OVERLOOK HOTEL

Location: The Hotel Overlook is nestled in the high mountains of Larimer County above Sidewinder, Colorado near the Rocky Mountains State Park. Overlook Road is twenty-five miles of mountain road over stone enforcements in the mountain heading to the hotel along the Larimer River in the valley. Because of weather dangers inherent in driving the road during the winter months, it is often closed from Early November to Late April. During the rest of the year, landslides sometimes occur.

Description: The Hotel Overlook (nee Overlook Hotel) is a grand, imposing three-story wood edifice resembling a giant cabin nestled in the Colorado Sierras, but appearances are not what they seem. The interior is actually a lavish labyrinth of rooms and luxuries. Over 130 guest rooms including a presidential suite fill the opulent structure which offers exquisite quarters and fine dining fit for any debutante. Features include the grand Colorado Lounge and dining room in the west wing and the Gold Ballroom in the east wing. The rising front lawn is decorated by hedge sculptures around a children’s playground and croquet field not far from the hotel's famous hedge maze concealed in the back of the property. The front veranda is open, the inside furnishings lavish and the prices expensive.

Ghostly Manifestations: In a recent Collinsport Ghost Society poll, over five hundred ghost and haunted house enthusiasts were asked what is the most haunted location in the United States. Some voters chose Belasco Manor in Maine while others nominated Hull House Mortuary in Oregon. Vannacutt Sanitarium and Gracey Mansion also made the list, but it was the Overlook Hotel in Colorado that swayed the most votes. There are supposedly two hundred rooms in the Hotel Overlook and only one of them has its own permanent guest of the disembodied kind. Guests who have stayed in Room 237 have reported the sounds and apparitions left over from a criminal underground homicide from 1927. In its long history, several guests, usually captains of industry, high-ranking politicians and Hollywood celebrities have specifically requested to be removed to other rooms in the grand hotel. Many of them have reported ghostly gunfire, phantom shrieks and the sounds of scuffling and fighting. One guest, an American Air Force lieutenant on vacation in an adjacent room jumped out of bed to stop a fight going on outside his room, but once he switched on the lights, he discovered the hallway empty and devoid of any other person but himself.

Room 237 has long been called the most haunted room in the hotel, but the hotel staff and employees are not allowed to talk about it to guests. Perhaps one of the strangest stories to come from Room 237 involves a phone call sent out from the room while it was empty. A 911 call came into the police station in nearby Sidewinder that was traced back to the Overlook and then to the room. Officers and paramedics arrived at the hotel expecting to find a person who had collapsed after dialing, but no such person was ever found. What’s odd about this instance is that all calls to outside the hotel must go through the switchboard and this one completely surpassed the operator. From now on, no one answers any calls from the room unless it is occupied.

Guests in the adjacent rooms in the same hallway have made complaints of Room 237 even when it’s empty and uninhabited. Some people have reported the sounds of several people talking and raucous laughter as if there was a wild party going on in the room. Other guests have reported someone knocking on the doors up and down the hallway. One night all these guests emerged within minutes to see who was running up and down the corridor. Several visitors, including hotel staff and employees, have seen at least one of these spirited phantoms. All of the descriptions bear a distinct similarity of the same small-framed blonde in old Prohibition type dress and a peek-a-boo Veronica Lake hairstyle. She’s been reported ignoring the guests as she drifts through the long hall near 237. Sometimes she’s only sensed by the detection of her strong French perfume.

Hotel staff and employees have reported seeing little girls running loose in the employees’ wing. Sometimes it is one little girl running around loose and sometimes it is the same little girl twice like a set of twins. One housekeeper retiring for the night saw them by the end of her bed looking at her. Another employee thinking they were children of one of the guests tried to tell them they were not allowed to roam loose in the employees’ wing because of thefts in the apartments, but as he chased them, they ran around a corner and vanished. Other employees haven’t heard the girls but instead have heard them singing in the hallway together. On another occasion, a guest woke to see the girls sitting on his bed next to him. One of them was sitting on his leg and felt like a solid block of ice, but she also felt as if she weighed several hundred pounds because he couldn't free his trapped leg. just as sudden as they seemed to appear, they gradually faded away into nothing. So far, almost all the descriptions of the girls have been nearly identical: "two girls around eight to ten with short brown hair and meticulous dress." One couple remarked they seemed to have large foreheads!

In March of 1997, an unidentified actress staying in Room 237 had a rather disturbing experience and checked out quickly to move to the Stanley Hotel in nearby Estes Park. No one is quite sure as to the identity of this actress, but several tabloid reporters have cast theories as to who it was, claiming it was everyone from Nicole Kidman to Christina Ricci. According to the unconfirmed account, the unidentified actress was being harassed by phone calls from an unidentified party who hung up when she answered. Finally asking the front desk to stop all calls, she was told that no phone calls were going to her room, but they would monitor the line for her for inter-room calls. Retreating to bed, the frustrated actress soon drifted off to sleep, but then sometime after midnight, the phone rang again. As she answered the call, she heard a faint, wretched petite child-like voice saying, "Can I sleep with you?"

