Stanley Hotel

Freelan Oscar Stanley, who with his twin brother had made a fortune in photographic dry plates and the Stanley Steamer, came to Colorado in 1903 with tuberculosis and no great expectation of recovering. He was fifty-four. He spent the summer in the Estes valley, got better, and stayed, and since Estes Park had no railroad, he set about building roads up the canyons so his steam cars could carry guests in.

The hotel opened on June 22, 1909, a white Georgian Revival block on a rise above the town, with electric light, telephones and private baths, and a concert hall built the same year for his wife, Flora, who played the piano. It took its name only after the townspeople petitioned a reluctant Stanley to put his own on it. It was a summer house for his friends rather than a money-maker; after his death in 1940 it passed through a series of owners, unheated and closed every winter into the 1980s.

In the fall of 1974 Stephen King and his wife stayed a night, nearly the only guests, just before the hotel shut for the season. King was given Room 217, wandered the empty halls, and went home with the idea that became The Shining, published in 1977. Stanley Kubrick shot his film's exteriors at Timberline Lodge in Oregon, but the novel's hotel is this one, and the ghost tours that now run every evening, and the queue for Room 217, have done more for the Stanley's finances than anything since the steamers.