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Remember that all work and no play can make Jack a dull boy, so plan your next visit to one of the nation's most horrifying hotels accordingly.
The Shining (1980) is the classic tale of a man slowly going crazy before trying to murder his family with an axe. Oops, spoilers.
It's one of Stanley Kubrick's more beloved films and a horror classic many of us admire anew each and every year around this time. We simply can't get enough of an extremely eerie setting produced by an ingenious method of creating unnatural spaces in and around the film's set.
Absolutely everything about this movie starring Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall is creepy, including the impetus behind the entire story, and that is where we come to the best part for travel lovers with a horror addiction.
As IMDB notes, the actual film was shot on studio sets in England as well as Timberline Lodge in Mount Hood, Oregon.
The one place that continues to draw visitors for its spooky qualities remains the Stanley Hotel, the very place that inspired Stephen King to pen The Shining back in 1974.
The Travel Channel profiled the hotel on its "Most Terrifying Places in America," which highlighted the supposedly haunted hotel in Estes Park.
BBC.com's Lindsey Galloway has more on King's chance visit: "In 1974, famed U.S. horror writer Stephen King and his wife Tabitha lived for a year in Boulder, Colorado. In late October, they spent a night in the mountain resort town of Estes Park, 40 miles northwest of Boulder. They checked into the historic 155-room Stanley Hotel - and found that they were the only guests for one of the last nights of the hotel's season."
When you are King, meandering about a purportedly haunted hotel all alone, possibly getting lost, is cause for inspiration. For the rest of us, this is cause to break out in a cold sweat.
The Stanley embraces every last ounce of its spooky history, dedicating a page to its haunted past. There is even a "Ghost Adventure Package," which comes with, "a guaranteed 4th Floor room, a K2 Meter per reservation, a glow-in-the-dark Stanley Hotel squishy ghost per person, a REDRUM mug per person."
And if you are in the area looking for Halloween festivities, the hotel may just be your spot for ghostly revelry.
While the Murder Mystery Dinner is sold out, visitors can still sign up for the Shining Ball, taking place on Sat., Oct. 25 and the Halloween "Masquerade" Party, kicking off on Halloween night.
Now this isn't the only hotel to get your Shining fix, because the previously mentioned Timberline Lodge has its own share of the movie's lore.
The A.V. Club visited the place that doubles as the Overlook Hotel's exterior:
Pop Pilgrims The Shining from Timberline Lodge on Vimeo.
The hotel's website adds a nice little tidbit about one of the more iconic and horrifying rooms in the movie: "Kubrick was asked not to depict room #217 (featured in the book) in The Shining, because future guests at the Lodge might be afraid to stay there. So a nonexistent room, #237, was substituted in the film. Curiously and somewhat ironically, room #217 is requested more often than any other room at Timberline."
Kubrick may have shot a great deal of the movie on sets created to look like Timberline, but the outcome was well worth the effort, because there is nothing cozy, quaint, warm or inviting about the fictional Overlook.
The result of the movie and the novel of which it's based has created a frenzy for those wanting to replicate a modicum of the chills presented in the King's fictional universe.
While there is no such thing as an Overlook Hotel built on an Indian burial ground, there are a couple of spots that cater to the horror story aficionado in all of us.
Thankfully, there are far more laughs than scares in regards to the lovely Stanley and Timberline if you are inclined to brave travels.
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