All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy.

can see if I will be anywhere near you. A lot of these do have meet and greed options too, so if you want to get a photo of me or ask me a question personally, this is your chance, so please check it out and hopefully we will get to meet in person and talk about spooky things. My favorite one Chili autumn night, a man and his wife stayed alone at a lonely hotel nearly abandoned as the staff prepared to close. Was the warm weather destination for

the winter. After she had gone to bed for the night, he couldn't sleep, so he went exploring the hotel's long, dark corridors. Eventually he found the hotel bar, where a bartender named Grady served him a drinker too. When the man returned back to his room later that night. Inspired by the remote location of the hotel and the eerie air of desolation in its empty rooms. He went into the bathroom and pulled back the curtain on the cloth foot tub. What if someone died here, he thought to himself.

At that moment, Stephen King knew he had a book to write. I'm Amy Bruney, and this is haunted Road. There may be no hotel more deeply embedded in horror lore than the Stanley, the hotel in Estes Park, Colorado that inspired Stephen King to write The Shining, the book that has become one of the most famous and most frightening stories of all time, and its sequel, Doctor Sleep. But Stephen King never saw any ghosts in the Stanley Hotel. His experience was totally normal, not paranormal, even if it

was extremely spooky. I mean, who wouldn't be creeped out spending the night in a nearly abandoned hotel. The answer is me. I once spent the night as the only guest in the Mount Washington Hotel in New Hampshire, and it was one of my most favorite experiences ever. But I digress. The Shining undoubtedly put the hotel in a different stratosphere of fame, though I just want to be clear,

the movie wasn't filmed there at all. Stanley Kubrick's version was filmed in Pinewood Studios in London, and the exterior shots of the building are of the Timberline Lodge in Oregon. Long before a certain horror writer passed through its doors, the Stanley had a reputation for strange noises in the night, for ghastly apparitions in hotel rooms, and unexplainable things happening

all around. In fact, the Stanley more than a century of curious history, and it all started with the tuberculosis epidemic. In nineteen oh three, freelan Oscar Stanley went to the mountains of Colorado with his wife Flora. Stanley, with his twin brother Francis, invented a photographic process they sold to Kodak and the Stanley Steamer train car. But despite his riches and his success, Stanley was suffering from a case

of tuberculosis that was quickly killing him. By the time he and Flora departed for the Mountains of Colorado, doctors had told Stanley he only had three months to live. Upon arriving in Estes Park, about an hour and a half from Denver, He almost immediately began to feel better. Stanley made a full recovery, due in part to the

crisp mountain air of the Rocky Mountains. You might remember from our Waverley Hills episode that not everyone who went away for a tuberculosis rescue, especially at that Kentucky sanatorium, had such a fortunate fate. Despite his prognosis of having three months to live, Stanley lived another thirty seven. In years before Western settlers arrived, the Estes Park area was a summer destination for the Ute and Arapaho tribes and became a gold rush town in eighteen fifty nine when

prospector Joel Estes arrived in the area. When Stanley visited, the town was a tourist destination, but only offering simple accommodations, not the kind the wealthy inventor was used to. Stanley started building what would become the Stanley Hotel in nineteen o seven, building on land that had originally belonged to an Irish earl, Lord Dunraven. The earl had illegally homesteaded six thousand acres to create a private hunting reserve and

built a hunting lodge, cabin and hotel for guests. As Kathy Wiser Alexander wrote in Legends of America, Dunraven was finally run out of the area after trying to swindle folks out of their land and money. Stanley had originally planned on naming the hotel after Lord Dunraven, but locals had other ideas. In September, ses Park residents approached Stanley with a deer skin petition and asking him to name

the hotel after himself instead. The Stanley Hotel opened on June twenty second, n o nine and makes a grand first impression. The main hotel building is built in the Colonial Georgian Revival style, four stories tall and painted mustard yellow with a vibrant red roof. The design was particularly striking for its contrast with the rugged, rocky mountain landscape. The style was a departure from the rustic accommodations otherwise offered in Estes Park. It was also one of the

first hotels west of the Mississippi to have electricity. The property is sixty eight acres. In addition to the one forty room hotel, there are the manor House, Stanley Hall, the carriage House, the north and south dormitories, the laundry building, the boiler house, the manager's cottage, the gatekeeper's house, the maintenance building, and the swimming pool cabana, some of which

are connected by underground tunnels. The Stanley cost over five hundred thousand dollars to build, over fifteen million dollars in today's money. According to the hotel's history, the first guests who pulled up and stylish Stanley design steam cars were astonished at what they saw. Here in this mountain wilderness, surrounded by the rustic haunts of the hunter and homesteader, was an edifice that withstood comparison to the posh hotels

back east. Electric lights, telephones, and suite bathrooms. A staff of uniformed servants and a fleet of automobiles were at their disposal. If the outside was impressive, the interior was even more grand. Guests walking in would see a lobby with carved wooden walls in several fireplaces, and a grand staircase leading up to the guest floors. The original Otis elevator from nineteen o nine is still in use today, and there's an original Stanley steamer on display in the lobby.

