Colorado Experience: The Stanley Hotel

-Widely known as the inspiration for Stephen King's 1977 novel The Shining, the Stanley Hotel's legacy is actually much more interesting than the paranormal activity for which it is famous. Hello, I'm John Ferrugia. When Freelan Oscar Stanley arrived in Estes Park in 1903, he was not looking for a

hotel

, but for a climatic cure for his attack of tuberculosis. But like the entrepreneurs who followed him, he fell in love with the area and built a luxury

hotel

worthy of his elite New England friends. He travels through the haunted halls of the Stanley Hotel and meets the gentleman who built the majestic hotel that is arguably one of the best in Colorado.

And now "Colorado Experience: the Stanley Hotel." -I want to welcome you to the Stanley Hotel. This is the most magnificent hotel, in my opinion, in the United States. -The Stanley Hotel is a gem located in a gem of a valley. A beautiful place in every direction... -The popularity of the Stanley Hotel never ceases to amaze me. -It is quite famous for ghost stories. There are many things happening here besides spiritual things. -One of the things that the people of this valley are really proud of: it is the Estes Park landmark. -This program was funded by the History Colorado State Historical Fund. -Support projects across the state to preserve, protect and interpret Colorado's architectural and archaeological treasures.

History Colorado State Historical Fund: Create the future, honor the past. -Supported by the Denver Public Library, History Colorado with additional funding and support from these great organizations and viewers like you. Thank you. -The Stanley Hotel is one of the most famous hotels in Colorado, possibly in the world. Although widely known as the inspiration for Stephen King's novel The Shining, its fascinating early history remains little known. Thanks to the continued efforts of several dedicated entrepreneurs, this mountain paradise has survived the test of time. -The Stanley Hotel is located on the northwest edge of Estes Park. It's only about 30 miles to the plains and just another 10 miles or so to Rocky Mountain National Park.

And certainly the Ute people, and probably American Indian cultures even before that, have used Estes Park as a hunting ground, as a hunting ground, for elk and deer and sometimes bison and fish. And more recently, at least relatively speaking, the Arapaho people, beginning in the late 1700s and early 1800s, began coming to this valley as well to gather poles for lodging, hunt, and use the same resources that the American Indians have been using for generations. -Estes Park is located in a 30 square mile valley. It is called "park" because in the language of the mountains, "park" means "valley." So Estes is valley.

Estes Park... the white settler, the first Anglo settler, was Joel Estes. And that's why it was called Estes' Valley or, ultimately, Estes' Park. -Windham Thomas Wyndham Quinn was the 4th Earl of Dunraven, an Irish baronet who was interested, like many British aristocrats, in the economic possibilities of the American West. And he was also interested in treating the Rocky Mountains as a playground for the rich and elite. -Homestead Act of 1862, an American citizen could claim 160 acres of land that had been opened to settlement. That was the count's problem. Americans could claim the land. The foreigners, the Irish, and the Irish lords could not do it. -But he found a way to avoid it.

He would hire peons and ne'er-do-wells from Denver to come and file a claim for ownership. They were asked to make improvements. But the law was not specific about what constituted an improvement. So they would just take four logs and put them in a square and call it a building. Once they had acquired title to the land, they would sell it at a reasonable price to the Earl of Dunraven. -He bought those claims and those 31 individuals. He had direct title to about 6,000 acres of the best land in Estes Park. He wanted to use the valley as a private hunting ground for himself and his aristocratic friends.

In 1878, he has a hotel. It's called Hotel Estes Park. The locals called it the English Hotel, which was a mistake because it should have been called the Irish Hotel. But it was not like that. It was a fairly large hotel. And in the 1870s it was the most elegant place to stay in the valley. It lasted until 1911, when one August morning a fire broke out and burned the building. And it was never rebuilt. -Stanley had moved here and was looking to acquire new lands just as the Earl of Dunraven was looking to sell them. And it was kind of a match made in heaven. -The Stanley family had been in Maine since the early 19th century.

In fact, it was said that there were so many Stanleys in Kingfield, Maine, that if you threw a rock, you'd hit a Stanley somewhere. -Freelan Oscar Stanley was a Yankee businessman. He was born in Maine and grew up in New England. And he, along with his twin brother Francisco, were inventors of some talent. -The story is that when they were children, his father gave them a knife. And they got to work carving and producing that they sold to their friends. At one point, they produced buckets for the maple syrup industry and sold them. So from the beginning they were young entrepreneurs.

