This episode explores the history of the Stanley Hotel before the stories took over, and what it might mean when a place feels like it holds onto something.
Transcript
Host:
The road into Estes Park gets quieter the farther that you go.
Have you ever noticed that?
The streetlights thin out.
The air even changes.
The mountains start to close in around you,
like something slowly narrowing your path.
And then, without much warning, you see it.
A large white building, sitting against the dark outline of the Rockies.
Still, out of place in a way that’s hard to explain.
For over a hundred years,
people have come here to rest, for fresh air, for something they couldn’t quite find anywhere else.
Some say they found it, others say they found something else entirely.
Tonight on the Midnight Drive, we’re in Colorado,
with a place that feels calm on the surface, but never fully quiet.
Now, if you go back far enough, before the roads and the signage and the steady line of cars moving
in and out of town, Estes Park doesn’t really look like a destination per se.
It looks like
space.
Long stretches of quiet.
The kind of place that you pass through,
not the kind of place that you build something permanent on.
Long before this hotel, this valley was known to the Ute and Arapaho tribes.
It wasn’t empty.
It was used.
It was moved through, understood in a way that didn’t require ownership.
There’s a difference between living in a place and trying to hold it.
In the late 1800s, that shift starts to happen.
An Anglo-Irish landowner, the Earl of Dunraben,
arrives in the valley and begins quietly acquiring large sections of the land.
Not to develop,
not to develop, not to build a town, just to keep it, to shape it into a private hunting preserve.
15,000 acres claimed over time.
It didn’t sit well with the people already trying to settle there.
Ranchers, homesteaders, people who were building lives in smaller, more practical ways.
Dunraben’s vision was different.
Controlled.
Exclusive.
A version of the valley that belonged
to one person.
It didn’t last.
By the 1880s, he left the area, and the land shifted again.
Passed along.
Broken up.
Absorbed into something a little more permanent, more public.
But the idea
but the idea lingers.
That this place could be shaped.
That it could be turned into something
else.
A few decades later, someone else arrives.
Not to claim the land, but because he doesn’t
have any other options, really.
Freeland Oscar Stanley.
At the time, he was known as an inventor.
One half of the Stanley Motor Carriage Company.
Wealthy, established, but sick.
In the early 1900s, that diagnosis carried a kind of quiet finality.
Treatments were
limited.
Outcomes were uncertain.
The most common recommendation was simple.
Go somewhere with clean
air.
Dry air.
Sunlight.
Elevation.
So, Stanley heads west.
He arrives in Colorado in 1903,
and eventually makes his way to this valley.
Estes Park.
A place that at the time still felt
very removed from everything else.
And something changes.
Over the course of a single season,
his health improves.
Dramatically.
The air, the altitude, the stillness of the place,
whatever combination of factors it was, it worked.
He gains weight back.
Regains strength.
Stabilizes in a way that didn’t seem possible before.
For someone in his position, it would
have been easy to take that recovery and just leave.
To return east.
Resume life, as it was.
But he doesn’t.
He comes back.
Year after year.
At first, it’s seasonal.
A retreat.
A place to
recover and rest.
But over time, that changes.
Because for all the beauty of the valley,
it lacks something he’s used to.
Structure.
Comfort.
Refinement.
So, he decides to build it.
Construction begins in 1907.
And what rises out of the landscape
doesn’t match what surrounds it at all.
The building is deliberate.
Symmetrical.
Designed
with intention down to the smallest detail.
It isn’t meant to blend into the environment.
It’s meant to stand apart from it.
When the hotel opens in 1909, it feels almost out of place.
Electric lighting.
Telephones.
Running water.
A full staff.
Guests arriving in custom built
steam cars.
All of it sitting in the middle of a mountain valley that not long before
had none of those things.
It isn’t just a hotel.
It’s a controlled environment.
Stanley didn’t design it as a hospital, but the influence is there.
Wide porches.
Fresh airflow.
Open exposure to sunlight.
Every element shaped around the idea
of health.
Of managing the body through the space it exists in.
In a way, it’s an extension of what
happened to him.
A place that changed him turned into a place he could shape.
And for a while,
it works exactly as intended.
The hotel becomes a destination.
A retreat for wealthy travelers.
A seasonal escape.
A place where people come to breathe differently.
To slow down.
To feel better.
But there’s something quiet underneath all of that.
Something easy to miss if you’re only
looking at what was built.
Because the valley didn’t start with a hotel.
