These hotels are not consoling places. Far from it. Any number of people had hung up their hats on those pegs. Even the flies, if you thought of it, had settled on other people’s noses. As for the cleanliness [. . . ] it wasn’t cleanliness, so much as bareness, frigidity; a thing that had to be. Some arid matron made her rounds at dawn sniffing, peering, causing blue-nosed maids to scour, for all the world as if the next visitor were a joint of meat to be served on a perfectly clean platter.
—Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
I. Exteriors
The Booking
On the phone with the Timberline Lodge, I note that I am coming for the Shining experience. The hotel has long been famous as the exterior of Stanley Kubrick’s Overlook. So I assume the clerk’s lack of enthusiasm is fatigue—many eager horror fans must have claimed the same pilgrimage, as though they were the first to come up with the idea.
But he tells me the owners don’t lean into the association. All he can offer is to put me in 217, the most malevolent room in the book, and let me know that behind the front desk they keep a replica of Jack Torrance’s axe, which guests have posed with for photos.
Those coming to the Timberline expecting the Overlook must have been disappointed in the past, and I sense the booking clerk preparing me. But this is a research trip. My primary goal is not to place myself in some Shining-themed amusement park, but to learn about one of the film’s hotels, and its relationship to that association—and possibly something about the nature of hotels themselves.
The Shining intrigued and terrified me as a teenager, but not because of the ghosts. What most captivated me was the hotel, the idea of a family of three navigating this empty colossus. Much of my life has been lived in small apartments. Growing up in my immigrant family, we were packed tight; I lived with my mom and uncle and grandmother, and my cousins and aunts and grandfather were over all the time. I was always physically aware of where my family was, and therefore the place I stood—my identity within the group—was never lost on me. As I watched The Shining, I wondered what a person did with that much space. Given that scale, that freedom, in what ways would one’s best and worst instincts be allowed—even coaxed—to expand?
The hotel is uncanny by definition, both homely and un-homely, where one performs their most intimate rituals on borrowed time, in a room that will soon accommodate a stranger. They are furnished with the trappings of the private, but experience the traffic of the public. They contain a tangle of associations between home and away that, in film, often dizzies their fictional inhabitants, confusing their sense of self.
So while my project—to stay at the two hotels that figure into the lore of The Shining and record my observations—is a study of hotels, it is also a study of myself in hotels. I will examine my reflection in their mirrors, embrace their unfamiliar scale, take part in their offerings, and see what, or who, emerges from the experience. In other words: I’m here for The Shining, but also because it can be both pleasant and terrifying to step away from one’s own life—especially in a space, an Elsewhere, that encourages the walls of self to become strangely, and illuminatingly, permeable.
I’m also excited by the idea that this hotel might prove fertile ground for ghosts. I am a longtime skeptic, but were I to encounter something that would blow open my capacity for belief, it would come at the perfect moment. A string of dissatisfactions and uncertainties have me worrying over a grim lack of future outcomes. There is an upcoming presidential election weighing on my mind, as well as an unresolved personal crisis—I haven’t seen my wife in six weeks, and when we do talk, there seems little left to say.
From the Timberline’s website:
The 1980 cult-classic film The Shining, based on the Stephen King novel of the same name, used aerial shots of Timberline as parts of its opening scene. Film of the exterior of Timberline Lodge was used for some establishing shots of the fictional Overlook Hotel throughout the movie. Several other shots in the film which purport to show the lodge, such as those of the hedge maze and loading dock, were taken at Elstree Studios in England, using a mock-up of the south face of the lodge. 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, Room 237, was substituted in the film. However, Room 217 is requested more often than any other room at Timberline. Rest assured, Timberline is not haunted!
Arrival Day
Timberline Road is long and winding and, by the time I’m driving it, pitch black. It’s thirty degrees colder up here than in Dallas, and I already regret my packing decisions. The lodge’s exterior is impressive in size, though I can’t quite make out the Overlook. Nor can I see the surrounding area, but I have a feeling it would take my breath away. The only open parking spot abuts a canyon, a drop that isn’t as clearly marked as one would hope. I have the vertiginous realization that with a single misstep on the rental car’s pedal, I’m dead/free.
