The history of Estes Park

A dying man's cure becomes a mountain hotel

The Stanley Hotel is a Georgian Revival hotel in Estes Park, Colorado, now run as a resort with a restaurant, a spa, and tours built around its reputation for ghosts. It began as a sick man's cure. In 1903, Freelan Oscar Stanley, co-inventor of the Stanley Steamer car, was dying of tuberculosis. Stanley's doctor sent him west for the mountain air. Stanley and his wife Flora arrived in Denver that March, then moved on to Estes Park for the summer on a doctor's advice. By the end of the season his health had turned around completely.

Grateful, and unwilling to settle for the valley's rough cabins and slow pace, Stanley decided to build the resort town he thought Estes Park deserved. Stanley bought land in 1908 from the agents of the Earl of Dunraven, an Anglo-Irish lord who had once tried to fence off 15,000 acres of the valley as a private hunting ground and left in disgrace. When Stanley floated naming the new hotel "The Dunraven," 180 locals signed a petition begging him to use his own name instead.

Construction ran through 1906 to 1909, using timber and stone hauled down from the surrounding peaks. Stanley built his own hydroelectric plant to power it, making it one of the first hotels in the country lit entirely by electricity. The hotel opened on July 4, 1909. Its first guests were 125 pharmacists in town for a convention, driven up from the train depot at Lyons in steam cars built by Stanley's own company.

On June 25, 1911, a gas lighting system installed as backup exploded on its second night of use. A chambermaid, Elizabeth Wilson, was thrown through a floor and broke both ankles, and seven waiters were also hurt, but she survived. Her room was 217, the same room Stephen King would sleep in sixty-three years later, the night he dreamed up the novel that made this hotel famous.

Stanley spends more than the hotel earns, then sells

Stanley's partner in the venture, Burton D. Sanborn, died in 1914, and Stanley slowly stepped back from running the hotel himself. He had built the roads, the bank, the water company, and the power plant that made Estes Park a real town, not just the hotel. By 1926, he had spent more money on the place most summers than it earned, and he sold the hotel and all his land holdings that February. The hotel passed through owners for the next two decades, including a Chicago syndicate called the Abbell Hotel Co., which bought it in 1946.

A single night gives Stephen King his novel

On a single night in October 1974, Stephen King and his wife Tabitha checked in as the hotel's only guests, just before it closed for the season. King woke from a nightmare about his son being chased through the halls by a firehose, and the idea for The Shining came out of that one night. The novel came out in 1977, and Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film version made the Overlook Hotel famous worldwide, though Kubrick filmed it elsewhere.

Ghost stories now draw more guests than the cure

The lot under the hotel was platted into what county records call the Stanley Historic District Subdivision, a 34-acre parcel. It carries the hotel, its carriage house, concert hall, gatehouse, manager's cottage, and the separate lodge Stanley built in 1910 to house male guests apart from women. The hotel passed through bankruptcy by 1995, when John Cullen bought it for about $3 million, a fraction of what Stanley had spent to build it. Under Cullen the hotel leaned into its haunted reputation rather than away from it, building tours and a concert hall renovation around the ghost stories guests kept telling.

Elizabeth Wilson and the hotel's other stories are now part of what people come for. Guides and guests say Elizabeth Wilson still tends Room 217, folding guests' clothes and lining up their luggage by the door. They say Stanley's own ghost lingers by the bar and the billiards room, and that Flora's plays the piano and dances alone in the ballroom at night. Children are said to laugh in the halls near the fourth floor, though hotel and county records show no child ever died there. A Skeptical Inquirer investigator who looked into the hotel's ghost stories found many of them borrowed from a different, long-gone property, the Elk Horn Lodge, mixed with local legend and television productions filmed on site. The hotel does not discourage any of it; its own television channel runs Kubrick's film on a loop.

A frozen Norwegian moves into the old ice house

The hotel came through the catastrophic floods that hit Colorado's Front Range in September 2013 largely untouched. In August 2023, it took in an unlikely tenant: the frozen body of Bredo Morstøl, the Norwegian man whose unofficial cryonic storage near Nederland inspired Colorado's Frozen Dead Guy Days festival. The hotel built him a new chamber in its old ice house, now billed as the "International Cryonics Museum," and sells tickets to see it.

In May 2025, the hotel changed hands again, sold for $400 million to a new group called The Stanley Partnership for Art Culture and Education. This public-private arrangement combines a state cultural finance authority, former owner John Cullen as chairman, and private investors.