It didn’t start with
Stanley.
It didn’t even start with Dunraven.
It was already something before any of them arrived.
And when you build something permanent in a place like that, something structured and
controlled and meant to last, you’re not just creating something new.
You’re layering it on top
of everything that was already there.
Most of the time, that doesn’t mean anything.
It’s just how places evolve.
But every now and then, a place feels like it holds onto more than
it should.
It’s not in a way that can be measured or proven.
It’s just in the way that it feels
when you’re there.
A kind of quiet resistance.
Like the space hasn’t fully adjusted to what it’s
been placed inside.
And in Estes Park, sometime after the hotel opens, something happens that
people still point back to.
Not as proof, but as a starting point.
Because even in the earliest
years of the Stanley Hotel, something goes wrong.
Something’s sudden.
Something that doesn’t quite
line up the same way, depending on who’s talking about it.
And from that point on, the story of
the hotel shifts slightly.
Just enough to notice if you’re paying attention.
Because once something
breaks the surface of a place like this, even briefly, it doesn’t always settle back the way
it was before.
You’re listening to The Midnight Drive.
I’ll tell you what, several years ago,
I went out to Estes Park with my family and even toured the Stanley Hotel.
And that place is
absolutely spectacular.
That’s part of the reason why I wanted to feature it in our Colorado
week of The Midnight Drive.
But I’ll tell you what, with all of the hype that has been built
around that place, because of The Shining, I feel like the history of the actual hotel
has almost been tarnished a little bit.
Because if you go there, they have Shining-themed tours.
They have Shining-themed merch.
You can buy the book.
You can buy the miniseries.
But there’s so
much more to this place.
So we will talk about The Shining a little bit, a little bit later on.
We’re going to keep unfolding into how the Stanley Hotel became The Stanley Hotel.
So by the time the hotel opens in 1909, everything feels intentional.
Everything about it.
Absolutely everything about it.
The layout, the symmetry, the way that the building faces the
valley as if it’s meant to take something in and hold it there.
It’s designed for comfort,
but also for control.
Air flow is planned.
Light is maximized.
Movement through the space
is guided.
Even the social structure of the hotel is built into its design.
Certain rooms
for certain people.
Certain activities in certain places.
It’s not chaotic at all.
It’s very
ordered.
And for a while, that order holds.
Guests arrive from the east,
stepping out of steam-powered cars into something that feels almost disconnected from the surrounding
landscape.
They eat, they rest, they recover.
They take in the mountain air from wide porches
designed for exactly that purpose.
There’s a rhyme and a reason to it.
It’s seasonal.
It’s predictable.
The hotel closes in the winter and opens again in the spring.
Life cycles in and out of the building, but the building itself stays the same.
Stable.
Reliable.
Constant.
Until it isn’t.
In June of 1911, just two years after opening, something shifts.
At the
time, the hotel was already using electricity, but power wasn’t always consistent.
So an auxiliary
gas lighting system was introduced.
It seemed practical at the time.
A way to maintain comfort,
even when the systems underneath it weren’t fully reliable.
But it also introduces something else.
Gas lines.
Pressure.
An invisible presence running through the walls.
On June 25th, shortly after the system is put into place, there’s an explosion.
It happens in one of the guest rooms.
Room 217.
The details depend on where you look.
Some reports say the explosion was severe enough to
damage parts of the structure.
Others downplay it.
Some say multiple people were injured.
Others
focus on one name.
Elizabeth Wilson.
A chambermaid.
In some accounts, she’s thrown from the second
floor.
In others, that detail is disputed.
What seems consistent is that she was injured.
Bad
enough to be remembered.
Badly enough that her name stays attached to the room long after the
physical damage is repaired.
And that’s the moment where things started to blur.
Because of the
where things started to blur.
Because the event itself is documented.
An explosion.
An injury.
Early in the life of the hotel.
That part is real.
What comes after is less clear.
Over time,
guests begin to associate room 217 with something else entirely.
Not danger.
Not even fear,
exactly.
More like presence.
People who stay there report waking up to find their belongings
moved.
Clothes.
Unfolded.
Suitcases.
Unpacked.
The room, in some cases, cleaner than when they went
to sleep.
It’s not aggressive.
It’s not chaotic.
It almost feels intentional.
Like someone is still doing their job.
There are also reports that don’t fit that tone at all.
Guests who describe something much colder.
Something that feels intrusive.
