HAUNTED HOTELS

In 1974, while on vacation with his wife in Estes Park, Colorado, Stephen King spent a lovely night in Room 217 of the Stanley Hotel. Lovely, that is, if you make your living scaring the bejeebers out of people.

The stay was so odd and his dreams so haunting, that King used the night at the Stanley as inspiration for his best-selling thriller The Shining, which Stanley Kubrick turned into a psychological thriller by the same name starring Jack Nicholson.

Here’s how it all came to be.

“The hotel staff were just getting ready to close for the season, and we found ourselves the only guests in the place — with all those long, empty corridors,” King explains on his website. He and his wife, Tabitha, were served dinner in an empty dining room accompanied by canned orchestral music.

“Except for our table, all the chairs were up on the tables. So the music is echoing down the hall, and, I mean, it was like God had put me there to hear that and see those things,” King