The Stanley Hotel

Freelan Oscar Stanley, co-inventor of the Stanley Steamer automobile, arrived in the Estes Valley in 1903 wrecked by tuberculosis and recovered in a season. He resolved to give the mountains a proper hotel, and the Stanley opened in the summer of 1909 — a Georgian colonial pile with an all-electric kitchen fed by his own hydroelectric plant on the Fall River, and a fleet of steam 'Mountain Wagons' to ferry guests up from the Lyons depot. Its first guests were the Colorado Pharmacal Association, convening for their twentieth annual meeting.

The house's worst night is on record. In June 1911 the hotel installed an auxiliary gas-lighting system; on June 25, the day after the pipes were charged, a leak met a lit match in Room 217 and the explosion wrecked roughly a tenth of the building. Head housekeeper Elizabeth Wilson was badly injured — and survived. She worked at the Stanley until about 1950.

Wilson is the ghost the staff speak of fondly. Guests in Room 217 report clothes folded, luggage unpacked, shoes lined up — the legend holds that the housekeeper who was nearly killed there still keeps the room. She is now the most requested ghost in the house, which makes 217 the rare hotel room people pay extra to be tidied by the dead.

The rest of the ledger: children's laughter and running feet on the fourth floor, once the servants' and children's quarters; piano music in the concert hall attributed to Flora Stanley, whose instrument stands there still; and the apparition trade in general, which the hotel encourages with nightly tours, a 2013-founded horror film festival, and a hedge maze planted in 2015 in homage to the Kubrick film that never filmed here. Ghost Hunters and Ghost Adventures have both shot episodes in the building.

The Stanley survived the September 2013 floods largely unscathed and runs at capacity on the strength of a reputation built in layers: documented health resort, documented explosion, one very productive night in 1974, and a ghost file that grows one guest report at a time. The Shining plays on a continuous loop on a dedicated in-room channel, so that guests may compare fiction with upholstery at all hours. Whether Mrs. Wilson still turns down the beds is folklore; that the room sells out is arithmetic. Stanley himself would recognize the economics — he ran the place, he said, as a pastime, and spent more on it each summer than it made.