A presence
that enters the space in a way that doesn’t feel welcome.
Those accounts are less consistent,
more personal, and harder to define.
So they sit a little bit differently,
but they still exist.
And they keep the room from ever feeling neutral.
Elsewhere in the hotel, the reports follow a similar pattern.
On the fourth floor,
which once served as a living quarters for the staff, guests have described hearing movement
at night.
Footsteps.
Running.
Laughter.
The sound of children playing in the hallway.
When they open their doors to check, there’s nothing there.
No one in the corridor.
No
indication that anyone was ever there at all.
In the main areas of the hotel, the experiences shift
again.
Less movement.
More atmosphere.
Even music sometimes.
A piano playing
in an empty room.
Often associated with Flora Stanley, who is known to spend time in the music
spaces when she was alive.
And occasionally, the sense of being watched.
A figure in formal clothes.
A man who appears briefly in common areas like the lobby or the billiard room.
Then disappears just as quickly.
Those aren’t isolated stories.
They show up again and again
in slightly different forms across different decades.
And that’s where it can become difficult
to categorize.
Because none of it can be verified.
There’s no single event you can point to and say,
this is what caused this.
The explosion doesn’t explain the fourth floor.
The layout of the
building doesn’t explain the piano.
The history of the owners doesn’t explain the consistency
of the reports.
So instead of building toward a conclusion, the story just accumulates.
It builds
on itself.
Layers of experience.
Some small.
Some more vivid.
All of them tied to the same
physical space.
And over time, that accumulation becomes part of the identity of the hotel
itself.
Not officially.
Not in a documented sense.
But in the way that people talk about it.
And the way they approach it before they even arrive.
Expecting something.
Even if they can’t
say what it is.
It’s all worth noting.
That when you go in expecting something,
you will experience something.
You just have to want it bad enough.
Doesn’t mean that something’s
actually occurring.
It just means that you’ve primed yourself enough to recognize any sound
or any movement out of your peripheral vision that it’s going to be something to you.
There’s no clear pattern of danger here.
If anything, many of these experiences people
describe are very subtle.
They’re easy to dismiss.
A misplaced object here.
A sound that doesn’t
repeat over here.
A feeling that fades once you leave the space.
Which makes it harder to define.
Because it never fully crosses the line into something you can point at with certainty.
It stays just below that.
Consistently.
And that consistency is what keeps the stories alive.
Not because they’re extreme, but because they’re familiar.
Because enough people have had just
enough of an experience to feel like something might be there.
Even if they can’t explain it.
Even if they don’t fully believe it themselves.
And that’s where the hotel settles.
Until one night, decades later, someone arrives at the hotel at the exact right time.
When it’s
nearly empty.
When the season is ending.
When the building is quieter than usual.
And whatever is
there, or isn’t, has more space to be noticed.
You’re listening to The Midnight Drive.
Now, I’d like for you to consider this.
By the time stories settle into the walls of the hotel
itself, they stop feeling like individual events.
Right? They start to feel more like patterns.
Not something that can be proven, but something that still somehow seems to repeat itself.
And the longer a place like this stays open, the more chances there are for those patterns
to form.
Guests come and go.
Staff rotates in and out.
Different decades.
Different expectations.
Different reasons for being there altogether.
And still, the same kinds of experiences continue
to surface.
Not always in the same way.
But close enough that people notice.
Room 217, for instance, is where most of these stories begin.
Or at least where they’re easiest
to point to.
People who stay there often describe small changes to the space.
Just subtle things.
Objects moved.
Clothes folded.
Suitcases unpacked.
Not disturbed.
Not scattered.
Organized.
As if someone came through the room in the middle of the night with a purpose.
It’s not presented
as something threatening.
If anything, some guests describe it as helpful.
Almost routine.
Quietly unfolding in the background.
Like a task being completed.
A box being checked.
Others described something different.
A complete shift in the room at night.
A presence that feels closer than it should be.
Something that doesn’t stay at a distance.
At a distance.
Those accounts are less consistent.
But they do show up often enough to be part of the
conversation.
And that contrast is what makes the room feel uncertain and a little weird.
Not one clear story is happening here.
Multiple versions of the same space are happening.
Elsewhere in the hotel, the experiences don’t center around a single room.
They spread out.
The fourth floor is one of the most commonly mentioned areas.
Originally used as living
quarters for the staff.
Smaller rooms.
Long hallways.
A space that feels slightly removed
from the rest of the building.