The hotel has a bar, dining room, music room, and billiard room, as well as lounges and meeting rooms. As Steve Winston wrote in Western Art and Architecture, the public rooms are filled with dark woods, brass, old West shandel years, bronzes of wild animals, old books and photos, and authentic period furniture and accessories. Bedrooms are reminiscent of the West's Golden Age, with large headboards and angled ceilings with round lights. One thing the hotel didn't have when it opened was heat.

Stanley designed the resort as a summer only destination for the wealthy set who traveled seasonally, not as a hotel that would stay open throughout the year. The first guest to the Stanley were members of the Colorado pharmacall Association, who met there for their twentieth annual meeting. According to a newspaper article of the day in the Weekly Courier, the Druggists were loud in their praise of the magnificent establishment. In those early days, many well to do visitors stayed

the entire summer season. Adults stayed on the lower levels, while children and nannies stayed on the fourth floor, where kids could play freely and stay out of sight of their parents and not disturb other guests. It wasn't long before made your accident shook the hotel. On June nineteen eleven, a thunderstorm cut the power to the resort, and gas lamps were lit as a backup. When chambermaid Elizabeth Warren entered Room two one seven with a lip candle, she

had no idea there was a gas leak. The explosion destroyed the west wing of the hotel, about ten percent of the building. The explosion plummeted Wilson down one floor into the Wilson dining room. She was badly injured with two broken ankles, but she recovered. The Stanley paid all of her medical bills and promoted Wilson to head chambermaid when she returned to work. She stayed at the Stanley

until her death in the nineteen fifties. At the time, Room to seventeen, which you might want to remember for later, was the lavish Presidential Suite, also encompassing modern day Room to fifteen. Pieces of carpet and drywall from Room to seventeen were found in the tunnels under the hotel during renovations. As barboyer Buck wrote, in the Estes Park Trail Gazette.

The discovered pieces of drywall are paid papered with a brightly colored floral pattern in reds, pinks, and greens, and the carpet fragment is a grass green with red and blue details. The success of the hotel helped Estes Park improve as well as the hotel describes. By nineteen seventeen, the town had waterworks, a power plant, and civic organizations that were all in some way thanks to Stanley. The hotel also transported elk from Montana to repopulate the depleted

local population. Because of his contributions to the area, F O. Stanley is sometimes called the grandfather of Estes Park. Stanley sold the hotel in nineteen six, but the new owners went into debt, and he repurchased the hotel in nineteen nine before reselling it. In the coming decades, the hotel stayed largely the same, with a few improvements. In ninety five, the facade was changed from its original yellow to the white it is today. In the early nineteen fifties, the

owners installed a swimming pool. Beginning in the nineteen sixties, the hotel began to fall into disrepair. In nineteen eight to a devastating flood hit Estes Park, and the Stanley was used as a National Guard command center. The main hotel got a heating system about this same time. It wasn't until the nineteen nineties that the hotel was restored

to its current state. Over the years, the Stanley hosted everyone from Theodor Roosevelt, John Philips, Sosa and the unsingable Molly Brown, to Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and a variety of foreign dignitaries in Hollywood stars. When Stephen and Tabitha King stayed there in nineteen seventy four, they stayed in Room to seventeen, the same room from the explosion more

than six decades earlier. At the time, he was working on a novel called Dark Shine, set in an amusement park, but King wasn't happy with the setting of the book. As King describes it, while we were living in Boulder, we heard about this terrific old mountain resort hotel and decided to give it a try. But when we arrived, they were just getting ready to close for the season, and we found ourselves the only guests in the place with all those long empty core doors. King and his

wife were served dinner in an empty dining room. He said, except for our table, all the chairs were up on the tables. So the music is echoing down the hall, and I mean it. It was like God had put me there to hear that and see those things. And by the time I went to bed that night, I had the whole book in my mind. In another retelling, King said, I dreamed of my three year old son running through the corridors, looking back over his shoulders, eyes wide,

screaming he was being chased by a fire hose. I woke up with a tremendous jerk, sweating all over. Within an inch of falling out of bed, I got up, lit a cigarette, sat in a chair, looking out the window at the Rockies, and by the time the cigarette was done, I had the bones of the shining firmly set in my mind. Kubrick's film plays NonStop on a channel on every hotel room television. Stephen King isn't the only notable person to have stayed in Room two seventeen.