It’s nine, but it feels much later because the darkness is so dense. I take my rolling bag and forego the front staircase for a side entrance that leads by a number of utility rooms, where the whir of machinery suggests the internal workings of the place. I feel, as I pass the employees only signs, that I’m in part of the hotel I’m not supposed to be. But I do nothing with this privilege, heading to the elevator and front desk, where I check in. When one of the clerks announces my room number, the other leans over.
“Oh,” she says, “Room 217.”
“I requested it,” I say.
“We have the axe,” she says, then steps aside to reveal it.
I’m surprised to see it leaned against the back wall, not under the desk, let alone in a glass case.
“Maybe tomorrow,” I say, smiling. “When there’s daylight.”
I’m hard pressed to identify anything spooky about the place. A group of teens seem to be having their run of the ground floor, some playing table tennis in the Barlow Room, some lounging near the fire. A large Hispanic family poses for a picture in front of the main lobby’s signboard, just as I’m trying to read it. The hotel workers I pass, like the front desk people, seem pleasant and young.
I am not in The Shining. But then there isn’t anything scary about the Overlook when Jack Torrance arrives to interview as caretaker for its upcoming winter off-season. It’s a thriving business, a beautiful hotel; on the surface, the only creepiness comes from the story of Grady, the previous caretaker who murdered his family during an isolation similar to what the Torrances are about to experience.
Perhaps it is not until emptied that the Overlook Hotel reveals its true nature. This is something the hotel manager, Ullman, hits on during the job interview, warning Jack of “the tremendous sense of isolation” that comes with the job—to which Jack confirms that’s what he’s looking for, a writer’s retreat to get some work done. But Ullman makes his point again, saying “solitude and isolation can itself become a problem.”
“Not for me,” says Jack.
The film highlights a horror disconnected from the supernatural—the ontological instability that being alone can provide. When Jack arrives, he’s already carrying a seed of violence; the hotel and its voluminous isolation provide enough disconnection from society’s mitigating forces to allow that seed to sprout.
Room 217 is small and creaky. Though the hotel has updated lodgings, this room has been preserved. On the dresser, by the tv, is a white envelope on which the following is printed:
timberline
We are listening . . .
Sometimes you hear a little more than you wish when staying in a historic hotel like Timberline Lodge. We hope these complimentary disposable earplugs help you rest more peacefully.
caution: choking hazard!
These are not toys or candy, keep away from children.
They aren’t lying—I can hear everything in the hallways, can hear the pillow talk of the people in the adjoining room, as well as every step from the people above me, who are either jumping on the bed, having sex, or tightening the bolts on a piece of furniture. The noise doesn’t bother me. What does is the reminder that these people can also hear me. It highlights the most uncanny aspect of hotels: the fact that you close your door to assumed privacy, while all around you are others, separated by thin walls and a mere few feet. Were I to burst into tears, everyone would look at their companions and tiptoe, hoping not to be noticed.
When I booked this stay in July, my wife considered joining me. But by the time the trip rolled around in October, our marriage fell apart. Without any spectacular acts of betrayal, it can be hard to know why a relationship is failing. But for months, maybe even years, something had been growing between us, something she needed to escape. Really, it was me she needed space from, disappearing to a friend’s house for an undetermined time I can imagine stretching into forever. As I settle into the room now, I feel her absence more strongly than at home. But I’m also glad to be alone. This pull of bisected desires, this fear of the only two available outcomes, seems a sure symptom of my quiet crisis.
What would have happened had Jack Torrance not had a family, had he been sole caretaker of the Overlook? Would its ghosts have seduced him? And if so, how would we have known? Without his family to torment, would his madness have ever become visible?
Before bed I open the envelope to see the bright orange earplugs inside. They do look like candy. And while I don’t eat candy at home, I do have the sudden desire to eat these. Instead, I turn out the lights and listen to the people around me—guests, hotel workers—and try to use the uncanniness to my benefit, to feel like I am sharing a house with all my closest friends, who will only be too happy to see me in the morning.