Guess who stay there are often described hearing movement
late at night.
Footsteps in the hallway.
Running.
The sound of children playing.
Laughter.
The
echoes just long enough to notice.
And then it stops.
When the doors open, you look out,
the hallway is completely empty.
No movement.
No one there.
No clear source for the sound at all.
It’s the kind of experience that doesn’t last.
But also doesn’t explain itself.
In the main areas of the hotel, the tone shifts again.
Less about movement, more about presence.
The music room is one of the most referenced spaces.
Guests and staff have described hearing
piano music when no one is there.
Notes that carry through the room then fade without any
clear ending.
These reports are often connected and affiliated with Flora Stanley.
She was known
to spend time playing piano when she was alive.
But that connection is based on association,
not confirmation.
It’s a way of explaining something that doesn’t have a clear source.
Then of course are the sightings.
Less frequent.
More difficult to describe.
A figure.
Informal clothing.
Standing in a space where someone could be.
Until they aren’t.
Seen briefly in areas like the lobby or the billiard room.
Then gone.
No interaction.
No clear intention.
Just a moment that doesn’t hold long enough to examine.
Taken individually, none of these experiences are extreme.
They don’t point to anything definitive.
And they don’t build towards a single explanation.
But together they create something else.
A consistency.
A consistency across different people.
Different periods of time.
Different expectations.
That consistency is what keeps the stories in place.
Because even if each experience is small, the pattern itself is very difficult to ignore.
It’s also worth noticing how these stories behave.
They don’t escalate.
They don’t become more intense over time.
They stay at the same base level.
Subtle.
Subtle.
Repeatable.
Just noticeable enough to be acknowledged and then remembered.
That matters because it keeps everything just below the threshold of certainty.
Easy to question.
Easy to explain away.
But also difficult to fully dismiss.
In that space, right in the middle, is where most of the conversation lives.
There are also attempts to explain it.
Naturally, a building this old carries sound differently.
Right? Air moves in ways that aren’t always predictable.
Temperature shifts can create the feeling of movement or even presence.
And memory plays a role.
Expectation plays a role.
Again, if you arrive somewhere
already aware of its reputation, it changes how you interpret what you experience.
Those explanations exist.
And they’re reasonable.
They account for a lot.
But not everything.
In that gap, however small, is where the stories continue.
Not as facts and not as proof.
But as
something people carry with them even after they leave.
Something they think about later.
They spin
it around in their mind.
Usually not right away.
It tends to settle in after the fact.
When the experience is already over.
When there’s distance from it.
And more space to consider what it might have been.
What it might not have been.
And that’s part of what makes The Stanley different from other places with similar reputations.
It doesn’t rely on one defining story.
There’s no single moment that explains everything away.
No clear origin point that ties all the experiences together.
It’s just a series of events.
A few documented.
Many reported.
All existing alongside each other without fully connecting.
And over time, that becomes the story.
Not what happened, but what continues to happen.
Quietly.
In the background.
In small ways.
Over and over and over and over and over again.
Until it stops feeling like coincidence.
And starts feeling like something built into the
space itself.
Because the experience doesn’t depend on proof.
It depends on being there.
On walking through the space.
On noticing something that doesn’t quite line up.
And carrying that with you when you leave.
And for most people, that’s where it ends.
They leave.
They move on.
The experience fades.
But every now and then, someone arrives at the hotel
under different conditions.
Not during the height of the season.
Not when the building is full.
But at a time where the structure feels closer to empty.
In those moments, the same patterns
don’t just repeat.
They become easier to notice.
Because there’s less to compete with them.
Less to explain them away.
And whatever is there,
or isn’t, has a little more room to exist.
You’re listening to The Midnight Drive.
Now, since this is a location-based story, I have to know.
Have you ever been
to the Stanley Hotel? Have you ever stayed at the Stanley Hotel? If so,
would love to hear your experience.
Please let us know in the comments below, wherever you’re
listening to or watching this.
And if you’d like to leave us a message, we’ll play it on the air.
The Midnight Drive’s hotline is 402-610-2836.
So we wrap up our last segment here.
We’re going to start getting into the Shining.
By the time the season begins to wind down,
the hotel starts to feel different.
Not in an obvious way.
Nothing changes about the structure.
The rooms are the same.
The hallways are the same.
The view doesn’t shift.
But the presence of the people does.
Fewer guests.
Less movement.
Longer stretches of quiet between sounds.