When Jim Carrey was in Esta's Park filming classic film Dumb and Dumber, he stayed in that same room. He was allegedly so spooked that he didn't even last a full night. Today, four hundred thousand people visit the Stanley Hotel every year, about one d twenty thousand of them stay overnight. Visitors today can explore a hedge maze similar to the one in the Shining, but on a much much smaller scale, which the hotel built in well, four

hundred thousand living people visit the Stanley every year. If we were counting dead people, that number might be a lot higher. The thing is, aside from the explosion in nineteen eleven, the Stanley hasn't been the site of any major accidents or tragic deaths on the property that would account for the hotel being one of the most haunted

in America. Some believe that the hauntings at the hotel are attributable to the geology of the minerals found in the mountain the hotel is built on, which has significant amounts of limestone and courts said to amplify paranormal activity. My friend John Tenney has another theory. If people can go anywhere they want after they die, why wouldn't they want to visit places as they loved during their life? And his view, ghosts are going on vacation to the

Stanley the same way living people do. Room to seventeen lives up to its spooky reputation. The ghost of Elizabeth Wilson is said to appear in the room, often cleaning up after guests, much as she would have done in life. Some guests report that she unpacks their suitcases and tucks

them into bed. Stephanie Earles, writing in Out There Colorado, writes that unmarried couples sharing a bed complained of an invisible force wedging them apart as they slept, and single men woke to find their bags have been packed and left outside the door. Guests have reported the door opening and closing by itself, and bathroom faucets operating on their own. Some say they've seen a woman in old fashioned clothing around the area, just like Princess Caroline Stickney stays around

the Mount Washington Hotel, overseeing the place. The Stanleys are also said to haunt their hotel. Fo died in nineteen forty and his wife, Flora, died in nineteen thirty nine. His presence is often sensed at the hotel bar and in the billiard room, and his reflection has been seen in an antique mirror in the hotel. Guests who are checking in sometimes say they see him at the reception desk.

As Nancy Williams wrote in Haunted Hotels of Northern Colorado, clerks at the front desk have seen the chairs quietly rocking on the front porch when there's no breeze and no one is sitting in them. Mr Stanley's large wooden rocker his favorite, often moves slowly back and forth. Flora, on the other hand, smells of roses wherever she goes, and likes to play the piano in the concert hall.

Kathy Wiser Alexander wrote in Legends of America that employees and guests have reported hearing music coming from the room, and when they take a peek in there, they can see the piano keys moving. However, as soon as someone walks across the threshold to investigate further, the music stops and no more movement can be seen upon the keys. Haunted Hotels of Northern Colorado reported that a man wrote to the hotel about his experience of seeing a young

woman playing the piano. He said when he approached, she was suddenly transformed into an elderly woman, and then she disappeared. The Stanleys, though, aren't the only owners of the property who are said to haunt the Stanley. Lord Dunraven himself is said to haunt rooms four oh one and four oh seven. There's a male ghost in room four a one who said to inappropriately touch female guests. He's also said to steal and hide women's jewelry. Closet door in

this room also opens and closes on its own. Uncover Colorado reports that one man claims he witnessed his wedding ring inexplicably moved from the bathroom counter and fall down the drain of the sink in the bathroom. Lord Dunraven is known to turn lights on and off in room four oh seven, and a ghostly face is sometimes seen

peering out the window of the room. According to Uncover Colorado, multiple guests have reported the odd experience of being tucked into bed by some invisible force, and others have felt someone sit on the foot of the bed, only to find nothing but an indentation on the covers when they switched on the light. But those are only of the

many many ghosts of the Stanley. Other ghostly reports on the property include the ghosts of a pastry chef who makes the employee tunnels under the hotel smell like baked goods. Some claim this to be the ghost of a French chef named Pierre who died in a tunnel collapse, but this appears to be a myth. Charles Stansfield wrote in Haunted Colorado that guests whose rooms are near the elevators sometimes complain about the elevators moving noisily up and down

the shafts continuously very late at night. Those bold enough to open their room doors and look down the corridor report that people dressed in nineteen twenties style tuxedos and evening gowns can be seen entering or leaving the elevators, but the elevator doors remain closed. There are many reports of ghosts of children on the fourth floor, where kids and nanny's once stayed. They are especially heard running in the hallways or on the roof where kids were once

allowed to play. Legends of America said that one couple reportedly checked out of the hotel very early in the morning, complaining that the children in the hallway kept them up all night. However, there were no children booked in the hotel at the time. The ghost of a little boy sometimes tries to wake up sleeping children because he wants to play another polls pranks like turning on the television as loudly as possible and flicking the light switch so

people will notice him. A little girl is often seen on the central staircase. A cowboy ghost in room four is reported to loom over you while you sleep, but the good news is that he's said to be friendly and even once politely left the room when requested to by startled guests. Locals believe he's the spirit of James Nugent known as Rocky Mountain Jim, a local explorer who helped found the town. Others believe that he's the ghost

of a frontiersman who was hanged for murder. The concert hall is said to be haunted by a ghost named Lucy. Brittany Annas writes for Trips Savvy that she was a runaway or homeless woman who found refuge in the hall,

but no evidence of this exists. Some say that this happened in the nineteen seventies and that she was a young teen had been squatting in the basement before being kicked out by maintenance staff and freezing to death in A woman on a ghost tour took a photograph that some claim shows Lucy, a young girl in a pink dress. Others claim that there is an additional ghost in the concert hall named Paul, said to be the spirit of a former employee. Nightly Spirits writes that, among other duties,