Friday
Famously, Stephen King hates Kubrick’s adaptation. King had imagined a story about a good father struggling with alcoholism and the demons of his past. The hotel preys upon his points of vulnerability, possessing him to kill his family.
But in Kubrick’s version, Jack begins a little mad. This is clear when I watch alone, and even clearer when I watch at tonight’s Timberline screening—part of a three-day run of showings—with an audience. There are bursts of laughter at Jack’s delivery, the ineffectual concealment of his lunacy. It’s indeed strange, almost comical, that Ullman, who knows the job is mentally trying, doesn’t spot Jack as the exact person who wouldn’t fare well, whose bitterness and anger have brewed a brutal passion that needs only a little coaxing to be unleashed.
I spend the morning writing. In the afternoon, I go in search of someone to talk to me about the hotel’s relationship to the film. There is no one standing at the front desk, so I take a seat near the fireplace. A man and small girl approach the desk. Instead of dinging a bell, they crouch, hiding and ready to pop out. Then, the door to the back opens, and the same front desk woman who announced the night before “Oh, Room 217” appears. Their exchange is brief for all the buildup. The man and girl walk unceremoniously away, leaving the front desk woman at her post.
Was the man her husband, the little girl her daughter? I want to ask, but as I catch her professional smile, I know doing so would breach some contract between us—just as if she were to ask what I was doing here, alone at a family resort.
So I ask if anyone would be willing to speak with me about the hotel’s history, particularly as it may elucidate something for my research project on The Shining.
Even with the context, she repeats what the booking agent told me on the phone—the hotel was only briefly used in the film. The owners never wanted to embrace the association, worried it would scare away their main source of business: families on vacation. The Shining screenings this week are the only events organized around the film, and only to appease those spirited by Halloween season.
I ask about the axe, which she tells me was a gift to the owner. I realize it’s held vertically on a stand I hadn’t noticed the night before. Engraved into it are the words here’s johnny. I’m not disappointed, but the front desk woman seems to think I will be. I want to tell her if she’s worried I’ll think the trip a waste of money, my university is footing the bill. If she’s worried I’ll think it a waste of time, I’ve been alone the last six weeks, with many empty hours.
She suggests an event called Tales from the Vault, a wine tasting with their resident sommelier, who tells ghost stories from the hotel. I’m obviously intrigued, but I don’t drink, so would it be okay, I ask, to tag along without any extra cost? I wouldn’t know how to account for the tour on my expense report.
Both Jack Torrance and I arrive to our respective hotels in the midst of sobriety—his five months (the longest, he says, of his fucking life), mine something like two years. I gather with nine other guests in the narrow, chilled wine vault, the only one not holding a glass. When I announce I don’t drink, a man asks why I’m here. “Just for the stories?”
I meekly correct him. “For the tales.”
The sommelier has been working at the hotel for over thirty years. He continually reminds us that the company line is that it’s not haunted, so take his stories with a grain of salt. They amount to little more than apparitions drifting through walls and keys flying off hooks. He tells one of a jilted lover trying to run over her husband in the Timberline’s parking lot. Before the cops arrived, the woman, fed up, drove her car into the canyon.
The other nine people keep plying the sommelier with questions about the price of certain wines. They emit sounds of affirmation after each number. They make little jokes. I’m annoyed. Amid the chill of the vault, the others must feel my own chill, because the same man who asked why I was there says, “I promise to stop asking about the wine, so we can get to the ghosts,” to which I laugh, as though the idea never occurred to me.
The sommelier becomes tipsy, loose with his movements, losing his train of thought. At one point, he announces this is a democracy, and when everyone votes for another pour, I take the opportunity to leave. As I do, he gives me his card, and tells me to email him if I have any questions.
I eat dinner alone and buy my wife a souvenir—a Timberline iron-on patch, to add to a collection I suspect will outgrow our marriage. I send a picture, counting the few words of her response, then kill time in my room before the screening. It is at the screening that I realize Jack seems somehow less frightening to me now, because I can see his sadness. He has upended his and his family’s entire life to write a novel, and he doesn’t even have a serviceable idea.
