Mar 11, 20204 min read

Haunted Stanley Hotel: The Most Haunted Room 217 where Spirit of Elizabeth is still Present!

The Stanley Hotel of Estes Park, Colorado is best known for being the inspiration for the bestselling literary works of Stephen King’s The Shining, a classic horror novel of 1977 and the subsequent film starring Jack Nicholson. Many people believe that the hotel is haunted by benign spirits, embracing the association, playing the uncut R-rated version of the first film adaptation for a continuous 24-hour loop in all the guest rooms of the hotel.

History:

Built by Freelan Oscar Stanley and famous for its old-world charm. The Stanley Hotel near Estes Park offers four different types of accommodation experiences to its visitors. The accommodations include historic rooms, modern apartment-style residences for extended stays, and expansive condominiums on the legendary grounds overlooking Rocky Mountain National park.

Freelan Oscar Stanley and his twin brother Francis Edgar were entrepreneurs and inventors from an early age. They engaged themselves in selling maple syrup, manufacturing of violins. They also ran a company specializing in photographic dry plates. Later selling it to Kodak and designed the Stanley Steamer automobile.

However, Stanley suffered from life-threatening tuberculosis in 1903, and with the recommendations of the doctors; he came to the curative Rocky Mountain air in Colorado. Stanley and his wife Flora went to Denver and later to Estes Park for the summer.

Architecture:

In 1905, Stanley built his own property, a four-bedroom house in Estes Park, and decided to visit there every summer. However, after some years the Stanley couple decided to build a property for accommodating more of their friends and provide sort of social life for impressing their East Coast millionaires, building the Stanley Hotel.

With the completion in the construction in 1909, the Colonial Revival hotel featured the latest technologies of the time, which included hydraulic elevator, electric and gas heating system, running water, steam laundry, telephones in every guest room along with a course of a fleet of Stanley Model Z Mountain Wagons that made transportation of the guests easier from the local trains.

For better entertainment of the guests, a Concert Hall was also built, which was a gift for his loving wife Flora, as she loved playing the piano. However, due to the lack of a central heating system until 1983, it became a seasonal hotel, forcibly closing down each winter.

Interestingly, the Estes Park Hotel built-in 1877 by Irishman Windham Thomas Wyndham-Quinn and not The Stanley Hotel was the Grand hotel in little Estes Park. The hotel hosted several wealthy and famous people during its famous days such as socialite Margaret Brown, composer John Philip Sousa, and Theodore Roosevelt.

During the time, Stanley arranged an array of summer activities for their wealthy guests, from concerts and picnics to bowling and horse riding.

Haunted Reputation:

With the starting of the hotel in 1909, there began to occur a century of mysteries and eerie happenings. within just two years of its opening, Ms Elizabeth Wilson found tending the rooms when a sudden thunderstorm rolled through the mountains of Estes Park and wiped off all the power supply in the hotel. The housekeepers became certainly busy, carrying out lit candles for lighting the acetylene gas lamps.

Wilson approached a room, which in the later years unknowingly became the focal point of mysterious activities for more than a century to come. This was Room 217 of The Stanley Hotel.

As soon as Wilson made her way into the room, the odourless gas combined with the flames of the candles, igniting them into a fiery eruption, blasting Elizabeth through the floors into the MacGregor Dining Room. Despite such intense explosions in the hotel, Elizabeth luckily survived with her two fractured ankles.

The injured employees and the guest were sent immediately to a hospital in Longmont, however, not much of the documents of the patients could be found. Although Elizabeth Wilson walked away from her injuries in 1911, her spirit is still present in the hotel, more specifically in Room 217.

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It is rumoured that the clothes and other fabrics in the room remain mysteriously folded or are put away. Some claim Elizabeth to be old fashioned yet proper and hence when an unmarried couple comes, she climbs up on the bed lying between them throughout the night.

People claim her life to be mysterious as her afterlife and despite having been working in the hotel for so long, none, even find a single photo of her.

The explosion sent the hotel spiralling into an era of spiritual activities, with the majority of the haunts occurring on the fourth floor. Activities include self-opening of the closets, giggling and running of children; the hotel is known to exhibit many similar activities.

The most notable activity includes the waiting of a cowboy on the corner of the bed of room 428 greeting the guests. The grand stairway in the lobby of The Stanley Hotel is reported for being a huge site for seeing the apparitions of the hotel; a sort of vortex for the ghosts for moving from the main lobby through the halls.

A guest, taking pictures of the brilliantly constructed stairway, reported finding a woman figure on top of every picture.

Conclusion:

The guests in several ways experience the superstitions of the Stanley Hotel. Throughout the month of October, the hotel engages its guests in several mystical activities through the Twin Terror Weekends, which includes a murder mystery dinner, the Shining Ball, and the Halloween Masquerade Party.

The Stanley Hotel, besides this, conducts nightly ghost tours that guests enjoy to their fullest exploring the dark history surrounding the grand hotel.

Presently the hotel offers a whole night’s stay to the courageous guests in their notoriously haunted rooms.

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