Paul used to enforce the eleven PM curfew. In the hotel's early days, guests and employees report hearing someone telling them to get out late at night. A construction worker was doing some work on the floors in the concert hall when he felt someone nudge him several times until he left. The hotel's main stairway has been nicknamed the Vortex, believed to be a center of energy that functions as a paranormal portal, allowing ghosts to appear and disappear it will.

I'm not sure that I buy that, but apparitions often thought to be the Stanleys, have been reported on the staircase. In a tourists took a photograph that some claim shows a ghostly figure in period us at the top of the stairs, another Stephen King Tidbitt. The hotel also has a pet cemetery on site. Uncover Colorado writes that Cassie, a friendly golden retriever, is said to still deliver newspapers and scratch at the doors to be let in from outside,

despite being buried at the grounds. Up next, I have my dear friend Carl Peiffer joining us. We're going to talk about his time as one of the resident paranormal investigators at the Stanley Hotel and will also chat the Estes method or the spirit Box experiment as you may know it if you're a kindred Spirits fan. That's right, that technique was born at the Stanley Hotel. That's up after the break. I am joined now by Mr Carl Pheiffer,

who we go way back. Carl. We're just kind of decide what to call you as far as like what your position in life is these days. But I mean, I knew you as paranormal researcher. I know you as director, brilliant photographer and artists like there, you are jack of all trades, it seems, thank you. Yeah. Yeah. I love creativity and I've kind of been exploring all different facets of it. And I mean creativity and the paranormal are

my two big passions. So anywhere that I can blend those two and have fun and make a couple of bucks from it is really the light goal at this point, right. I feel like a lot of us who are kind of in the paranormal field, it's it is trying to make a living out of something that we love, which I think is the case for a lot of people who have a passion about something. And so I think it's great to be able to meld those two things in your world. And you're brilliant at it, So I

love it. I've been privileged enough to have you photographed me a few times and they always turn out lovely, So I have on some of those shots. They're fantastic. Yeah, a lot of fun. So I met you years ago. I might have met you before the Stanley, but in my brain, I feel like Carl is just always at the Stanley Hotel. You know, it were kind of a

staple there. I have spent so much time at that hotel and I have just such phenomenal memories of it, and just to kind of take it back for one moment before we get into the hauntings and things and theories, So years and years ago, I attended a what was a Darkness event hosted by Dave Schrader Back I want to say, probably two thousands, six or seven with Chris Williams, and she had just started on ghost Hunters. I wasn't

even involved in ghost Hunters. She and I were just really good friends, and at the last minute we decided to go there because we heard they were fun, and there wasn't even rooms at the hotel, so I think we stayed at like a holiday inn or something. But you know, I got to this event with a few hundred paranormal people and I was like, Oh, I have

found my people. I have found my tribe of weirdos, like, you know, because I kind of had been going through my paranormal interest for so long, you know, feeling like it was kind of an unusual thing. But here I was in this place, surrounded by people from all walks of life who were super interested in the same thing I was, and it was this like serious awakening for me. So years would go by and I would go up

to the Stanley every year, usually in April. And so it started with Darkness events, and then I had a company called Beyond Reality Events, and we had a big paranormal event every year, and then Strange Escapes went there, and sometimes I go at multiple times a year, and so like, I have pictures of my daughter Charlotte from the time when she was like a little tiny nugget until she was four or five on the same spot every year because I wanted to get pictures of her growing.