Before bed, my phone battery is low. In order to plug it in, I’d have to leave it on the other side of the room. For some reason, not having it in reach makes me uncomfortable, afraid I’ll miss an important message the moment it comes in.
I’d earlier written the hotel’s sommelier, asking if he had any Shining anecdotes, asking why management is so adamant about denying ghosts. And while I’m eager to hear back, his isn’t the message I’m afraid to miss.
Saturday
I wake up to a bounce-back notice, saying my email to the sommelier was undeliverable. I could take this as a sign of conspiracy, but it’s not; just an older man who has let his email fall into disrepair.
Because it’s the weekend, the place is busier, and I hear the lilt of new accents from German, British, and Australian tourists. As I wait in the lobby for my friend Jon, who lives in Portland, I meet a number of tourists. One man, well into his seventies, leads a woman of the same age to the fire, in front of which I’m sitting. He directs her to aim her back at it, and she does, with a look of spreading relief.
“Sorry to obstruct your view,” he says to me.
It turns out the woman is recovering from back surgery, and as another woman who hears this rummages in her purse for Advil, the man asks where I’m from. Living the transient life of an academic, I never know how to answer this question; feeling inauthentic, I tell him I’m from Dallas.
His daughter lives somewhere in north Texas. He himself lives not far from Mount Hood. “I’m a farm boy,” he says, a line he must have used the better part of a century. The woman he’s with, who he jovially calls his girlfriend, lives in California. He has an easy nature that seems to indicate someone not jaded by the cruelty of others—perhaps not even by the current political tumult, from which he is insulated on his farm. But he’s dating at seventy, has a daughter whose exact location he doesn’t know. Some of that easiness must be a cover. Or maybe I’m projecting, because my own smile feels like a mask.
When Jon arrives, I go to the front desk and ask to borrow the axe. We do a touristy photo shoot on the hotel’s front steps. I realize this is the first time I’ve ever wielded an axe. Unsure what to do, I become silly: smirking, appearing uncertain with the axe in my arms, leaning against it as though it is a walking stick.
We eat dinner in the Cascade Dining Room. Jon tells me about a friend with whom he started a literary magazine that put the two of them in close contact for a few years. Eventually, people this friend worked with—writers published by the lit mag, grad school peers—came forward with accusations of harassment. To me, the accused had always oozed friendliness, which I learned was part of a pattern of behavior that ended with him never letting up. Jon also missed the signs, or ignored them. When the truth was revealed, it all came rushing at him, everything he’d hidden from himself.
The friend was recently in a motorcycle accident. Someone pulled in front of him while he was going forty. The friend went flying, needed a series of surgeries to correct his injuries and subsequent infections. Apparently, however, he didn’t use the ordeal to see himself anew, thinking instead that his survival affirmed the path he walked.
The many mirrors prominent in The Shining nudge the viewer to consider the disparities between the way we see ourselves versus the way others see us. If I were to separate the film into two parts, Exterior and Interior—the part which shows the crack in the façade, and the part which shows how deep that fracture cuts—the dividing point is when the phones go down, the snow begins to fall. The camera cuts to Jack, staring through the window at his wife Wendy and son Danny playing outside, a maniacal look on his face. Because he watches through glass, his own image must be overlaid on them. He must be seeing himself as he really is, all the worst parts, looming over his family. And everything on his face suggests he likes, loves what he sees.
At 9:30, I walk Jon out and head to the Barlow Room for another screening of The Shining, hoping the movie’s mirrors might yield more insight. But after twenty minutes of fiddling, the woman from the hotel announces the audio cable is out, so tonight’s screening is canceled.
Sunday
In a couple weeks, I have a campus visit for a tenure-track university position. I’m in the final year of a fellowship, which contributes to the feeling that the next chapter of my life is a total blank. As part of the visit I’ll give a job talk, where I’ll define myself for the better part of an hour. Each afternoon in Room 217, I pull out my notes, start the timer, and practice delivering my speech with confidence. I’m never unaware of how thin the walls are and imagine other guests listening from bed. I could take a break from practice, but I’ve finally gotten a grip on this version of me; were I to not clasp my fingers around it each day, I fear I’d lose it, without time to recover.