And eventually,
the building reaches a point where it’s almost empty.
That’s how it was in 1974.
Late in the
season, right before the hotel closed for winter, one of the last nights it would be open, a man and
his wife arrive without much expectation.
Just passing through, looking for a place to stay.
Looking for a place to stay.
At that point, he’s already a writer.
A couple of published books.
Some success.
But not yet what he would become.
They check in and find that they are among
the only guests in the entire hotel.
Almost every room is empty.
Most of the staff is already
preparing to shut things down for the winter.
The building, for the most part, is quiet.
It’s still.
After dinner, the writer’s wife goes back to the room.
And he stays out.
Walking.
Not with a purpose.
Just moving through the space.
Room to room.
Hallway to hallway.
Taking it all in.
The scale of the place changes when no one else is there.
Spaces that feel normal during the day start to feel larger, more open.
The distance between rooms
feels longer.
The silence carries differently.
Every sound has more weight.
Even the small ones.
The shift of the floor.
The movement of the air.
The kind of details that
usually get lost when a building is full.
He moves through it alone.
No one interrupting.
No one filling in the gaps.
Just the structure.
And whatever it feels like when it’s not being used.
Later, he describes the experience in a very simple way.
He was scared.
But he liked it.
That’s a significant combination.
Because it doesn’t point to something external,
it points to a reaction.
To a space doing something to a person.
Not physically,
but mentally.
Emotionally.
The imagination turning on in response to the environment.
At some point, he goes back to the room.
Falls asleep.
In dreams.
A long hallway.
A sense of being chased.
Something moving through the space behind him.
Not seen clearly.
Just felt.
The kind of dream that doesn’t explain itself, but definitely stays with you long after you
wake up.
He wakes up with an idea.
Not fully formed, but enough to start building something
around it.
A story about a place like this.
A hotel.
Isolated.
Empty.
For long periods of time.
A structure that holds onto people who pass through it.
Not because something is there,
but because of what the space does to the people when they’re staying inside it.
That story becomes something bigger later on.
But at the time, it’s just a reaction to a place.
An environment.
Creating an honest response.
And again, that part is significant because there’s no clear evidence that anything happened.
To him that night.
No confirmed experience.
No documented event.
Just a feeling.
A shift in perception.
And an idea that came out of it.
Which raises a question.
What is it about a place like this that can do that?
Because the hotel was designed to be the opposite of unsettling.
It was literally built for comfort.
For health.
For rest.
Every detail.
Shaped around making people
feel better.
And yet, under the right conditions, it seems to do something else.
Not to everyone.
Not to everyone.
Not every time.
But often enough to notice.
Especially when the building is empty.
Or close to it.
Because when a space is full, the experience is shared.
Voices fill the area.
Movement creates distraction.
There’s always something else to focus on.
But when that’s gone,
the building has more presence.
The structure becomes the experience.
The length of the hallways.
And the way the sound carries.
The way the light falls into certain rooms and not others.
Something about the sense that you’re moving through something that isn’t
actively responding to you.
It just exists.
And you’re inside of it.
That’s when people tend to notice more.
Not because something new is happening.
But because there’s less to interrupt it.
Less to explain it away in the moment.
And that’s where the line starts to blur again.
Between what’s there and what it feels like.
Because even without any of the stories, even without the history, a place like this can still
create a certain kind of response.
The isolation.
The stillness.
A sense of being removed from
everything else.
Those things can have an effect.
They change how people think.
How they interpret
small details.
How quickly something unfamiliar turns into something unsettling.
And once that
process starts, it doesn’t take much to keep it going.
A sound.
A shadow.
A shift in the room
that doesn’t have an immediate explanation.
And suddenly, the space feels different.
Not because
it changed, but because the way it’s being experienced has.
That doesn’t prove anything.
It doesn’t confirm any of these stories, but it does explain why they continue.
Why a place like
this doesn’t lose that reputation over time.
Because it doesn’t rely on a single event.
It
relies on something more subtle.
Something built into the way the space exists.
The way people move
through it.
By the time you leave, that’s usually all you have.
Not a clear experience.
Not something
you can fully explain.
Just a feeling.
That something about this place didn’t fully settle
while you were there.
Maybe that’s enough.
Because a place doesn’t need to show you anything directly
to leave an impression on you that stays with you.
Especially when the lights go out for the season.
The building sits there.
Empty again.
Waiting for the next group of people to walk through it.