And then one year the Stanley decided they didn't want to do paranormal events anymore. And it just kind of like, which is completely their prerogative, and you know, we should never feel as though we are owed any you know, spot at that table at a place. I'm sure it's just some sort of internal business decision that made sense

to them. So I don't fault them at all, and I highly encourage everyone to go visit there because it is gorgeous and beautiful ghosts aside, But it was this moment of like, oh, this tradition is gone, and I just never expected it to happen like that. It was just so strange, and so now I never take that for granted. When a location lets us come in and and look and talk to their ghosts, you to look at and talk to their ghosts, So it's just kind

of a life lesson. But I have nothing but fond memories of the place, and I would go back in a heartbeat. It's just now it's you know, across the country for me. So yeah, it's it's a wonderful place that has presence. It has this excellent kind of magic to it and this prestige the way it's situated and laid out in the history. Yeah, I think the ghosts just weren't really on brand anymore for kind of business facing, wedding facing event facing have a drink on the porch

kind of a kind of a brand. So I think I just kind of moved on from that, which is a bummer because I love the way the ghosts in history mesh. But you know, I can definitely understand, and it's still an absolutely magical place to visit, absolutely, and so you know, I do hope to get back there at some point, you know, I just us I think sometimes it would just tug at my heart strings a little bit. So, but you know, it's also they're not

the first place to do that. So like I said, I don't I don't blame them at all, you know, I do kind of send them an email once every year or two, just kind of letting them know that I'm still here. If they ever decided to take that

up again, I'd be happy to assist. So but that being said, I've had a number of experiences there over the years, as I'm sure you have to, which it doesn't always make a ton of sense because there hasn't been some major tragedy at the Stanley, Like I have found a number of deaths over the years of guests and things, but you know, it's kind of mostly from natural causes. But what do you think is going on there exactly? And what are some of the experiences you

think people could expect to have there? It was, I mean, it was very much. One of the most common questions that was asked to us was like, why is this place as haunted is or even haunted at all? And back in the time we sort of kind of attributed it to the fact that a lot of people had

so many happy memories there. I know that my friend Aidan Sinclair, who's a magician in residents up there at the hotel, he attributes it to like, if there is an afterlife, maybe the afterlife is us spending the time where we were happy at the most and for a lot of people that was to Stanley, especially historically speaking, when the hotel was seasonal and it was only open

in the warmer months. A lot of people would go and stay four months at a time back in those days, rather than just the occasional weekend or weekday like we do now, and so a lot of people I think that their Stanley experience was much more embedded than the way that we typically look at at resort hotels now as being a lot more of a brief stay. So I think that there could be some longevity in that regarden, just people spending their summers in such a beautiful place

up there. But more of my kind of current research now points towards the liminality of the hotels and how people come and go constantly, and there's this kind of like movement of this energy, and it's this in between space where it feels like a homer residents, but nobody stays there for very long, and that seeming to facilitate paranormal activity and high strangeness I think could absolutely be a factor, and not just the Stanley, but many of

the hotels out there. It doesn't have to be a creepy or unsettling aspect, but just sort of the nature of the place contributes to the paroral activity. A lot of people used to associate like courts and limestone with the hotel, but when we were up there, we found that there was not really too much of that going on under the hotel. So as far as the mineral explanation,

that doesn't hold up quite as well. But I think that the liminality and the historical presence of the place and the experience for a lot of people probably contributes the most to that. Yeah, and I I agree. And then I've sometimes wondered because you have this idea that you know, Stephen King stayed there and came up with

the shining, and there's so many rumors around that. We covered that in the first half of the podcast kind of what the reality is with that, but people, I think associated it so heavily with the shining and that sort of a haunting that it makes me wonder if people with that expectation in mind arrived and you know, kind of brought that energy with them and almost infused a haunting into that hotel, especially when it was being

so actively investigated. You know, it kind of just became this giant thought form or something, because the hauntings were so fluid there. I felt like over my years of investigating it, it wasn't a lot of really like they did get to know us, like I know they knew my name over time, but the activity wasn't completely It wasn't something you could easily replicate. It changed constantly. Yes, yeah, I mean that's another angle that I think about all

the time too. It is that sort of thought form idea and how much of of hauntings that we're experiencing or just from us, the stuff that we're kind of psychically or spiritually projecting outwards, and whether that's giving them life or giving them form, like actually manifesting that. You look at how many people have read the Shining and

project out of the hotel. How many people even visit the hotel and think that the Kubrick movie was filmed there totally wasn't Like it doesn't really look the same once you compare them side by side. I mean, I wonder sometimes maybe this wasn't the platform to to make it. But sometimes I wonder if the Stanley is going to burn down one day because so many people book spoilers. I suppose here like so many people, I read that book and like, look at that hotel and are projecting

that onto it. That you kind of wonder how much of that was a factor. I mean, it's certainly put it on the map historically, but from a spiritual standpoint, it's definitely a big question mark that I think is fascinating, right, I mean I never even thought of that, but you never know. It is so interesting what I think we can manifest just with our mind and expectations. So that being said, as far as the activity goes there, I

have had some of the craziest experiences there. I think probably the one that stands out in my mind the most, and I still have the video of this. I don't know what has become of the carriage house. I feel like it has since been has it been renovated or Yeah, because that was also on the Historical Buildings What do you call that? That slips my mind here, Oh, the

