by Aaron Mahnke
The Stanleys have frequently been sighted on the main staircase in formal attire, and even in the elevator. The encounters are never violent or malevolent, but they frighten guests and staff nonetheless. Bartenders there in the Cascades claim they have even seen the deceased owner strolling through the bar. Some have given chase, only to lose sight of the ghost as it vanished into one of the walls.
Whether or not you believe in ghosts, the frequency of the reports is enough to make you wonder. From glowing orbs caught on film to the faint sound of piano music drifting into the lobby, there seems to be no lack of fuel for the legends that fill those halls.
But it’s not just the Stanleys who haunt the hotel. Sightings have been reported throughout the structure’s four stories, with the vast majority of them occurring in the most unwelcome of places: the guest rooms.
JUST PASSING THROUGH
In the early 1900s, many visitors to the Stanley Hotel would stay for more than a weekend. In many cases, guests would stay through the summer, and that meant arriving equipped for months of living away from home.
Those of us who have spent the past few years watching the British television show Downton Abbey might be very familiar with the process: the gentlemen and ladies would arrive by carriage—in this case, steam-powered, of course—along with a caravan of servants and luggage. And while the wealthy guests had access to the many finely appointed rooms of the hotel, the servants and children were relegated to the fourth floor.
This was an era when children were expected to be seen but not heard, and so they played in the rooms and halls far above the heads of the guests. They slept there, played there, and even ate there in a small windowless corner of the upstairs kitchen.
These days, the fourth floor is just one more level of guest rooms. According to many accounts, however, that doesn’t mean the children are gone. Many of these stories center around Room 418.
There have been reports of the sound of balls bouncing in the dark, of high, childlike voices laughing and talking in the hall outside the room, of the clink of metal jacks on wooden flooring, and the pounding of little feet. Guests have been startled out of their sleep by voices and sounds, some of which have been captured on video.
Even the staff have had experiences. The cleaning staff always enter the room with a bit of fear due to the many odd things that they have witnessed inside Room 418. The television has been known to turn on and off on its own, and on at least one occasion a housekeeper has turned to see that the bed she has just made up now has the deep impression of a body in the bedspread.
The room with the most activity, though, is on the second floor, and there are legends as to why. It is said that in 1911 a thunderstorm caused a power outage in the hotel, sending the building into complete darkness. It was dinnertime, and most of the guests were downstairs in the MacGregor ballroom, but the staff still needed to provide a temporary fix for the lack of light.
Because the Stanley Hotel was built at a time of transition between gas and electric lamps, the fixtures throughout the hotel were equipped for both. With the building in darkness, staff were sent from room to room with candles to light each acetylene gas lamp. But when one of the chambermaids, a woman named Elizabeth Wilson, entered Room 217, something happened.
It should be said that this room was the Presidential Suite. It was enormous and elegantly decorated in the style most beloved by Flora Stanley herself. Bright floral wallpaper, with reds and pinks and greens, covered the walls, and the carpet was the color of grass, with accents of red and blue. It was the jewel of the hotel.
According to the legend, the light fixture in that room had a hidden leak, and the room had filled with gas. When Mrs. Wilson opened the door with her lit candle in hand, the gas ignited, setting off an explosion that destroyed nearly 10 percent of the hotel along the western wing.
Part of the floor gave way, and several steel girders fell on tables in the ballroom below, thankfully missing the guests. Mrs. Wilson, though, was not so lucky. She fell through the floor, breaking both of her ankles when she landed.
It’s a good story, but there are many versions of it. Five separate Colorado newspapers carried the story, but details varied wildly. One paper listed the chambermaid as Eva Colbern and said that she was thrown through a wall onto the porch with no injuries. In another, she was Elizabeth Lambert, who died in the fall. Still another report claimed the chambermaid was a woman named Lizzie Leitzenbergher. All of the stories did agree that the explosion happened at 8:00 p.m., but none mentioned the thunderstorm.
There are other glitches in the story. No employee records exist from this period in the hotel’s history. Among the many photographs of hotel staff over the past century, there are no pictures of anyone named Elizabeth Wilson, or Lambert, or Leitzenbergher. All of it has the smell of window dressing, designed to lend some credibility to the odd experiences that guests have had in Room 217.
Just what experiences am I referring to? Well, according to firsthand accounts, the ghost of Mrs. Wilson has been known to unpack the suitcases of guests, toss their clothing on the floor, and rearrange the bed linens. Another common report is that some guests and staff have seen a mysterious black hole in the floor, said to be the location of her fall after the explosion. The faucet in the bathtub has been known to turn on and off on its own, and maids have seen doors in the room open and close.
In 1974, a man and woman arrived at the hotel at the end of the season. According to his story, they were the only guests in the entire hotel. After dinner that first night, the couple retired to bed, where the husband had a horrible nightmare.
