Spirits of the Stanley Hotel

 In December 2010, I traveled to Denver, Colorado with my husband to participate in the commencement ceremony for my Master's degree. My mother flew up from Phoenix to meet us for the event. The day after graduation, my husband, mother, and I decided to make the trek to Estes Park to visit the Stanley Hotel. Our Ghost Tour reservations were made for 12:00 noon on a Sunday, and this is our story of the unforgettable experience...

You might know the Stanley Hotel from its connections to Stephen King's The Shining. The author wrote the story after the hotel offered him some urgent motivation after just one night's stay in room 217. Stephen King also directed and filmed his made-for-TV miniseries there called Stephen King's The Shining. (The movie The Shining featuring Jack Nicholson was actually fimed in Oregon and deviated a great deal from the actual written story).

You might also know of the Stanley Hotel from that Lamborghini scene in Dumb and Dumber. During the filming of that movie, Jim Carrey also stayed in the same room 217 that Stephen King braved for a night. Only... Jim Carrey got spooked and high-tailed it outta there after only 3 hours in that room. The Holiday Inn in downtown Estes Park got Jim's business that night :)

It wasn't the literary and cinematic fame that attracted us to the Stanley Hotel, but the reports of actual spirits that haunted and continue to haunt the infamous hotel. In an attempt to make a long story a bit shorter, I'll let you know why the three of us were attracted to the "other side" of the Stanley Hotel...

After surviving a cracked skull and personal near-death experience in September of 2001, made an almost-complete physical recovery, but my spiritual recovery was more than I bargained for! After experiencing the life after life, I returned with a spiritual awakening and the uncanny ability to sense the presence of spirits. It was extremely frightening at first - the nausea, the disorientation, and the foreign images flashing through my consciousness as it would happen to me randomly. One particularly strong sensation even landed me in the Emergency Room because it caused my to have a gran mal siezure! Ouch... my tounge hurts again just thinking about it. A CT scan showed that the siezure wasn't a lingering problem from my serious cranial trauma. My brain had fully recovered from that.

Instead, I knew that the siezure was somehow connected to my new-found ability. But the amazing thing is that it's an ability that my mother has had almost her entire life. In fact, it runs in her side of the family. Until September 2001, I thought that maybe it had skipped a generation. I was wrong.

With great motivation to understand what was happening to me, I decided to devote my new lease on life to learning and chasing after the knowledge my spirit so desperately craves. The ghosts of the Stanely Hotel called loud and clear, and with my understanding mother by my side, I was ready to learn.

The first stop on the ghost tour was the Music Room in the Stanley Hotel. Our tour guide, Scary Mary (fun name!), educated us on the history of a piano that sat on an elevated platform near some large windows. F.O. Stanley's wife, Flora, played that piano and John Phillip Souza also played/tuned it when he stayed at the mansion with the Stanleys. It has been reported that the piano often plays itself. The employees of the Stanley Hotel have heard it. The keys never move when this happens. This photo we took of the piano as Mary spoke delivered the very first orb of our adventure...

Our tour continued on to the main staircase in the Stanely Hotel. Mary informed us that it is a very active place for spirits. She then informed us that she felt the presence of two children with her at the base of the stairs. Anouther tour group ran into us and both tour guide stood on the stairs - both aware of the childrens' presence. Here are the photos we took...

Our tour continued up the staircase to the first landing. My mother was just a step behind me when our feet hit the landing. Both me and my mother immediately felt the presence of a spirit. She knew that it was a young woman right away. I just felt overwhelmingly overcome with sudden nausea and disorientation. My body felt the urgent need to spin in counter-clockwise direction for some reason I didn't understand. We stopped the group and told them what was happening. My mother told me to be calm and that helped me understand the nature of our "gift" a little more. We stepped off of the landing to continue up to the second floor and I began to recover. I spun around to take this photo over the railing looking at the landing where we felt the presence. This is what I captured...

Continuing up the stairs to the 4th Floor of the Stanley Hotel, our tour guide let the group pass as she waited on the very last landing. Our group looked down at her over the railing and she began to tell us about the hauntings of the 4th Floor. We took pictures of her as she spoke and this is what we captured...

Children are said to haunt the 4th Floor of the Stanley Hotel because that's where the children were kept "out of sight, out of mind" when the Stanleys housed guests and balls in their mansion. Kept in close proximity, many of the children became sick and some died. Spirits of children are said to haunt the rooms and hallways. I took a photo down the hallway and look at what was captured next to a service cart...

At one point in the tour, Mary felt the presence of a child grab her hand. She attempted to give the child's hand over to another tourist in the tour group, and I took a picture of it. Here's what I captured...

As we gathered in an open part of a hallway to hear more about the history of the Stanley Hotel from our tour guide, Mary, my mother took this photo of me across the group. Look at what appears in the middle of our semi-circle...

While visiting the inside of a haunted room of the Stanley Hotel, Mary told us about a spirit that frequently walks in and out of the closet as if no doors, walls existed. My husband opened the closet door and took this photo...

The end of our tour of the Stanley Hotel took us to the underground tunnels. A worker as reportedly killed a long time ago when a tunnel collapsed. These are some pictures we took at the entrance to that tunnel...

Here is the most amazing photo we took at the Stanley Hotel during our ghost tour. Remember all of the spitiual activity near the staircase? Well this one takes the cake!

My mother felt an uncanny urge to hand me her camera. "Take a picture of me standing over there," she said. I did as she'd asked. Amazingly, Iunknowingly captured photographic evidence of a ghostly apparition standing behind my mother...

Looking at the photo, you can see that my mother's right side is very fuzzy/blurry for some reason. The white fur adorning her purse is still visible, but her hair, shoulder, arm, and hand look either out or focus or altogether non-existent. Instead, the blue-light image of a man's face appears just beyond her right shoulder. The man's head is turned slightly to the left and he is looking right at my mother.

The interesting thing is that we may know who's ghost it is! A man named Lord Dunraven, a womanizing cad, is said to haunt the Stanley Mansion - pinching women's asses for fun. We believe it is the ghost of Lord Dunraven standing next to my mother in this photo. Here's why...

I hope you've found this report on our experiences at the Stanley Hotel to be enlightening. Please do not steal any of my photos. Please do not edit any of them. I've kept them just the way I took them for a reason (even refusing to fix red-eye). This is how it really happened for us. Take a visit of the Stanley Hotel to see and feel the amazing spiritual activity for yourself. Stay open and you won't be disappointed!