And I suppose if you want to trace his technology and his ingenuity, that Yankee ingenuity that we talk about, you have to go back to his childhood days in Kingfield. FE Stanley had been teaching at the school, he had been making small kits with compasses and protractors for the Business School. He did pretty well, but his factory burned down. And he needed a job. And then FE Stanley hired him. -They began by inventing a dry plate photography process, a way to make the photography process much less cumbersome than it had been. -FO Stanley became the salesman type.

He hit the road and got orders for the Stanley Dry Plate Company. And he was doing very well. And then along comes George Eastman from Eastman Kodak. And they finally sold the company to George Eastman in 1904. It was for about $500,000, a princely sum for that time. -That made them a fortune that they later turned into an even bigger one by continuing to invent and innovate. In the late 1890s, they developed their own steam-powered automobile, known as the Stanley Steamer. -The first horseless carriages had three different types of locomotive power. Some were internal combustion gasoline engines. Some were powered by electric batteries.

And some were powered by steam. And for at least a decade, it wasn't entirely clear which technology would win. -In fact, the Stanleys broke the land speed record in the early 20th century with one of their steam-powered automobiles. It became known as the Flying Teapot because, even though it looked like a strange steampunk device, it could actually move down the road, as long as there was a way down. -The history of the Stanley Steam Car Company is not as glamorous, progressive or technologically relevant as its beginnings. The Stanleys were kind of stubborn. And they weren't up to date with the type of technology that was needed to maintain continued success.

So they let the technology go. -So FO Stanley was a great success before arriving in Colorado. When he was 50 years old, he contracted tuberculosis. Like so many other Colorado emigrants, Stanley's doctors encouraged him to come to Colorado to live a life outdoors, to breathe our high, dry atmosphere, because the truth is that the doctors had no cure for tuberculosis. -Fortunately, he knew a doctor here in Denver who had practiced as a doctor in Maine. And so, that summer, at Dr. Bonny's suggestion, he came to Estes Park to recover. He fell in love with the valley and, before leaving, purchased land for a 5,300-square-foot summer cabin.

He was 54 years old when he arrived in 1903 and summered here for the next 36 years. -Stanley fell in love with Estes Park and was determined to build a mountain paradise. He poured everything into the hotel. At the age of 59, FO Stanley embarked on the final chapter of his life, building a legacy that is still remembered today. -I think FO Stanley should be called a quintessential New England gentleman. He obviously had a New English accent. But he always dressed to the nines. Although he was 5 foot 10, because he stood so upright, he looked taller than that. He was always a gentleman, soft-spoken and yet obviously when he said or did something, people listened because he was a genuinely kind and nice guy. -Mister.

Stanley had an extremely good heart for people and children. And he was a thinker. I believe he was one of the first conservationists in our community. He was an innovator and an inventor. He really saw the future, that's how I look at it. He would be wearing a bowler hat. I called him my elegantly dressed gentleman. -Flora Stanley was a teacher when FO met her. She taught for a few years and then became a homemaker. She spoke very softly. She loved music. -I think many of her feelings arose through music. Her room is the music room where the piano is.

And she was very particular about the way she had everything here. She had to be in her place and with proper cleanliness. Everything was luxury for her. She was also an amazing lady. They were an incredible couple. -She doesn't know anything about hotels or building hotels or managing hotels. Stanley just goes ahead and decides that he's going to outdo the Earl and build a bigger, better, obviously bigger hotel, a resort, if you will, and he did it. Here is a Georgian hotel located on a hillside in Estes Park, above a town that has only a few wooden buildings, very flimsy buildings.

This elegant hotel sitting here, a monument to a man who had boldness, courage and the ability to look into the future and predict what Estes Park could be if he could give it a head start. And yet, when FO Stanley was looking for a name for his hotel, he thought of calling it Dunraven. The local community, having accepted the story that what the Earl of Dunraven tried to do was turn the valley into a private hunting ground, said: wait a minute. That name really doesn't go very well. Let's call it the Stanley Hotel in his honor, sir.

And the Stanley Hotel became the Stanley Hotel. He begins building the hotel in 1900; the hotel, not one building but 11 buildings, a complete complex in 1907. It takes two years to build. And in June 1909, it finally opened to the public. -300 men, two years between 1907 and 1909, working 24/7, boosting the economy... now Mr. Stanley needs to build a city. Now Mr Stanley is bringing in things like tourism and employment. -Since he wants an all-electric hotel, he builds a power plant, a hydroelectric plant, in Fall River. From the start, this is an electrified hotel. Mr. Dunraven's hotel was not electrified. So he had an advantage over the earl. -He is going to build the landfill, the sewer, the garbage dump... everything.

