Despite a love of all things cryptozoological and a penchant for interviewing UFOlogists, I consider myself a skeptic. I don’t believe in Bigfoot because I’m convinced he’s actually out there, but rather because, well, why not? There’s no harm in hoping that the world is more magical. And, really, a lot of disbelief of the paranormal tends to be based on some kind of human exceptionalism, and, seriously, have you met us?
If nothing else, though, I love a good story, be it about sasquatches or little grey men — or ghosts.
This was a realization I had as Monica and I were on our way up to the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado. The hotel is (in)famous for inspiring Stephen King’s The Shining, and is said to have several spirits still roaming its halls. We were in town anyway, so we signed up for one of the hotel’s night tours, to hear all the spooky tales and supernatural sightings.
Stephen King and The Shining — the book, the movie and the miniseries — were clearly the draw of the tour. We wasted no time in visiting Room 217, the room spooky enough to both inspire King and scare Jim Carrey so bad that he ran into the hall in his underwear and requested to be moved to another building.
(Carrey had filmed Dumb and Dumber at the hotel. He’d requested Room 217 specifically, but didn’t make it a night. To this day, he won’t say what happened and routinely leaves interviews if asked. When they filmed the sequel, he had it put into his contract that the Stanley couldn’t be used as a filming location.)
The room was, to be honest, just a room. The hotel was old and ornate, sure, but I didn’t get a particularly “haunted” vibe. Even as we went up to the fourth floor, the favorite of numerous paranormal investigators and home of most of the ghost stories in the hotel, nothing felt particularly out of place.
Still, when our tour guide suggested that we should take a ton of pictures — to better our chances of catching a ghost — I obliged. The architecture was cool and the carpets were highly reminiscent of the ones in The Shining, if nothing else.
After we passed by Room 401 and heard the stories of the ghost children who ran around the floor– and pointedly didn’t hear the stories about Lord Dunraven’s lecherous spirit, at his family’s request — I turned around and took a few photos of the hallway.
That’s when things got weird.
There are weird blue lights right outside Room 401 — and they seem to be moving.
Initially, I thought these were just reflections from the lights, either off my camera or the walls, but, well, here are some things you might need to know:
1. I wasn’t moving.
2. The flash was off.
3. They can’t be reflections off the walls, since there are reflections on the notably non-reflective carpet.
4. Pretty sure white lights don’t reflect blue? In a red and cream hallway?
5. Those are the only “reflections” that showed up the entire time I was in the hotel. As you’ll see below, in an identical hallway on the same floor, with the same lights and same walls, there are no blue dots.
Look, I will readily admit that I have a bit of a tremor, so my camera probably wasn’t as still as it could have been. But, even then, the lights seem to rearrange themselves slightly every time; the angles and spaces between them are different in every photo. And I think I’ve taken enough shaky, into-the-light pictures to understand reflections.
I showed the photos to our tour guide, Frankie, at the end, and she explained that paranormal investigators give “weird spots” two specific criteria for being evidence of ghosts: a metallic color and movement.
So, yeah.
Did I actually see a ghost? Did our entire tour group just stroll right past the restless spirits of dead children or a creepy land baron? Do I actually believe any of that?
I don’t know.
But, I mean, it is a pretty good story.
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