“I dreamed of my three-year-old son running through the corridors,” he later said. The boy was “looking back over his shoulder, eyes wide, screaming. He was being chased by a firehose. I woke up with a tremendous jerk, sweating all over, within an inch of falling out of bed. I got up, lit a cigarette, sat in a chair looking out the window at the Rockies, and by the time the cigarette was done, I had the bones of the book firmly set in my mind.”
The man was Stephen King, and the book, of course, would later become The Shining.
WORKING BACKWARD
Some folklore is historical. We tell the tales because they happened—at least to some degree. There’s a grain of truth at the core of many myths and legends, a real-life event or fear that caused people to remember, to retell, and to eventually immortalize.
Other legends, however, lack that core truth. They work backward instead, creating a unique story to explain the unexplainable. Oftentimes these stories lean on the past and mine it for hints of validity, but in the end, we’re still left with stories that have no roots.
The reason people do that isn’t really a mystery. Story, you see, helps keep us grounded. It helps provide us with bearings as we navigate life, like a landmark we can all point toward. And when something odd or unexplainable happens, I think it’s only human nature to look for those landmarks. When we can’t find them, oftentimes we simply invent our own.
Perhaps the original events that led to the unusual activity at the Stanley Hotel have simply been lost in the past. It would be reasonable to assume that at least some of the stories have a foundation in reality, rather than just the narrative of a hotel with a supernatural reputation to keep. That’s not my decision to make; I’ll leave that up to you.
But sometimes we’re reminded that stories can evolve, that the unknown can suddenly become a bit more knowable. In 2014, while doing maintenance in a service tunnel beneath the hotel, workers found debris. Specifically, they found pieces of drywall covered in pink and green wallpaper. Carpet fragments were also discovered, still pale green with red and blue details.
It turns out the explosion really did happen. And if we can find truth at the center of one of the stories, even a century later, how much more truth is out there to be found?
I’
ll leave you with one last story from Room 217. According to a previous guest who was preparing to go to bed, he opened one of the windows to let in some of the cool Colorado air. Later, after having been asleep for some time, he felt his wife climb out of bed and quietly walk across the room toward the window.
The man said that he opened his eyes, and after glancing at the glowing face of the alarm clock, he looked to find her standing at the window, face pressed against the screen.
“You have to see this,” she whispered to him. “There’s a family of elk outside.”
The guest didn’t move. He just smiled and watched his wife for a long time, noticing how her hair moved in the breeze. It’s hard to blame him, after all. She’d been dead for over five years.
EVERYONE HAS AN opinion. Whether it’s politics, religion, popular culture, or brand of coffee, everyone has a preference. For most people, their opinion is set in stone. It’s an emotional choice. It’s rooted in habit. It’s safe and comforting.
But some opinions are darker. For example, ask anyone you know what their greatest fear is, and you’ll get a five-minute answer. Their pulse will race. Heck, they might even shudder in front of you. No one wants to die, and no one likes to feel unsafe. And that means everyone has one big fear.
Maybe it’s the thought of being buried alive, trapped inside a confining space while hundreds of pounds of dirt are shoveled on top of the only exit. Maybe it’s the thought of drowning, or being kidnapped. But here’s the secret: most big fears are really just all about the same thing. Nearly all of them are about losing control.
There are few places in modern culture that represent the loss of choice, the loss of freedom, and the loss of safety more than prison. It’s a setting that fills us with dread and inspires hopelessness, but somehow also remains oddly attractive. Films like The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile and small-screen hits like Oz and 60 Days In stand as testament to that obsession. And rightly so.
Prison, to many, is a dark collection of pain, despair, guilt, and hatred. And while it might not be the same as physically being buried alive, it never fails to strike fear into even the strongest of hearts. But our modern prison system didn’t start out that way. Instead, it was built on hope, opportunity, and change.
Like all good intentions, though, those goals have been worn down over time by the worst of human nature. Whatever hope and light they might have tried to bring into the world has been washed away by horrible darkness. And no prison represents that evolution more accurately than Eastern State Penitentiary.
HISTORY IN CHAINS
The idea of prison has been around since the dawn of written language. Early legal codes, dating back as far as four thousand years, listed punishment for illegal behavior. Back then, it was all about retaliation for wrongdoing, but imprisonment was on the horizon.
The ancient Greeks dabbled with the notion of captivity. In Athens, the prison there was known as the desmoterion, which meant “place of chains.” You get the idea, I’m sure. It was the Romans, though, who took the concept of prison and turned it into an art form, and trust me, they pulled no punches.
The Romans built prisons in the worst places imaginable. If it was unpleasant or nasty, it was perfect for holding criminals. They used basements, abandoned stone quarries, and even metal cages. The infamous Mamertine Prison in ancient Rome was literally built into the city’s sewer system. Prisoners ate and slept among piles of wet, rancid human waste.
With the advent of the castle in Europe, captivity moved inside the fortresses, becoming an extension of the crown. It was a display of power, in a sense. In order to encourage people to obey and respect the ruler of the land, they were taught to fear the power those rulers wielded. But even then, prison was only a sort of purgatory, a waiting room for the final verdict. It was rarely the end itself.