It had a nine-hole golf course. Where Lake Estes is now, it was actually Stanley Land because it is a man-made reservoir. -I can only imagine what he saw here 115, 120 years ago. -Due to his influence as a New England capitalist and investor, he was able to exert some positive political pressure on Congress to create the national park. And for all these reasons, Estes Park prospered. But Stanley brought something else to the table that I don't think he gets much credit for. And he brought cars. Remember, this is the end of the great golden age of railroading. But Estes Park never had a railroad line.

Stanley changed the calculus on that. He inaugurated a steam bus service, or, as he called it, a coach service, from Lyon, the location of the nearest railroad station, and Estes Park. -He goes to work. He helps establish the local bank. And before he finishes, he gives the town a piece of land for a school, a piece of land for the town garbage dump, a piece of land for a park. And he is known as the grand old man of Estes Park. -Stanley Hotel was inspired by the grand hotels on the east coast of Newport, Rhode Island and New England, places where America's wealthiest families came to spend their summers.

The scale is monumental. It dwarfed the small town of Estes Park that sat at its base. -The intention was that his friends could go out to visit them during the summer season. That's why we call it Flora's Guest House, if you can imagine that. The style of the building is actually called Georgian Colonial Revival architecture. The windows are special because some or most of them are original to the hotel. They are the palladium windows. The Stanley Hotel's first guest would have arrived in grand style, but he would have been the victim of a practical joke. You're going down the canyon, the twists and turns.

You've never seen a bear before. You see a bear. He stands up. Charges against a Stanley steam car. The steam car driver says: Don't worry, ma'am. That happens all the time. And he pulls his gun out and shoots that bear. Well, no, he didn't. He is a man dressed as a bear. No one knew anything about the bear except FO, Flora and the bear himself. -Certainly, a luxury hotel of the caliber of the Stanley was really going to attract the best and the brightest. So it was. President Theodore Roosevelt stayed here. The Emperor and Empress of JapanThey stayed here at one time.

This was a global destination, a place where you could come and enjoy the beauty of nature with all the comforts of industrial America. -This was built for the elite. They came. They stayed longer, they brought their servants with them, the maids, the nannies and all that, and they stayed a month. Some of them stayed all summer. -He never made much money. They needed someone like FO Stanley who had a lot of money. And Mr. Stanley had something else that every businessman should have. He had no children. He had no heirs to leave money to. He only came here in the summer.

He would leave Massachusetts in late spring and stay here all summer. The story was that he would go out with a wad of cash in his pocket in the spring, pay the bills before he left, go home, have a good winter, and then return for the following summer. Mr. Stanley finally managed to sell the hotel in the late 1920s. He would now be over 70 years old. He sold it to a very interesting guy, a man named Roe Emery. -He did the tour of the Rocky Mountains with his tour buses, which he had a route that he did.

And he was basically the father of Colorado tourism, that was the word for Mr. Emery. Mr. Stanley started it. Emery went one step further in business. -Earning money was difficult. The hotel was only open, for the most part, for 90 days in the summer. Its subsequent owners had difficulty maintaining the hotel from a deferred maintenance standpoint. And gradually, over time, despite their best efforts, the hotel began to fall into disarray. -When Stanley sold the hotel, he would have been negligent if he had known that he would spend the next five decades struggling to stay open. But fate, or possibly the spirit of FO Stanley, intervened.

And a famous author visited in 1974, changing the trajectory of the struggling hotel. -Stephen King, who we know is a Maine resident, had grown up learning about FO Stanley and the FO Stanley Hotel here in Colorado. Oh, he didn't come for the ghosts. -Stephen King was a struggling author. And he lived in Boulder for a while. And he came right at the end of the tourist season in October of '74 and he stayed at the Stanley. It turned out that he was there just as they were closing down operations. And just watching a grand old hotel close for the winter inspired him and got his energy flowing, as only Stephen King can, which led him to write The Shining, which was his first big bestseller. -After the arrival of Stephen King, we really have our panoply of ghosts here. -Estes Park has been a place to come and seek visions of spirits for thousands of years.

Less than a mile and a half from the Stanley Hotel is Old Man Mountain, a promontory that towers over the town of Estes Park. In that sense, the Stanley Hotel was built with a central spirit. -The entire valley is spiritual. Nature makes it spiritual. People came here to relax, enjoy life and have a good time. That's why I think they come back. They had a great time in the building. I always think of the hotel as the place where the spirits come to party. And then the story, because it's so old, the building retains energy like smoke in the walls. -We are literally built on the mountain.