In the afternoon I drive down the mountain to a Goodwill I saw on the drive in. There, I look at suit blazers and ties. As I flip through jackets, I try to decide how I want to be seen. But there are more important details to work out: I expect they will inquire about my family life, if only casually over dinner. With so many academics married to people in the same field, they’ll want to know whether to expect a spousal hire. Would it be worse to tell them I’m married, then show up newly divorced? Or to tell them I’m single, only to arrive with my wife of three years? Given the precarious nature of our marriage, I don’t know which bet is safer.
When I return to the Timberline, it’s virtually empty. This is what it must be like on Sunday nights. It feels as though the place has closed and I am still here, haunting its halls: the ghost in Room 217 I’d been assured does not exist.
II. Interiors
A Month Later
At the rental car counter, the clerk asks what I’m doing in Denver. Through shallow breaths, because of the altitude, I tell her I’m going to—“I almost said the Overlook. But the Stanley.”
Her face lights. “And are you staying in Room . . . what’s the number again?”
“217,” I supply. “I am. The Stephen King room they call it.”
“Yep, that’s what they call it.”
She tells me Jim Carrey stayed in Room 217 during the filming for Dumb and Dumber. In the middle of the night, he went down to the front desk and asked to be switched to another room, because a ghost spooked him.
“I hadn’t heard that,” I say.
She nods knowingly, then, either in support of or pity for my upcoming trial, upgrades me to a full size.
In between hotel stays, my wife has returned home. A month is a long time, and not so long. We’ve decided on couples counseling, but nothing is resolved; no clear direction for our future has emerged. My great worry, the harbinger of every failed relationship, is that now that she’s returned, I’ll feel just as alone as when she was gone.
But when I arrive at the Stanley, the man at the front desk has been expecting me. “You’re in Room . . . well, you know what room you’re in,” he says, and slides me the envelope marked 217. It’s Saturday night, and people in ski jackets fill the main lobby. I take the old elevator up to the second floor. In the hallway, I walk past a group of women, and I find Room 217 by following their wondrous eyes.
“Did you book the Stephen King room?” one asks.
“I did,” I say.
“Oh wow. Do you think we could take a peek?”
I’m reminded of the dual nature of hotels: in this room I am supposed to assume privacy, but it’s clear I’ve booked a place of keen public interest.
I open the door and five women my mother’s age follow me in. I had forgotten, but the room comes with a bottle of champagne, which is sitting on ice on the coffee table. One woman asks if I’m on my honeymoon. Another, if my wife is behind me. I later realize she is asking whether my wife is on the stairs, trailing me to our room. But for a second, I think she means right behind me, and I turn, half-hoping to catch one of the room’s many ghosts.
Most of the women filter out while I’m speaking with one. As we’re chatting, three guys and a girl, all younger than me, wander in. The woman asks if these are my friends, and I tell her I’ve never met them.
“You’re probably going to want to shut your door,” she says quietly.
The girl apologizes, realizing this isn’t a tour, that they’ve entered a guest’s room. As everyone is leaving, one of the guys asks if I feel anything. I assume he means any malevolent energy, any fear. I tell the truth: so far I’ve been surrounded by more attention than I’m used to. With this much company, I feel safe. What I don’t tell him is that while most people seem nervous about the thought of encountering a ghost, I’ve reached a point in my life when my skepticism, like my loneliness, has gone stale; I would actually welcome an intrusion, ghostly or otherwise, that could lead to a cosmic shift in perspective.
As I close the door and take stock of the room, what strikes me is how much homier the space is than I’d anticipated. It’s large, and the warm, dark wooden furniture is the kind I might choose were I to have decorated. The bed is a true king. There’s a desk in the corner, where I’m now writing—unlike at the Timberline, where I had to turn the smaller second bed into a makeshift work station. There are two armchairs and a couch, with side tables at each end. Atop a wooden closet rests a small, somehow tasteful bust of Stephen King. His books, and those of other popular writers, line the shelves.
