Where The Shining Miniseries Was Filmed

333 Wonderview Ave, Estes Park, CO 80517

Most filming-location posts are about a building that stood in for somewhere else. This one isn’t. The Stanley Hotel is the actual place. Stephen King stayed here in 1974, and what happened that night became the Overlook Hotel. Two decades later, King came back and shot the real adaptation here too.

The hotel opened July 4, 1909, built by Freelan Oscar Stanley, the inventor behind the Stanley Steamer automobile. It was a resort for wealthy Easterners and, in its early years, a retreat for tuberculosis patients who came for the mountain air. It’s been on the National Register of Historic Places for decades and it’s still a working hotel today, up at about 7,500 feet with Longs Peak and Rocky Mountain National Park in view from the front lawn.

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The night that started it

In late September 1974, Stephen King and his wife Tabitha checked into the Stanley on a trip out from Boulder, where they were living at the time. It was one of the last nights of the season, the hotel was closing down for winter, and the Kings were more or less the only guests in a 140-room building. They were put in Room 217.

King has said he wandered the empty hotel that night, ate alone in the big dining room, and then had a nightmare about his young son being chased through the halls by a fire hose. That dream is the seed of the book. The Shining came out in 1977, and the fictional Overlook is the Stanley almost room for room, right down to Room 217 itself.

Room 217 already had a story before King ever checked in. In 1911, a housekeeper named Elizabeth Wilson was hurt in a gas explosion while lighting lanterns in that room during a storm. She survived, but guests have reported cold spots, moved belongings, and lights switching on and off in 217 for over a century.

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Kubrick skipped it

Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film never shot a frame at the Stanley. The Overlook’s exterior is Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood in Oregon, and every interior, including the hedge maze, was built on soundstages at EMI Elstree Studios in England. King was open about hating the result. He felt Kubrick had gutted the emotional core of the book, particularly Jack’s alcoholism, and turned Wendy into someone barely resembling the character he’d written.

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King came back and did it himself

In 1997, King got to make the version he wanted. He wrote the teleplay and produced it, Mick Garris directed, and this time it was shot on location at the actual Stanley Hotel in March 1996. Garris has talked about pushing hard for this: the studio wanted to scout a location in Canada instead, and he talked them out of it by getting a couple of executives to spend one night at the Stanley themselves. That was the end of the argument.

The miniseries restores a lot of what Kubrick cut, including the topiary animals from the novel, which Kubrick had replaced with the hedge maze because he didn’t trust the era’s effects to pull off moving hedge sculptures convincingly. King even gives himself a small cameo, as a band leader. Steven Weber played Jack Torrance and Rebecca De Mornay played Wendy.

One odd footnote: the Stanley didn’t actually have a hedge maze until 2015, when the hotel built one on the front lawn as an homage to Kubrick’s film, the one adaptation that was never shot there. A design contest picked the layout, out of entries from over 30 countries.

[PHOTO: the hedge maze, or the fourth-floor hallway if you got a shot of it]

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What happened when I stayed

The Stanley keeps a handful of rooms officially designated as its most active: 217, 401, 407, and 428, each with its own separate history of reports attached to it. I stayed in one of those rooms. I don’t remember the exact number anymore, but I remember the night.

The door slammed on its own more than once, hard enough that there was no mistaking it for a draft. A drinking glass cracked and then shattered outright with nobody near it. And more than once, we heard footsteps running across the room in the middle of the night, with nobody there to make them.

I’ve been to a lot of supposedly haunted places for this site. Most of them give you nothing, or something explainable if you look hard enough. The Stanley is one of the few where I left genuinely unsure what to make of it.