Ghost Hunting (20 page)

Grant and I had to agree. However, no one had been hurt by the spirit or spirits residing there, so there wasn’t any reason to be afraid of them. As far as we were concerned, they could stay right where they were.

THE STANLEY HOTEL FEBRUARY 2006

T
hat scene from the 1980 movie
The Shining
has become a part of our national consciousness, a relic of Hollywood moviemaking as famous as any other: actor Jack Nicholson, all stubble-faced and disheveled, with an axe held tight in his hands and a murderous glint in his eyes, is seen leering through the bathroom door he has just smashed. With a crazy glee in his voice, Jack’s character screams to his intended victims, his terrified wife and son, “Heeeere’s JOHNNY!”

It was a familiar phrase among Americans, the one announcer Ed McMahon had used to introduce popular late-night talk show host Johnny Carson since the early 1960s. Hearing it shrieked by a madman who was about to hack up his family was nothing short of horrifying.

Weeks earlier in the film, Nicholson’s character—a failed private-school teacher turned playwright, named Jack Torrance—had moved his family to the Overlook Hotel in Colorado, where he had taken a job as winter caretaker. It was supposed to give him the quiet time he needed to finish his play and maybe salvage his life. Instead he went bugeyed nuts, influenced by the powerful supernatural forces running rampant in the handsome old hotel.

The film was based on a book by author Stephen King, a name every horror fan should know. But the Overlook Hotel wasn’t strictly a child of King’s fertile imagination. It was inspired by an actual place—the stately Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado.

So when Donna sat me and Grant down in our conference room and told us we had been invited to investigate the Stanley Hotel, my partner and I looked at each other and grinned. For two veteran ghost hunters, it was very much a dream come true.

Over the years, guests of the hotel had claimed to see little kids running up and down the hall, even when there weren’t any children staying there. Mr. Stanley, the former owner, had reportedly been seen in the lobby and in his favorite room, the Billiard Room. More recently, the police had been called in when a female guest started screaming for no apparent reason.

It was all we could have hoped for and more.

Though it was wintertime, the place wouldn’t be shut down entirely, so we would still have to work around a few guests. However, we were assured we wouldn’t have any problems in that regard. Unfortunately, Donna had to work and couldn’t go on the trip, so we would have to do without her experience and sensitivity. Our team would consist of Grant and myself, Steve, Brian, Dave, and Lisa Dowaliby.

Lisa had come to us a couple of years earlier. She had had some experiences that she couldn’t explain and she was still wrestling with them when she saw our show on the Sci Fi Channel. To say she was interested in speaking to us would be an understatement.

As soon as we met Lisa, we realized how valuable she could be to T.A.P.S. She had worked in a veterinarian’s office and possessed great organizational skills, and generally knew how to get things done. At the same time, Donna was getting overwhelmed setting up cases, not only for the TV investigations but also for our home group.

So at first we put Lisa to work helping Donna, and she did a bang-up job. She’s one of those strong-willed people who can be firm and charming at the same time, so you don’t feel you’re being coerced into doing what she wants. Later on, she asked to take part in some investigations, and she really flourished in that role.

So there she was, pretty much taking Donna’s place in this instance and heading to the airport with us. You could see the excitement on her face. She was determined to make the most of the opportunity.

The next day we found ourselves driving through the Rocky Mountains, talking about the investigation ahead. Apparently, the hotel property was made up of three separate buildings, and activity had been reported in all three. It was winter, so we would experience the same snowy conditions as in the movie.

Because of the size of the place and the promise it held for paranormal investigators, we decided to spend two entire nights there. Fortunately, the management had offered to put us up, so we wouldn’t have to go back and forth to a motel. En route through the mountains, we saw elk everywhere. Between the snow, the aspen trees, and the elk, it was like being on another planet.

Finally, we came in sight of our destination. The Stanley Hotel was a big white building with a red roof nestled comfortably in the lap of the Rockies. Billy Ward, the concierge, greeted us as we pulled up. Inviting us in, he told us how the hotel’s original owner, F. O. Stanley, had moved to Colorado in 1903 in the hope that the dry mountain air and cool climate would help his tuberculosis.

When Stanley’s health improved dramatically, he thought it was so great that he and his wife built a hotel in Estes Park. The place opened in 1909 and was immediately hailed as one of the nicest hotels in the country.

Stanley, as you may know, was one of the two twin brothers who founded the Stanley Motor Carriage Company back in the late 1800s. Their cars were affectionately known as Stanley Steamers because they were powered by steam engines, which were all the rage until the newfangled internal combustion engine became available.

Anyway, by 1909 Stanley was more focused on his hotel than on the car manufacturing business. The place was built with beautiful hardwood floors, ornate wooden moldings, and the fanciest furnishings available at the time.

The first room Ward showed us was the MacGregor Room, which was used to shoot the party scenes in a TV miniseries, also called
The Shining,
that aired in 1997. According to Ward, the hotel’s cooks had once heard a party going on in the MacGregor Room—only to find, on leaving the kitchen, that the room was empty. Another time, a manager and another employee were talking in that room when a ghostly figure appeared between them.

“You get an eerie feeling in here,” said Ward, “as if people are walking behind you.”

He had had a paranormal experience of his own in the hotel. When he was new to the staff and learning to conduct the night audit, he had seen books come flying off a shelf.

Room 217 was the one where Stephen King had stayed on the last day of the season back in 1973. In fact, he and his wife had been the only guests. In the Jack Nicholson version of
The Shining,
217 had been renumbered 237 so the hotel in which they were shooting the movie, a place called the Timberline Lodge, wouldn’t have a problem booking its room 217.

