According to our tour guide Gabe, some guests enjoy The Stanley Hotel so much that they check in but never check out. He’s trying to creep us out, and he’ll have some success.

I’m on the 10 p.m. tour, which commenced in the hotel’s basement, right near the creepy underground tunnels and a mysteriously empty fish tank.

It’s a moonless night in Estes Park, so there’s no sign of the snow-capped ridges of Rocky Mountain National Park, 10 miles west and 8,000 feet above the front porch of the late Freelan Oscar “F.O.” Stanley’s legacy. But there will be plenty to see, even in the dark.

One fellow tourist is all geared up to detect spiritual emanations, brandishing her K-II EMF (Electromagnetic Field) Meter. The device looks like a TV remote, but it’s designed to measure ectoplasmic electromagnetic fields, and it displays the results in increments from 1.5 to 20+mG. Evidently ghosts are all about EMFs and photobombing, as we’ll see later in the tour.

Tour guide Gabe leads us along a dark sidewalk to a concert hall on the Stanley grounds. As we make our way inside, he pointedly avoids turning on the lights, for extra creepiness. We find our way into seats in the murky space, and then he tells us about a dozen spirits who may or may not be on the tour with us.

There’s Paul, who manifests as a shadow figure. And Dennis, so called because he is a mischievous menace. And Lord Dunraven, who guzzles sealed liquor bottles and lasciviously invites women to join him in room 401. (Don’t go!) Pierre, the Stanley streaker, nakedly haunts redheads. Our tour guide backs this up with photo evidence of each of these spirits, shared – he says – by tour guests just like ourselves!

He also points out that Bob Dylan once performed on that very stage behind him, which we can’t see very well, on account of the dark. But it does make you wonder: In the post-Dylan future, will the ghost of Bob go electric with an EMF supernova? And will his lyrics make more sense, or even less, from the great beyond?

 

The stanley hotel is the showplace of Estes Park – its structures resemble a series of fancy red and white hats dropped onto a ridge above downtown. You can’t miss it, unless you happen to be staring in the opposite direction, at the high-mountain highlights that have been drawing visitors from around the world to Estes Park for a century and a half.

F.O. Stanley opened the hotel in 1909; it has since added a dozen outbuildings, a spa and sauna, restaurants, wine and whiskey bars and surrounding labyrinths (more on that, later). Stanley was a polymath and renaissance man born in 1849, in Kingfield, Maine. He launched a maple-syrup business at age 9, and two years later learned to play, build and sell his own violins. After graduating Bowdoin College, he and his twin brother, Francis Edgar Stanley, packaged up protractors, compasses and other nerd necessities in the Stanley Practical Drawing Set.

Then, their factory burned down.

Undaunted, the brothers went on to revolutionize photography, developing dry plates that could register an image in minutes, sparing subjects an hours-long, stiffened pose. When they opened the Stanley Dry Plate Co. in Lewiston, Maine, the world’s photographers beat a path to their door. They made a million bucks a month in modern dollars, then sold to George Eastman, whose Eastman Kodak Co. brought photography to the masses.

For their next trick, the Stanley brothers thought: Let’s invent the motorcar! The brothers’ photo operation stood next to a bicycle factory. When Francis’ wife, Augusta, took a bike out for a spin, she tumbled into the street and swore never to mount that infernal contraption again. No worries, Francis said, I’ll build you a four-wheeled vehicle that doesn’t require balance to operate.

And he did: the famous, hand-cranked Stanley Steamer.

Cars soon ruled the road, but not the Stanley’s version. “The electric starter on the internal combustion engine knocked the wind out of their sails,” said James Pickering, author of the book Mr. Stanley of Estes Park. “Nobody wanted to fuss with cranking up that steam engine anymore.”

Even though Henry Ford’s Model T carried the day, the Stanley Steamer was around long enough to deliver the world to The Stanley Hotel.

It was lung disease that first brought F.O. Stanley to Estes Park. In his day, there was only one cure: Leave for higher ground. “F.O. was in the care of Sherwood Bonney, who vacationed in Estes Park,” Pickering said. “He could have sent the Stanleys anywhere, but he sent them there.”