I decide to spend the evening in bed, breaking my two-year sobriety by sipping champagne and watching The Shining on my laptop, seeing if something will emerge in my altered state. I wish I feel the same pleasure Jack does at his first sip, but the champagne tastes like carbonated gasoline. Still, I finish half the bottle before pouring the rest down the sink.
Sunday
I have breakfast at one of the hotel’s restaurants. For some reason, they seat me at the head of the dining room. Though I’m alone, my table is larger than the others and raised a few inches higher. It feels like I’m the guest of honor, at the bridal table of my own wedding—a joke I make to the hostess, who responds that my wife must have left me at the altar.
Afterward, I go on the first of three tours. Our guide takes us around the hotel explaining its history and lore. She expounds on the Jim Carrey story: he requested 217 but didn’t make it through the night, showing up at the front desk in his underwear and demanding a new hotel. He’s never said what happened in that room and vowed never to set foot at the Stanley again, making it a condition of the Dumb and Dumber sequel before he agreed to do it.
Though I’ve remained alert, the only disturbances I’ve felt come from the many tours that pause at my door. I hear the guides lowering their voices, inviting people to take pictures near the numbered plaque. Once, I left my room and surprised a family crouched near the Stephen King nameplate for a photo. They must have thought I was a ghost, and seeing shock twist their faces at my appearance was likely the closest I’ll ever come to being one.
Now on one of these tours myself, we pause outside 217 while others take pictures, disappointed when the guide tells them we aren’t allowed in. I have the disorienting feeling that I am both standing outside the door and lying in bed on the other side, hearing my oohs and ahhs.
Of Stephen King’s stay, we’re told he was living in Boulder at the time. He stopped at the Stanley on a road trip when the weather was bad. That night, when King went to bed, he dreamed the fire hose in the hallway was strangling his two-year-old son. He woke in a cold sweat and went out to the balcony for a cigarette. By the time it was cashed, he’d assembled the entire plot of The Shining. At the time, he was experiencing writer’s block, and it strikes me as fitting that he was able to break it while at a hotel, a place disconnected from real life and its creativity-crushing pressures.
Just two weeks ago, Donald Trump was reelected president. As in 2016, the verdict has shaken me. At the Stanley, however, I feel strangely insulated from troubling considerations—a man on vacation, catching his breath, thinking about a film.
However, it’s hard not to see that Jack Torrance tells his family who he is, in action and words, and they choose to trust him anyway: to not see that Jack, given the office of his position—caretaker—uses the privilege to empower his worst instincts. Wendy eventually discovers who her husband is, what she has so long blinded herself from. It begins with her reading his manuscript pages: endless iterations of the phrase All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, the first glimpse into a cracked mind. When Jack later confronts her, revealing his murderous potential, she retreats up the stairs, struggling to recalibrate her loyalties and expectations.
“I’m very confused,” she says, crying. “I just need a few minutes to think things over.”
“You’ve had your whole fucking life to think things over,” Jack says. “What good’s a few minutes more gonna do you now?”
After the famous bathroom scene, where Jack uses his axe to hack through the door, sticking his face through the gap in the wood to taunt his wife with “Heeeere’s Johnny!” Wendy runs around the hotel, looking for Danny and seeing all the ghosts she hadn’t been able to before. It’s traumatic, painful, and only time will tell how much she will blame herself for missing the signs.
It’s not clear in Kubrick’s movie, but in King’s novel, the character Tony, Danny’s imaginary friend who speaks to him and offers guidance and warnings, is revealed to be Danny—Daniel Anthony Torrance—from the future. It’s a nice idea, a future-you who has access to the insights the present-you doesn’t, and will no longer have to meet with ignorance.
What warnings might our future selves now give us, if they could?
At night, I go on the Shining tour, and when the guide asks if any of us is staying at the hotel, I say I am, though I’m not keen on drawing attention to myself.
“Are you staying on the second floor?”
“Yeah,” I say.
“Okay,” he says. “Even or odd?”
“Odd,” I say, not sure why this has turned into a game.
“Okay,” he says, then it dawns on him. “Are you staying in 217?”
