The Stanley Hotel: The Sick Man Who Built a Palace to Breathe and the Guests Who Never Checked Out
There is a particular kind of building that comes into the world already carrying a debt. Not a mortgage — something older than money. A debt of the sort that gets paid in decades rather than dollars, and never quite gets paid in full. The Stanley Hotel sits at seven thousand five hundred feet in Estes Park, Colorado, white as a bone against the dark shoulder of the Rockies. It looks like a wedding cake somebody left out on a mountain. And it exists for one reason, which is stranger and sadder than any of the ghost stories that have grown over it like ivy: a dying man built it because the air up there let him keep breathing. The Man Who Was Sent Away to Die Freelan Oscar Stanley was a New England Yankee of the old, flinty, tinkering kind. He and his twin brother Francis had already made themselves rich twice over — first by inventing a dry-plate photographic process they sold to George Eastman, then by building the Stanley Steamer, an automobile that ran on boiling water and could ...