Sounds occur very often in the hotel and range from knockings and tappings to distant voices from somewhere in the Overlook. Noises of several people partying have also been heard from the Gold Ballroom as well as from the adjacent elevator or trailing from the Colorado Lounge on one side of the lobby, down an access hall and vanishing into the Gold Ballroom. One housekeeper on her way to her apartment in the employee wing swore the cacophony of noises and odd voices passed through her with the force of a small thunderstorm. Some guests have reported riding alone in the elevator only to be suddenly accompanied by two men with pale white skin wearing pin striped suits. Others in the lift have heard big band music wafting through the elevator shaft. One guest was so adamant about the music that he asked the front desk about getting a copy of the Prohibition-style music, but they had to turn down the request because there’s never been any music played in the elevators.

Hotel employees that close up the ballroom at night have experienced other phenomenon. Two stewards putting all the chairs up and removing the ashtrays one night left the room to clock out and as they left back through the room, they found one chair down with a fresh cigarette butt in a returned ashtray on the table. Chairs have fallen off of tables for no reason at all. One female wine steward quit her job because of a strange man watching her from the shadows of the room.

In the Colorado Lounge in the hotel, guests and staff have seen an oddly defined figure staring at them from the upstairs balcony, but whenever they try to look at it directly, it vanishes. One enterprising employee tried to get a picture of the entity by snapping a camera over his shadow. When the instant photo developed, it showed an anomalous barely human form distorted by a gray fog.

Groundskeepers have experienced their own type of manifestations. They heard the sounds of people playing croquet even when the grounds are empty as well as strange people from closed wings. One employee swore he saw one of the hedge sculptures turn its head and look at him from out the corner of his eye.

History: The Overlook was built by Robert Townley Watson between 1907 and 1909 on what was reportedly a Native American burial ground. Some rumors passed down claim that the builders had to fend off a few Indian attacks. It's later history is long and tumultuous, having finally opened in 1910, but the fledgling hotel proved to be a burden on Watson, and he had to bitterly sell the hotel in 1915. His grandson would later return to the Overlook as a maintenance man, but meanwhile, the hotel would be sold again and again through the days of Prohibition and was often abandoned, deserted and vacant until the end of World War II, when it was finally purchased by an ultra-powerful Howard Hughes-type millionaire named Horace Derwent. The Overlook became one of Derwent's most valuable holdings in Colorado. Described as one the most beautiful resorts on the Rockies, it has served as the "stopping-off place" for many of the jet set including actors and celebrities, captains of industry and politicians. It quickly became a important stopping point for much of the jet-set from Hollywood actors and producers to politicians and captains of industry. Famous guests at the Overlook included Henry Ford, Nelson Rockefeller, Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, and Darryl Zanuck, as well as four United States Presidents, such as Warren G. Harding, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Richard Nixon, but unknown to the famous who stayed here, the hotel also became a site for the infamous and the inhuman, such as mafia figures and underworld criminals passing from points East and West.

Derwent had boasted that his Overlook would be the "Showplace of the World," but it would have a history as anything but. Everything Derwent touched seemed to turn to gold, that is except for The Overlook. Derwent had poured over three million dollars into restoring the hotel in his attempts to create his showplace before a single guest ever walked through the doors. Even with all of the Overlook's fabulously wealthy guests, the hotel never made a single dime back. The Overlook's financial loss proved to be too great, and in 1952, Derwent sold the hotel to Charles Grondin, the head of a group of investors based in California. The group ran the hotel for two seasons before it was sold to a company called Mountainview Resorts. The company went bankrupt in 1957, closing the Overlook for the rest of the decade. The Overlook fell into disrepair during this period, but it was leased and repaired in 1961 by four writers who reopened it as a writers' school. However, the school closed after a scandal when a drunk student died after falling out of his third-story window onto the terrace below.

In 1963,the Overlook was bought yet again by a Las Vegas investment firm and opened a few months later. However, the sale was peculiar because the head of the firm was Charles Grondin, who had bought the hotel from Horace Derwent in 1952. Grondin had been tried and acquitted for tax evasion in 1960, and had become the executive vice president of the Chicago office of Derwent's company. These facts led to speculation that Derwent controlled Grondin's Vegas organization and had bought the Overlook a second time under peculiar circumstances. In 1964, it was discovered that the Vegas firm that owned the Overlook had connections with unidentified Mafia kingpins. Grondin, however, denied the charges. In 1966, however, a gangland-style triple murder was committed in the Overlook's presidential suite, one of the victims being a notorious mafia hit man named Vito the Chopper.