When I confirm I am, everyone gasps. They ply me with questions. I don’t want to disappoint them, ruin whatever mystique the hotel may benefit from, but I tell the truth: if I was nervous about staying here before coming, once I’d arrived and realized it was just a room, I wasn’t afraid. I don’t tell them that contrary to its reputation for unsettling disturbances, it’s one of the most comfortable rooms I’ve ever stayed in.
The questions keep coming, and soon I’ve told them everything about my project, my research, my position at SMU, who is footing the very large bill. It’s a little surprise to me, a normally private person, but the more I share, the closer I feel to these people, and the closer, I can tell, they feel to me. Once the tour concludes, two women ask if they can look inside the room. One is wearing a Stephen King tee shirt. When her friend says she’s an expert on literature, having studied it in college, she blushes and deflects. It’s endearing, and I feel that having been granted this privilege, this wealth in the social currency of the Stanley, means I’m duty-bound to share it. So we walk up and I let them in. I point out the bust of Stephen King and his books on the shelf. They’re impressed and take pictures with the door to 217, just like all the other tourists, except in their photos the door, my door, is open.
When they leave, I get in bed and turn off the lights. I feel heart-warmed as I replay the encounter, the tour. During it, people shared pictures that had green orbs and unaccounted-for reflections in mirrors. In one of the more compelling ones, I saw a ghostly figure that appeared to be wearing a bowler hat. These were from fellow tourists, whose photos were recent, no time to have them doctored. I couldn’t explain them, but for some reason I wasn’t scared either, couldn’t quite believe what my own eyes were telling me.
Then, before I fall asleep, I suddenly hear wailing.
I get out of bed and press my ear to the door. A woman screams, “What the fuck happened to me? What the fuck happened to me?”
The idea of something supernatural flitters to mind—this distress feels like an unexplainable emergence. But soon I realize it’s no ghost.
Two female voices are trying to calm the wailing woman. I can’t make out their words, but she keeps screaming, “What the fuck happened to me?” She cries for a stretch, then repeats a new line. “Rape is no big deal? Rape is no big deal? Rape is no big deal?”
She emphasizes the word as though it is a knife she’s trying to stab her listeners with. I wait for more. But the words fade, and soon I hear nothing.
Monday
In the afternoon, I prepare for virtual conferences with my students, in compensation for the fact that I had to cancel today’s class. Not until I see their faces do I realize how strange it is to have them enter my capsule, my escape from reality. Teaching brings out my best characteristics—patience, generosity, compassion. Despite this, I feel unsettled after the meetings, as though now that I’ve allowed home to pierce my Stanley bubble, I can no longer pretend there isn’t a life waiting for me to attend to it.
I have a tour scheduled for that evening. In the afternoon I go for a drive. Normally, I would prefer to walk the grounds, but the wind chill has temperatures in the teens. I find NPR, where they cover Trump’s plan for mass deportation, his desire to seek a Nobel Peace Prize by mediating a cessation of the war in Ukraine, and his potential impact on climate change—matters of startling consequence. And yet, we are in a strange incubation period. Until January 20, we can only speculate—a sentiment my future self, my own Tony, might shake his head at.
When I return to the hotel, I kill time in the lobby before my tour. As I’m scrolling through my phone, I hear behind me a young woman and man getting to know each other. I recognize her from my first night here, when she was working the information desk for the hotel’s weekend séance. She is dressed in all black with black lipstick and black-dyed hair, all of which contrasts with the white makeup on her already pale face. She says, “I don’t usually come here just to hang,” suggesting it’s her off day. Maybe a first date. Then, during a bout of quiet, she proposes a game with this formulation: the other person is with a romantic partner who is a perfect ten but has one glaring flaw that the other person is supposed to readjust the scale to account for. The young man agrees, and she delivers her first: “She’s a perfect ten, but she still believes in Santa Claus.” He gives it some thought, says that while the effort of maintaining his partner’s belief each year would be a hassle, it would be endearing to be with someone so innocent. He only drops her to an eight.