F.O. and his wife, Flora, hopped the next westbound train from Newton, Massachusetts, to Lyons, then took the eight-hour horse-drawn carriage ride up Big Thompson Canyon. Estes Park town wasn’t much of a place – just low buildings below some very tall mountains. There wasn’t even a national park yet. But when F.O.’s health improved, he began breathing life into Estes Park.

 

Enter the stanley Home Museum after spending time in the lobby of Mr. Stanley’s hotel, and you just might have a creepy feeling of deja vu. Both buildings have the same curving balustrades framing a sweeping central staircase leading up to stunning stained-glass windows, and rooms left and right to welcome guests. It’s an architectural testament to one man’s love for his wife.

“Flora was F.O.’s alter ego,” said Nancy Thomas, an Estes Park resident who is writing a biography of Mrs. Stanley. Thomas is also the sister of James Pickering, the author of the F.O. Stanley biography.

Flora developed a degenerative eye disease, so it was convenient that both their home back east, and their 1904 house in Estes Park, were built from the same plans. Their hotel had a similar layout, but on a grander scale. Housekeepers were instructed not to move the furniture around, so that Flora could find her way.

The pair never produced offspring, but they did give birth to Estes Park as we now know it.

In the spirit of “if you build it, they will come,” Mr. Stanley created the town’s first power plant, water plant, golf course, library and even the town dump, according to Pickering. Meanwhile Flora was a founding member of the Estes Park Women’s Club, fundraising for the ideas she and her husband dreamed up.

That’s how Flora found herself in “gypsy” garb, in front of a crystal ball, dispensing fortunes to the townspeople in a leaking tent during a fundraising bazaar. She racked up a full $10.16 in the process and earned herself a lasting reputation. “There was quite a lot of that fortune-telling stuff going on at that time,” Thomas said. “She and F.O. had a good laugh over it.”

Thomas says Flora probably deserves a better representation. She was a graduate of Bates College, in Maine, back when few women attended college, met her husband while teaching school in Mechanic Falls, Maine, and was a concert-level pianist.

As they developed their summer home west of the hotel, on Wonderview Avenue, the Stanleys invited a hifalutin crowd back east to come out and breathe deeply. Theodore Roosevelt, John Phillips Sousa, the “Unsinkable” Molly Brown of Titanic fame, plus a full pen of Hollywood peacocks, would pass through The Stanley Hotel doors. Many of them arrived in specially outfitted Stanley Steamers autos, which cut transit time from Denver by eight hours and untold horse-watering stops.

Once the world noticed Estes Park, its fate as a vacation destination was sealed. Mr. Stanley personally backed efforts to create Rocky Mountain National Park in 1915 and supported the restoration of elk to their natural habitat in the high country.

In 1926, the Stanleys sold their stake in the hotel for $800,000, and bought it back out of bankruptcy in 1929, then resold it almost immediately.

F.O. Stanley missed the decline and near ruin of his hotel, dying in 1940, as he walked out to pick up his morning newspaper. Even as the hotel received a designation on the National Register of Historic Places, it operated without heat in winter.

 

It was into this riot of decay that a scruffy alcoholic writer, plus his wife and son, pulled up in front of the Stanley, looking for a place to stay for the night. They arrived in late October 1974, the hotel was about to close for the season, and staffers were vanishing for the winter. Nonetheless, the trio was offered room 217, if they were willing to pay cash: The credit card machine was heading back to Denver for the winter. The family ordered dinner in the grand ballroom, all alone, with chairs up on surrounding tables and canned orchestral music piped in over the speakers. A bartender named Grady manned the cocktail shakers.

During the night, the husband was awakened by a nightmare about their son being chased down the hallways by a firehose, so he stepped out onto the porch to have a cigarette. That’s when he envisioned a story about an alcoholic caretaker who goes mad during a winter with his wife and son at the Overlook Hotel.

Does any of this sound familiar?

The guest, of course, was the novelist Stephen King, and his book The Shining, plus the 1980 Stanley Kubrick film loosely based on it, would go on to join the all-spook roster of our collective nightmares.

Here’s Johnny!

Gabe the tour guide paused in front of The Stanley Hotel’s grand front porch and gestured up to the very balcony where King knitted together his tale of madness, writer’s block and murder. In fact, this was the only part of the night tour that gave me a chill. Writer’s block is terrifying!