Historical Hotels of America the Register of Historic Places. Yeah, I think that the secondary buildings were included on that, so they wound up tearing it down, but I think that the rebuild had to keep to the certain foundational specifications of the original, so that's now a restaurant, and that's actually where Aiden's Underground Theater is is underneath where the carriage house used to be built. It's very strange to see a bit flourishing now after driving by it

all condemned for so many years. Yeah, and so we had I had Aidan on the podcast. He talked about the Queen Mary for me, so listeners are definitely familiar with him. I mean, that's really interesting. Now I really do have to get back and see all of these kind of changes. But before that happened, it was that, like you were saying, this kind of rundown building that

it was not open to the public. But we were able to investigate it over the years just because I became friends with so many people there, and I had this experience out there one night multiple but there was one night I was out there, I want to say it was with Grant Wilson and his wife Rihanna, and I think Britt Griffith and we were and maybe Raven actually, I think Raven might have been there too, and so we were just kind of standing we were all watching

this shadow move in the back corner like oh, most like it was kind of avoiding us, but we could see it moving very clearly against kind of the moonlight coming through the boards in the wall, and then also there was light coming in from underneath the doors. Like I said, I have this on video, have the sound of it. We're standing there and all of a sudden, you hear feet in the dirt because the floor was dirt,

just running like rushing me so fast. You just hear dunt dunes like straight like I if that was a live person, I would have thought they were going to just barrel me over, like tackle me. And you hear it just runs straight up to me and just stop. And it was very threatening and I stood my ground. But I've never experienced anything like that. Since it still stands as one of the craziest experiences I've had. And the fact that you can hear it, I'll have to

dig up the recording. I think it's on my MySpace page, which tells you how long ago this happened, but it is it was wild. I mean, I don't know, did you have you had anything like that happened there or do you have any ideas of what that could be to some And yeah, I investigate the carriage house probably two or three times during that time period, and it's

got a weird vibe in their weird energy. The couple of times I was in there, we didn't have too much like objectively happen, but there was a sense in there that would kind of come and go and creep over you and kind of surround you in a way that I always attributed to feeling very animalistic and not exactly like your typical kind of like a human haunt

or residual haunt. And maybe this has a lot of me projecting an interpretation into it, but it felt kind of like that's where certain things that weren't very social went to go hang out on the Stanley grounds, you know, everywhere else is so busy, like the continent or the carriage house. Felt like that was where they were just

kind of hanging out where nobody went. And that could be the animalistic, almost elemental type of energy to that could be similar, or I could be relating it to another story I had a couple of months after I first got to the hotel, myself, the parental investigator at the time, Callie and my friend Connor were investigating in room two in the manor house. It was one of the rare instances that I ashamedly say that I dozed off on a ghost hunt right laying had a comfy

bed at two in the morning. It happens to the best of us. Yeah, But I saw the like most vivid, clear image pop into my head in this like ten seconds that I like kind of gotten into that, you know, in between him the gagic state, and it was this weird, scary face of like a man's face crossed the pig's face with instead of eyes only these two like hollow eye sockets. It was very unsettling, but it didn't freak

me out, Like I didn't feel weird about it. But he was standing there almost like I was wearing a suit or something, Like I was looking at it like through a people on a door or something, and I thought it was really weird. Didn't bother me too much. But the weird aspect about it was that I think a couple of days later, Cali was telling that story to the resident psychic at the time at the hotel,

Madame Vera. She she's great, and I think she said that she had experienced the exact same thing in that exact same room about a year beforehand, and she attributed it to being an elemental spirit of the land that was there for much longer than the hotel itself, and so I thought that was like really interesting in the way that it's sort of validated the experience that I had had. Was her talking about that as well, and

so maybe it flavored my perception of it. But I think that a lot of that towards the edges of the property, so to speak, when it comes to the carriage house, makes me wonder how much more is kind of going on in that area that could be a less human, more elemental, more nature spirit type of energy

there rather than just kind of the typical hauntings. You know, it's funny to me because the Stanley actually draws a lot of parallels for me to the Mount Washington Hotel, and the Mount Washington has something very similar in their Presidential wing that kind of runs around like you can hear its footsteps out there at night, and some people and this is the new wing, you know, it's not, you know, this is a recently built addition, and we've always kind of had that same vibe, and it's often

the mountains, you know, the White Mountains of New hamp Sure it just makes you wonder, like what comes from these places and starts to inhabit these hotels. You know, it's just so interesting to think about. But yeah, that actually really jives with the activity with that running kind of like threatening, like in your face kind of activity, for sure. I would say also probably high on the list of I mean, gosh, I've had some experiences there, but high on the list would be I've seen many

shadow figures in the hallways. The other thing that's happened to me many times there is I've had like phantom knocks on my room in the middle of the night, which is really jarring. Or I've had my furniture but I've actually had drawers open on my furniture in my room before there too. But the knocks can be a lot because you're trying to sleep and it's not people, because you're not live ones anyway, because you know you do.