The Overlook recovered from the scandal and business continued as usual. Eventually, management of the hotel was given to a man named Stuart Ullman in the early Seventies. Soon after he started his tenure is when the paranormal history of the hotel seems to begin. A panicked cleaning woman claimed to have seen the corpse of a guest in the bathroom of Room 237, and she was promptly fired by Ullman. Later investigation turned out that the guest's corpse was en route to her funeral at the time of the sighting. In 1979, Ullman hired a man named Charles Delbert Grady to be the Overlook's winter caretaker. Along with his wife and two daughters, Grady spent the winter months in the hotel running the boilers and doing maintenance in the exile imposed by the closed roads to Sidewinder. While no one is quite sure to this day what exactly happened, many believe the solitude drove him mad and he ended up killing his wife and two daughters. He left their bodies posed idyllically in Room 237 before eventually turning his rifle on himself. When the Overlook's staff returned to open the hotel for the season, they discovered the bodies of Grady and his murdered family posed in Room 237.

The following year, another winter caretaker, Jack Torrance, an aspiring playwright and a recovering alcoholic, saw the caretaker job as an opportunity to repair his fractured family life. Torrance, along with his wife Wendy and son Danny spent the winter tenure in the Overlook, but he also seemingly snapped from the isolation, and his wife, Wendy, and son, Danny, deserted him at the hotel with the help of Jack Halloran, the hotel chef. These events were loosely based to create the Stanley Kubrick movie, “The Shining,” with Jack Nicholson, at the actual Overlook Hotel.

In 1999, Stephen King adapted and remade the original Stanley Kubrick film with Steven Weber and Rebecca DeMornay, at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado. 

Identity of Ghosts: With its share of famous and infamous guests, the Overlook has also experienced guests ranging from the eccentric to the bizarre, and it is the spirits of these people who have been reported active in their old rooms at one time or another. Along the sighted images of Grady and his daughters, the image of a man in a bear suit and his male lover has been described. Story has it during one active costume party in the hotel, a man fell in love with one of his costumed partiers, but when he realized his lover was a man, he jumped to his death from his room. His rejected lover later took his life with a razor while still wearing his costume. Another sighted specter is believed to be a former elderly female guest met her young teenage lover in clandestine affairs at the hotel, always reserving Room 237 in advance to do so, but one weekend, her young affair neglected to show up and she died of heartbreak. When she briefly stayed in the hotel, Wendy Torrance was met by an image of "undead cadaverous skeletons in various styles of dress" filling the darkened lobby. She blinked, stepped back and looked again, but there was nothing there. She later commented that she felt she was "staring directly through the undead veil of the hotel separating the world of the living from realm of the deceased." A psychic staying in the hotel as a guest in 1987 was asked to give her impressions of the hotel since the rebuilding. She described a plethora of surviving entities still presiding throughout the place including Grady, the mobsters, one of their girlfriends, a few workers who had died in the construction as well as countless former guests and several Native American ghosts constantly passing through and back from the afterlife. She also described several other spirits connected to the land who she thought might be hostile.

Investigations: In October of 2006, paranormal researchers from TAPS paid an eager visit to the Overlook in search of its ghosts. The organization has best been known for making the pursuing of ghosts a respectable field again and has allowed for cameras to film their investigations for their very popular and successful TV series. An intimating figure of a man resembling Michael Chiklis of "The Commish," field leader Jason Hawes and his team had been wanting to cover the Overlook for years and the current manager, Joe Nicholson, gave them a short window of time with free range of the hotel before the roads closed down. Armed with advanced equipment and sensors, Hawes' crew were met with both explainable illusions and paranormal activity that still refuses to be explained. Teamed with Grant Wilson, Jason explored the hotel's catacomb-like basement and taped what seemed to be a female voice and Jason seemed to have an experience as he stayed in Room 237. An untouched glass on his nightstand cracked without being touched, and when he repositioned his camera on a previously closed closet, it closed itself after he had fallen asleep. In the Gold Ballroom, Brian Harnois and Steve Gonsalves taped what seemed to be disembodied legs beyond the windows of the room but later decided it was their own reflections. Feeling he was being watched, Brian noticed a shadow figure watching from a doorway, but by time he could get his camera on it, it had vanished.  

Source/Comments: The Shining (1983/1999) Novel created By Stephen King. Extended phenomenon loosely based on the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado, the Miami Biltmore in Coral Gables, Florida, the Brookdale Lodge near Boulder Creek, California, Tiedemann Castle in Cleveland, Ohio and the San Carlos Hotel in San Carlos, California.

Before "The Shining," the Timberline Lodge also appears in stock footage in TV shows through the 1960s and 1970s; most notably, as a ski lodge for Colonel Klink in the episode, "How To Escape From A German Camp Without Trying," of Hogan's Heroes.

TAPS from the TV Series, "Ghost Hunters," SyFy Network

Overlook Hotel history adapted from the Wikipedia