No matter what it was called, the room had a long association with a former maid called Mrs. Wilson. Back in 1911, when she joined the staff of the hotel, it was the maid’s job to light acetylene gas lamps in each room. If she did a poor job, she would blow the place up, so she had a lot more responsibility than today’s hotel maids.

According to various guests over the years, Mrs. Wilson is still in the room. There are stories that people on their way to the bathroom suddenly see the light go on in there, as if someone was looking out for them. It’s believed that Stephen King had an experience with Mrs. Wilson as well. Apparently, he and his wife left their luggage in the room without unpacking it. When they returned forty-five minutes later, they found their clothes in the dresser drawers and their bags stacked neatly in the closet.

Of course, that could have been done by a flesh-and-blood maid. But none of the hotel’s staff seemed to know anything about it when King asked them.

As we talked with Ward, we were joined by other employees. Like the concierge, they had stories to tell. Krishanthi Fernando, the night auditor, talked about complaints from guests on the fourth floor that children were playing loudly in the hall outside their doors. When hotel staff investigated, there weren’t any kids to be found.

Krishanthi speculated that these children were the ghostly son and daughter of one of the maids who’d worked on the fourth floor. It was her understanding that Stephen King had seen them—a dark-haired boy and a blond girl—and also seen the ball they were throwing back and forth between them.

Ward noted that room 401 was one of the most haunted places in the hotel. One night, he said, a male guest took off his wedding ring and set it on the night table beside his bed. A couple of hours later, he woke to find a man picking up the ring. Before the guest could stop him, the man walked into the closet. But when the guest followed him in, the closet was empty—and he never recovered his ring.

Krishanthi told us about something that had happened just that past season. A married couple was staying in room 412 when, in the middle of the night, the wife started screaming. When Krishanthi came upstairs, she found the woman rolling on the floor and shrieking, “Help me!” at the top of her lungs.

Though nearly incoherent, she was able to communicate a feeling that an energy was trying to take her over—to possess her. Krishanthi and food and beverage director Sandy Murphy walked the woman down the hall, hoping the exercise would snap her out of it. Suddenly, with what Murphy described as “the strength of twelve men,” the woman’s hands clenched into fists and she sent the hotel employees flying in either direction.

Finally, paramedics arrived and took the woman away in an ambulance. When she arrived at the hospital, she was checked for drugs, but the doctors couldn’t find any. Despite her outburst, she was totally clean.

Next, Ward took us to the Manor Hall, a smaller version of the main building. In room 1302 on the Manor Hall’s third floor, a housekeeper had just finished tidying up when she saw the head housekeeper out in the hall. After they talked, the head housekeeper poked her head into the room to make sure it was up to snuff. What she saw was a picture of chaos, with bedclothes pulled off the bed and the room’s wall hangings strewn across the floor. And yet neither of them had heard a sound.

In fact, Ward told us, every room on the third floor had a problem in that its windows went up and down on their own. Grant and I assured him that we would check them out. Then we followed the concierge out of the Manor Hall and into the hotel’s third building, an airy, spacious place called the Concert Hall.

Ward said this structure had sheltered a homeless lady, unbeknownst to hotel management. As the story goes, she snuck into the hall to get warm. However, she made the mistake of hiding in the basement, which was colder than upstairs, and was eventually found frozen to death.

Sometime later, Ward was playing host to four teenaged girls—guests of the hotel—who had gone with him to the Concert Hall to hear ghost stories. Naturally, he told them about the homeless lady. Chills running up and down their spines, they got out their cameras and began to take pictures of the place—until they heard a high-pitched shriek from the side booth, and ran like the dickens.

“I’m not fond of going there after dark,” Ward said of the Concert Hall.

One thing we found early on in the investigation was that it was easy—and fun—to give each other static shocks. The air in Colorado was pretty dry, and there were carpets everywhere, so all we had to do to build up a charge was walk around. Then we reached out with our forefingers and touched each other on the ears. One time when I touched Grant’s ear I generated a five-inch spark. It was pretty impressive.

The Stanley had everything you could ask for in an investigation: a list of impressive stories, creepy old buildings, and an ominous feeling in the air. But it was too big for us to cover everything we wanted to cover. We decided to focus on a half-dozen of the most active locations.

Grant and I started our night in the ominous-looking MacGregor Room, which we scanned with an audio recorder and a thermal-imaging camera. The camera picked up a trio of rectangular-looking light spots, all moving in unison. Were they reflections or something more meaningful? We would reserve opinion until we had a chance to analyze the data.

At the same time, Lisa and Dave were in room 418 looking for the ghostly kids who had been reported playing ball up there. Among his many talents, Dave is a really clever magician. He announced that he had a ball that imparted superpowers to whoever touches it, then asked the kids to roll the ball across the floor for him.

Unfortunately, nothing happened. However, the night was still young, and Dave wasn’t easily discouraged. There was a lot more to investigate.

By then, Brian and Steve had started checking out room 412, where more than one guest had reported feeling the bed shake. Steve, who was planning on spending the night there, lay down for a moment to see if there was any truth to the stories. For a while, nothing happened.

“Show yourself,” Steve said. “You shook the bed a couple of days ago. Why can’t you do it again?”

As if in answer to his challenge, the bed started to tremble beneath him.

But that wasn’t the strangest phenomenon he and Brian would experience in that room. No sooner had Steve reported the tremor in the bed than Brian saw a shadow come up next to Steve—a shadow that looked a lot like a human hand.

“There’s somebody here, Steve,” Brian rasped, trying to contain his excitement.