And it has a wonderful energy coming from the quartz crystals and granite. Our theory is that the energy shoots through the hotel, over here, due to the northern hemisphere, and then dissipates and returns to the mountain itself. -So here we are in the famous Room 217. It is mainly known to people thanks to Stephen King. He spent one night here, September 30, 1974. We had an explosion, unfortunately, in 1911. There had been a leak in the room with the gas, an acetylene (white gas) backup system and I'm sure you know that back then It was colorless and odorless. Then the waitress, Elizabeth Wilson, walked past where the arch is right here, which was the door that day, with an open flame to light the gas lamp and boom, 10% of the Stanley is gone.

She lived to tell the tale. She obviously had very serious injuries. There was no death that day. It took her 18 months to recover, but when she came back, she wanted to stay and stay and stay for the rest of her life. The most haunted room is right in front of us. It's the long hallway that runs past the bell tower and room 401. It's where the children were. It was a large, open, cavernous attic. And that's when I tell people, go down and see if you can make it to the end. And when you do, I want to hear you say: red rum, red rum, red rum.

And that is our fourth floor. -I haven't seen any ghosts here on the property yet. I think there are some amazing coincidences? Absolutely. Many of them I can't explain. Does that mean I believe or see ghosts? I haven't seen a ghost. But many of my guests do. And who am I to judge their eyes, what they have seen? In 1995 we came third in the Stanley Hotel bankruptcy auction. And yet, we still won. There was just one problem. We didn't have the money. And I didn't expect to win. We were the lowest bidder. So we raised $3.5 million and the lender asked us to come forward with half a million dollars of capital.

Well, at that moment I'm only 29 years old. I didn't have half a million dollars. So my share of the capital amounted to $57,000. I had $50,000 in bonus checks from my last job. And the last $7,000 came from my credit card, 100% without conditions. And so, the morning after winning, we paid the check. Then I tour the entire property and realize the magnitude of how much capital it will take to bring this to a minimum level like any of our other hotels. -Because the Stanley Hotel campus has been recognized as a National Register Historic District by the National Park Service, the property was eligible for financial assistance from the State Historical Fund, which supported the preservation of the hotel, carriage house and power plant. -The current owner at this time is Mr.

John Cullen. -I think I am the seventh or eighth owner of the Stanley. -He also has that Mr. Stanley energy and vibe. Creativity... -I know I'm the oldest now at 21 years old. FO Stanley only owned it for 17, 16, 17 years. -Mister. Stanley could see something and then create it. I see that in Mr. Cullen. -John Cullen and FO Stanley are similar in certain ways. -I love comparisons with someone no one has met. -He has the same inventiveness. -I'll take that as a compliment. -He has taken it to a new level. -There are certain similarities, I grant you that. -Both have lavished their heart, their money, their soul on this physical plant and have tried to keep it up to the standards that a crown jewel should enjoy.

And they both have done it. -I think I'm completing his vision. -This place contains artistic energy, creative energy. -But I have brought his vision to a population that wants it. And it's all in those same categories of wellness, art, national park, outdoors, recreational living, people from all walks of life coming together. Well, my future is actually your past. He was simply 100 years ahead of his time. One of the great pillars of the Stanley Hotel has always been art. FO Stanley built a concert hall. He played the violin. And they had performances there every night. We started the Film Fest three or four years ago.

The part about the Stanley Film Fest is that it became the precursor to the Stanley Film Center. And this 45,000 square foot building will be the world center of horror cinema and the entire film genre. -For more than 100 years, the Stanley Hotel has welcomed visitors from all over the world. The dedicated perseverance of FO Stanley and, more recently, John Cullen, ensured that this white colonial-style hotel would be majestically preserved for generations to come. -The hotel gives you the feeling of traveling back in time to go back and see what it was like 110 years ago. -It is important to preserve the Stanley Hotel for the children of the future, so that people can see the architecture from a long time ago still in place today. -FO Stanley's legacy is that he created more than just a hotel.

He created a town, a community. And he actually he has created a lifestyle. -The legacy continues right now. People still come to his hotel. And it remains a healing place. People come here to feel better, like Mr. Stanley. To feel better, to become stronger here... it will be here when you and I are gone. And it will continue to serve people and make them happy, because people are happy when they come here. -I consider The Stanley my greatest achievement. I can't imagine how I could ever top that again in my life. I've been extraordinarily lucky, starting from the beginning.

If there are spirits, I think they are happy with me.