They continue: “He’s a perfect ten, but he’s rude to waiters. She’s a perfect ten but she has to fall asleep to ASMR. He’s a perfect ten but his shoes will always squeak. She’s a perfect ten but she eats the garnish on restaurant plates . . .”
When things aren’t going well in a person’s longtime relationship, these are the moments they long for. What I wouldn’t give to return to the beginning, when talk was this easy, when laughter slipped so naturally. I crave the tantalizing awkwardness of a first romantic encounter, realizing the possibility that I might never again have one.
But the longer they go on, the more I lose patience, though nothing is being asked of me. Maybe when I was younger I could pretend to be amused by a game this tedious. But now, I would only disappoint the young person who wanted to play. It’s a little reminder that the things we long for in the past, the past selves we wish to rekindle, are gone, which is of course the reason we long for them.
I show up for my tour. Occasionally, we’re invited to wander down dark hallways and steps. Others are a little timid. More than once they look to me, inviting me to go first.
In a basement our tour guide places a lollipop in his palm and speaks with a ghost named Lucy, who communicates by making the candy’s stick stand in the air. Others gasp; I smile, and I can’t tell how much of their reaction is, like mine, meant for the guide’s ego at his simple trick.
The Final Day
With the wind chill, it feels like two degrees outside. So I stay in and decide this is the perfect day to watch The Shining, which I’ve done a dozen times over the last month, for the final time before ending this project.
During this viewing, I find myself focusing on Dick Halloran, the cook for the Overlook. I have trouble situating Halloran in the film. His role, which begins rooted in character, becomes strictly, absurdly plot-based. As he tours Wendy and Danny around the kitchen, he perceives that Danny shares his shine, a psychic ability that allows him to see the ghosts of the hotel. When Jack begins terrorizing his family, Danny uses his shine to summon Halloran to the hotel. Halloran makes the snow-laden journey only to be murdered by Jack the minute he arrives. Even as a kid I thought it strange that so much buildup could be so swiftly dashed. Sure, without Halloran’s arrival on the functioning snowmobile, Wendy and Danny would have no means of escape. But Dick was not just Danny’s teacher, his guide to their shared ability; he was ours, and therefore the film’s potential hero.
As a competent paternal figure, Halloran provides an apt counterpoint to Jack. While Jack blames his family for the failings of his career and his growing bitterness, Halloran is gentle with Wendy and Danny, a troubled boy starting to endure the painful realization that he is different from others. Halloran is quick to risk his life, a life he loses in service of helping the more vulnerable. And yet, Halloran is also vulnerable. Unlike Jack, he has every reason to be bitter, a Black man in the seventies, his ceiling unfairly low. If nothing else, he demonstrates the sacrifice of ego it takes to love others.
As I start to gather my things, ready to end this trip and project, I note that in the novel, Halloran is not only a better developed character, but he is allowed to live. Thumbing through, I find this advice he gives Danny:
The world’s a hard place, Danny. It don’t care. It don’t hate you and me, but it don’t love us, either. Terrible things happen in the world, and they’re things no one can explain [. . .] But see that you get on. That’s your job in this hard world, to keep your love alive and see that you get on, no matter what.
I know there’s much waiting for me back home, some of it great, some awful. Perhaps I embarked on these trips searching for the same thing we all want from our travels: some unexpected certainty that our present and future lives are and will be okay. But what I learned is that the nature of time allows little certainty, and even, or perhaps especially under these conditions, we must, as Halloran urges, find a way to get on.
Before I check out, I tour the hedge maze, a remarkable labyrinth in the film, effectively disorienting those who enter. At the end of the movie, Jack loses himself in the maze and freezes to death. Shining tourists often came to the Stanley in search of the hedge maze, which they were disappointed to learn didn’t actually exist on their grounds. So in 2015 the Stanley erected one. But the surrounding wildlife ate down its walls. It took some trial and error to finally find a plant immune from hungry animals.
Still in progress, today it just reaches my shoulders. As I walk through one final time, I’m aware that I came here, in a sense, hoping to lose myself, just enough to discover something new, to become enlightened or changed. But no matter how deep I go, I can see the maze’s entrance, and therefore my way home, over the potted plants.
—October to November 2024