It's it's like a dun dun dune and you'll run up you think there's an emergency and you open the door and there's no one there. And I've had it happened at least three times there. Yeah, Yeah, and usually it's pretty telling when you know, like if it's another guest, like messing with you, because people certainly like to do that,

but like it's a very creaky hotel. As paroral investigators, you kind of get the sense of when it's a living human being and when it's not just in the pure sense of like hearing footsteps running away or hearing the laughter, and when it's just kind of the knock on its own and europe quick enough to see if there's anyone in the hall like it, you know, it's something different. Absolutely, I can definitely see why Stephen King was inspired to write The Shining after spending a night

there in the winter. What would you think is maybe the most kind of interesting, compelling or even frightening experience that you've had there? Yeah, I think that the two kind of pigman experience that's always been my most memorable one. The Stanley was interesting because we had such a unique opportunity, as there is in paroral investigators, to repeat, visit, repeat, investigate the same location for five years at a time.

And while there's plenty of hindsight on that, for like wishing I did more analysis of whether in time of year and all that sort of thing, it was kind of more about the collection of the spirits at their activity at the end of the day for me, because a lot of it wound up being very subtle and it's weird. The paramoun experiences, Yeah, they're sticking your brain forever,

or they start to fade in a weird way. And so as as you know, a lot of the craziest paramorn experiences are the relatively subtle ones, like not that it's subtle, but like hearing the footsteps running up at you, like footsteps in general. When you hear them and you know exactly what they are and you know that there's nobody else in the building, that's like an incredible experience. But I think that the Stanley had a lot of those kind of things, a lot of objects being rolled

off of the table. We had. One of those actually had a strange escapes. There was a flashlight that was rolled off of the ledge of the balcony in the concert hall and we're investigating there. A lot of it. You know, if you get a good communication through whatever device you're using, or a lot of knocks, those can be fantastic. And so it was a lot of the smaller stuff. I'm not want to like see things you know, like shadows or apparitions at the end of hallways whatnot.

From me, it's about trying to like develop the best kind of like communication or interaction with the spirits via the devices or Viet Knox or communication in that regard is usually what was a little bit more common for me. Well, and that kind of leads me to the Estes method, which was developed at the Stanley Hotel, hence the name the Estes Method, and so to kind of rewind on that for us. So when you guys first did that, I remember you put out a video Adam and I

were first shooting. This is like a clarification moment for all of you. So Adam and I, Adam and I were shooting Season one of Kindred, I believe when you first kind of developed that method, and so at the time it did not have a name. What we were fascinated by it. And I remember I wrote you and I said, we're going to try this on this show that we're making. But I promised when it comes out, I will give you guys all this credit for coming up with this amazing idea, which I did. Like you know,

I I've always championed you guys. Is developing it, but it did not have a name at the time, and so on the show we started just calling it the spirit Box Experiment. Then you guys eventually named it the s His Method, which is incredibly fitting. But I think by them, we were like in season three, and there's never a moment for us to just stop down. You know, you work in production. You can't just like interject suddenly in the middle of the show and be like, we're

changing the name of this. So so for everyone, I want everyone to know that I'm fully aware that they we have dubbed that the st His Method, and that is what we call it. But we also have, you know, millions of viewers who aren't as tuned into the paranormal world as the rest of us, and so I think if we started it that way from the beginning. But just know, like I give full props. I love these guys, and so tell me that maybe people don't even know

what I'm talking about. So tell me what is the s His Method and what gave you this idea to kind of develop it. Yeah, So essentially the method is taking the spirit Box, which is getting through different radio stations at varying rate speed where you hear little bits

of commercials, their music, radio and possibly spirits. It's typically like very full of white noise, and it can be garbled and it's hard here, so it's very easy to sort of hear what you want to hear out of it, and we were kind of always on the fence about that. I'd heard some pretty crazy stuff out of it in

the past. At the same time, though, like you do it enough, especially with with groups of people that are just kind of paying for a ghost on every week, there's once in a while that the group gets very excited about hearing something that clearly was not what the what was actually coming out, and so we started thinking at some point it was one of those late night conversations years before we even gave it the first try, where I think I don't even recall whose idea it was,

so much as just developing in a conversation one night, the idea of like just plugging headphones into it and having that person who's listening to those headphones say what

they hear through it. But because of the headphones, they can't hear the questions that are being asked, and so if one of the things that they say that they heard through the spirit box matches up as an answer to one of those questions, and that's a lot more compelling because it takes out the sort of like forcing it to have said what you thought it should say. Element it's either gonna fit or it's not going to fit.