King’s tale – on the page and in Stanley Kubrick’s movie – thrilled the Grand Heritage Hotel Group, and its chief executive officer, John Cullen. The company paid $3.1 million for it in 1995. They renovated the place from floorboards to ceiling and leaned in hard to the “this place is haunted!” reputation, inviting in TV crews from various spooky shows, which in turn fueled reservations for their eleven Shining tours a day, which cost a scary $30 per person.

Since those dark days, The Stanley Hotel has launched a concert/comedian series to provide popular entertainment and opened a spa, bars and restaurants for abundant refreshment. It’s heated year-round now, so the only shivers you’ll feel will come from encounters with the supernatural. To match the Kubrick film, they’ve even added a juniper maze out front, because guests kept on asking where it was. (In King’s novel, topiary sculptures were scary plants.)

And now the hotel is headed for new owners, backed by the Colorado Educational and Cultural Facilities Authority, if they can work out a deal. The CECFA is a kind of culture bank, extending $7 billion in low-interest loans to Colorado theaters, schools, museums and, quite possibly, creepy old hotels as well. If the deal goes through, they’ll help the Stanley realize its dream (or nightmare) to become a focal point for horror-movie fans and a catalyst for filmmaking in Colorado.

Just in time to welcome the new owners, whoever they may be, the hotel has attracted a new, high-profile resident. In the spring of 2023, Nederland’s famous Frozen Dead Guy was part of a $250,000 deal to relocate his frosted corpse and his eponymous holiday: Frozen Dead Guy Days. The festival debuted in its Estes Park location last March.

So the chilly corpse of Bredo Morstøl made the journey up the Peak-to-Peak Highway to his new climate-controlled crypt in the Stanley. No charge to Morstøl for the uber-air-conditioned suite, but visitors will cough up $20 for a forty-minute visit.

You could consider that a bargain.

Tour guide Gabe informed us that Mr. King’s suite goes for $600 per night. The elevated charges extend to the “haunted” fourth floor, where little-kid ghosts are said to stomp through the hallways all night.

In room 401, above the main entrance, a spectral little girl looked out the window for two and a half hours, goose-bumping a crowd that gathered to watch her. But the family that had rented the room wasn’t there at that time! Or so Gabe told us. The hotel also served as a location for the 1994 yuk-fest Dumb and Dumber, which may also describe the people who take this ghost stuff seriously.

Then again, maybe not. That film’s star, Jim Carrey, was said to have had a ghostly encounter in the hotel, and quickly changed residences for the duration of filming. What sort of encounter? He’s not saying. But Gabe flipped through many images shared by other tour takers, who had snapped photos at Stanley and found spectral photobombers in their digital images. Seeing is believing, or at least it’s a good excuse to use the full range of photo-enhancing features on your app.

My friends, Ward and Sue, are perfectly normal, intelligent people. He’s an artist, she’s a management consultant, and they bought a night at the Stanley at a fundraiser. They checked in and carried their luggage up to the second floor, where they took a turn toward the King suite.

When they got through the security door, they both felt a tingling sensation and looked at each other: Their hair was standing straight on end, as if they were experiencing an extreme bout of static cling.

On second thought, maybe my friends are nuts. But, in any case, they’re just my third favorite Stanley-visitor-with-a-tale-to-tell. Stephen King is number 2, because he saved the place from ruin. And my favorite?

In 2018, the night clerk manning the front desk at the Stanley noted a late-night visitor. He picked up his cellphone in time to capture a brown bear standing on top of a coffee table near the front door. The beast hopped down, gave the premises a good sniff, then turned to look at the front desk clerk. Amazingly, the video continues as the bear saunters off into the gloom of the lobby.

And yes, I know for sure that this actually happened, because I saw it on YouTube.

Had I been running the front desk that night, I might have suggested that the bear head downstairs to visit the Colorado Cherry Co. It would have loved their cherry hand pies, as I do. In the history of hotel dining, it may be the best thing ever to accompany a cup of coffee.

And if you carry your pie up to The Stanley Hotel’s front porch and take a seat, you can enjoy your treat while taking in the long view that includes the town that F.O. Stanley built, the national park he helped preserve and the elk he invited into town.

If those 2,000-pound beasts are welcome, lounging around the front lawns all over Estes Park, then you surely will be as well. Especially if you believe in ghosts.