The Stanley Hotel

The Stanley Hotel is located in Estes Park, Colorado and very close to the Rocky Mountain National Park.

The building officially opened on July 4, 1909. It was always intended to be a place for the wealthy people of the time.

The style of the hotel can be categorized as Colonial also known as neo-Georgian. It is a private property with 138 rooms. The hotel itself is built on the land owned by Earl of Dun raven and Mount-Earl, and purchased by Mr Stanley.

The magnificent building is famous for having had many notorious guests under its roof, including Theodore Roosevelt, Hollywood royalties as well as heads of states. One of the most illustrious guests having stayed at the hotel is Margaret Brown, who survived the sinking of the Titanic.

The Stanley Hotel is also well known for being the location chosen by Stephen King to write his bestseller book, The Shining. The hotel is officially listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Haunting at The Stanley Hotel…

A lot of ghostly activities have been reported at the Hotel.

The main haunting usually takes place in the Ballroom. This is the room where “ghostly parties” take place. Even scarier, the ballroom’s piano plays on its own!

This recurrent event has been investigated and each time, people were able to confirm that nobody was physically sitting at the piano at the time the music was playing.

Some think that the piano player is Mr Freelan Stanley’s wife. She was known to be a piano player when she was alive…

An uninvited guest in the Guest Room

A man often appears. He stands over the large bed before scurrying away into the nearby closet. Guests occupying this room have reported jewellery thefts including watches and even luggage. The ghost has been blamed for these disappearances.

People staying in other rooms have also reported similar sightings. All of them have mentioned a man standing and then suddenly vanishing.

TV show Ghost Hunters visited the hotel. The team was shown the numerous areas where ghostly apparitions were said to have taken place. Whilst some allegedly paranormal activities were later confirmed as being noises emanating from the main pipes or other normal things such as wind and draught, they were able to confirm some paranormal activity within the building.

The allegedly most haunted room of the hotel, the ballroom was not “found to be inhabited” by any spirit…at the time of their visit, that is!

However, the team could sight figures of people fleetingly passing through the hallways then disappearing and in most of the cases hiding all of a sudden. They also claim to have heard children playing in the rooms above them whilst it was confirmed that no children were present during the shooting of the show.

Angry Table and a Moving Bed

A table literally jumped about 2 feet up in the air whilst the crew had been busy changing a film in the camera.

One of the crew members plucked up enough courage to sleep in the room where items had been known to disappear and said that his bed moved in the middle of the night.

He also stated that the closet doors where the ghost has been seen running towards, unlocked and opened numerous times during the night. Finally, a glass left near his bed was found with a big crack on the inside whilst it item had apparently received no shock during the night.

TV show Ghost Adventures investigated the hotel as well in 2010.

Science versus Paranormal at The Stanley Hotel?

Some scientists from the Rocky Paranormal Research Society have claimed that most of the so-called paranormal activity taking place in the hotel could be explained. The have mentioned natural reasons mainly since no extra magnetic activity had been detected by a satellite surveying Colorado.