomed as friends, in a valley where the air was so clean and so cold and full of mountain light that had brought her husband back from the edge of dying. Of course, she's still playing. Elizabeth Wilson worked at the Stanley for nearly 40 years after the explosion that almost killed her. She came back, she chose to come back to the room that blew her through the floor, and she kept making beds and folding linens and adjusting covers until she was done. Of course, she is still tucking people in. Lord Dunraven is there too, apparently. Still bitter about the land he lost. Even the unpleasant ones stay. Yeah. Without hesitation, I would stay there in room 217 and I would leave my luggage slightly messy just to see what happens in the morning. I would sit in the concert hall at night and I would listen to as long as the listening took. I would walk the fourth floor corridor and I would let the children run. Some buildings hold their people. The Stanley Hotel is just one of them, and I think that it's worth the drive to Estes Park. That is episode six of Really Scary Real Estate. I'm Amanda Janae. The Stanley Hotel is at 333 East Wonderview Avenue in Estes Park, Colorado. It is open year-round. Ghost tours run nightly and book up. I would recommend reserving in advance, especially if you want room 217. All the booking links are in the show notes. Next week are we are going to Fall River, Massachusetts, population 89,000, a city that has been trying to move past one afternoon in August of 1892 for 130 years. Andrew Borden and his wife Abby were found hacked to death in their home on 2nd Street. Their daughter, Lizzie, was tried, acquitted, and never formally charged with any other crime. The case is technically still open. And the house where it happened is now a bed and breakfast where you can sleep in the room where Abby's body was found. Eat the same breakfast the Bordens had on the morning of the murders and throw an axe in the backyard. I'm not making that up. Subscribe so you don't miss it. And if today's episode made you want to book a room at the Stanley, leave a review first. It takes two minutes. It means everything to Independent Show. I will see you next Friday. So stay curious, okay? Stay skeptical and always, always read the full property history before you close on purchasing a house.