For centuries, prison was where criminals would await their trial, and the waiting was oftentimes the least unpleasant part of the process. After their sentence was handed down, the punishment was intensely harsh. Painful whipping, physical mutilation, branding with hot irons, and even public execution were all waiting for them outside the walls of their cell.
But all of that changed in the eighteenth century. The Age of Enlightenment brought with it a new focus on rational thought, which led to public outcry against violent punishment. Instead, people called for a new type of prison, one that would inspire moral reform and help criminals become better people. It sounded good on paper, and so many countries got behind the idea.
The British Parliament passed the Penitentiary Act in 1779, introducing the concept of state prisons. Inmate populations in England had multiplied following the loss of their North American colonies, the prisons filling up quickly with traitors and rebels. It’s ironic, when you think about it; our own declaration of independence led to an increase of captivity and imprisonment back home across the Atlantic.
One of the strongest voices for prison reform in the newly formed United States of America was, of all people, Benjamin Franklin. In 1787, while the Constitution was being crafted in Philadelphia, Franklin was gathering others in his home nearby to discuss the poor conditions of the local prison known as Walnut Street Jail.
Rather than individual cells, prisoners there were gathered into groups inside large pens. There was no segregation, so men and women, along with young children, were all living in the same space. Inmates ran the spectrum, from simple thieves to cold-blooded killers. It wasn’t safe, and it was common for rape and violence to take place unchecked in there.
Those being held for trial were forced to buy their own food and water. Jailers would even sell heat in the winter, that’s how bad it’d become. So Franklin and his fellow reformers demanded change. There were immediate effects that changed much of the system there, but the biggest impact wouldn’t be seen for another forty years.
After decades of campaigning, funding was finally approved for a new prison. But this building would have a different sort of name. Today when we hear the word penitentiary, we think of it as a generic term for a prison, but in the early 1800s, it carried a specific meaning. The root of the word is penitent, which means “to be repentant, to seek change.” And that’s the attitude that this new prison was meant to embody: a building full of inmates who were no longer awaiting a violent end to their lives but instead were improving themselves.
On the outside, Eastern State was designed to look like a gothic castle: intimidating, imposing, and impenetrable. One look at the exterior and most people would give up their life of crime. At least, that was the theory. Inside, though, it was different.
When inmate number 1 entered the building on October 25, 1829, he was ushered into a state-of-the-art facility. Criminals were housed in private cells with shower baths and toilets. Central heating pipes ran throughout the building and into each cell, keeping the inmates warm in the winter. The original cellblocks even included skylights.
This was a huge change. President Andrew Jackson, sitting in his office in the White House, didn’t even have those luxuries. But that lack of modern amenities was offset by the freedom he enjoyed, which is more than we can say for the inmates at Eastern State.
And it was only downhill from there.
PIPES AND BAGS
Central heating and individual toilets sounded like a fantastic idea, but there were problems with them from the start. The plumbing that carried the hot water to each of the cells ran through tunnels that also housed the sewer pipes. As you can imagine, applying heat on a 24/7 basis to pipes that carried human waste is never a good idea. Because of this, the first few cellblocks that were constructed suffered from some odors that were…offensive.
Early doorways in the building were tiny, requiring inmates to stoop low to pass through. And those doors didn’t even open up into the hall inside the building. Instead, cell doors opened outward into tiny outdoor cou
rtyards, where each prisoner was encouraged to be active, to garden, or to meditate quietly. Separating each courtyard were ten-foot walls, meant to discourage communication between the prisoners.
All of this complexity was designed to create an atmosphere of isolation. The toilet system was built the way it was because the prison staff needed to be able to remotely flush the toilets twice a week, rather than give the inmates control over that. Flushing, you see, could be used as a method of communication.
And for those rare moments when a prisoner was being moved through a cellblock and could possibly be seen by other inmates, the prisoner always had a cloth bag over his head. Walking in on his first day, being moved from one block to another, even going out into his private yard; each prisoner wore a cloth bag, sometimes with eye holes cut into it, to engender a deep feeling of isolation. And for a while it worked.
True to the stereotypes that we’ve come to expect from prison movies over the years, Eastern State Penitentiary was no stranger to attempted breakouts. This became possible, in part, because of changes to the layout and flow of the prison itself. Doors were enlarged, access to the internal hallways was opened up, and overcrowding put more than one inmate in each cell.
The first escape attempt was by inmate number 94, William Hamilton. He climbed out a window in the warden’s office, but was caught a short time later. In 1927, William Bishie —an inmate of fifteen years—escaped with a friend. They managed to push a guard off one of the towers and then climb down the side before making a run for freedom.
Bishie was pretty bold. He stayed on the run for seven years, and eventually got a job in Syracuse, New York. What was the job, you might ask? He worked as a crossing guard. For the police department. Like I said, the man had guts.