The Stanley Hotel: How a Bad Night's Sleep Wrote a Horror Classic

Sun, 04 Aug 2024 16:07:00 +0000

In late September 1974, a young and not-yet-famous novelist named Stephen King and his wife, Tabitha, drove up into the Rocky Mountains to Estes Park, Colorado, and checked into the Stanley Hotel, a great white Georgian pile perched against the front range with Longs Peak looming behind it. They had picked the place more or less at random on a late-season trip. They could hardly have picked a stranger night for it: the hotel was about to close for the winter, and the Kings arrived on the very last evening of the season, when the building was all but empty. They were, by King’s account, essentially the only guests. They ate dinner in a cavernous, deserted dining room with the chairs already stacked on the other tables and canned orchestral music playing to no one; a single bartender served King in an empty bar. They were given room 217.

Stephen-King - vo.rs

The Stanley Hotel: How a Bad Night's Sleep Wrote a Horror Classic