And so yeah, eventually we gave it a try. We were filming a little fun web series that we were making at the time called Spirits of the Stanley, and so we were doing an investigation one night and we wanted to try something different, so we finally grabbed a pair of headphones. It was now what it was now.

They were the only like you know, I think everyone used to get the old Apple headphones with their phone and then I would cram them in my bag just in case the headphones broker died when I was traveling. So I crabbed these like really crappy headphones and plugged it in. And it was kind of hit and missed for a little while. But when my friend Connor Randall jumped on, he started getting some pretty interesting stuff and

that got us kind of excited about it. So eventually he is a drummer, and so he had some really solid kind of sound isolating headphones that he eventually brought up, and then we were getting some kind of funny interactions that you know, told us like everybody stand up, you know, and so we stood up, and I think that sort of prompted the idea it's natural to sort of close your eyes while you're doing it to concentrate. But that sort of gave us the idea that visual cues could

be happening in the group. And then if we wanted to really isolate the person to try to make their responses as objective as possible, we should probably blindfold them too. So fustly we kind of got the big drummer headphones to blindfold and really just dial in to listen to

the device. Now, what's happening there, Whether it's spirits actually coming through on a radio channel, I don't know, but there's definitely seems to be an almost meditational element of doing it, where it seems that some people do it better than others and it can be hard to listen to. So perhaps those results are a bit skewed, but Connor and Danta new Kirk get a lot better results than I do, and I've been doing it since the inception

as well. So whether that's a psychical aspect. I don't know we found that as well, Like, and sometimes it depends on what we find because we do this all the time now, and sometimes I feel like it depends on who's talking. Like most of the time I seem to be the one that does it, and like sometimes there's that kind of sensory deprivation moment. It actually can make me sick sometimes if I am under for too long.

But then sometimes if I'm not getting responses, Adam will put on the headphones and suddenly we're having a conversation. You know, just depends sometimes, I think on the comfort level of the energy or spirit and who they're more comfortable talking through. But it really, I think just opened up this whole new element to investigations because it went from you know, doing like real time e v P to having full conversations and it is absolutely mind blowing

sometimes the results that we get. And I know, for us on the show, people always want to hear and I'm sure you've gotten this too. They want to hear what you're hearing and you're in the headphones and we've tried it and it's literally just white noise, you know, to the viewer at home. You know, they're naturally skeptical, as they should be, But I always just tell them, like try it yourself, you know, like go go try it. It's an interesting gray area with it, because I mean,

it's it's interesting for us to the investigators. But whether or not that voicing that answer is on the feet or not. I think a lot of people look at

that skeptically. But if you're truly isolated in the headphones from the questions being asked and you're not cheating, it doesn't really affect the legitimacy of it, if there's a voice there or not, because that speaks towards that, like is the subconscious feeding you these words and these answers in a psychic fashion that allows your conscious mind to like believe that you're hearing them, like it it lets the conscious mind relax and maybe lets you be more psychic.

I don't know. And so I think that it's telling in an interesting fashion of like how it might be working in that regard. But I think a lot of people want to hear it because they're skeptical, and I'm kind of like, I'm not sure if that's actually going to answer your question, because there's a lot of possibilities out there. Yeah, we definitely have kind of decided there

is some sort of psychic element to it. We have listened, you know, we have synked up the audio and listened, and I have said an entire sentence that you definitely do not hear. I don't know where it comes from, because when I'm hearing it, it literally sounds like a voice coming through. You know. It always goes kind of past just the quick blips of it changing stations, and the voices go through that, if that makes sense, they

extend beyond just the quick changes. What I love is like it eliminated a lot of confirmation bias as well, because I think we do kind of especially if you have any background information on the haunting that you're investigating, you kind of start to expect to hear certain words, and so if everyone's listening together, it's easy to kind of make it have the conversation you want versus isolating yourself.

But you know, we've done all kinds of experiments with it now where you know, I'll pull a ton of historical information that Adam doesn't know, and you know, he'll go under and I'll ask about him we'll get answers, just things that he had no idea occurred, or we've even both gone under at once and had like entire conversations between two spirits that had no idea the other

existed there. It was this really crazy episode of Kindred at the fee House where it was like a mother and daughter who were both haunting the same house but literally had no idea the other was there. So I don't know how that happens, but they had a conversation and it was, you know, you don't know how it goes.

You take off your blindfold. Really how was that? And we looked at our crew and they were like Jaws drops, you know, We're like, well we got It was always the best barometer of those moments exactly you look at them and you're like, is this good? Like what happened? So it's just fascinating to me, And I think it's also really pushed people to kind of think outside the box with their investigative styles, like what else can we

think of to kind of push the envelope? And so I love that that was born of the Stanley Hotel and it just makes perfect sense that it would come from there. Yeah, it always blows my mind when I see the hashtag pop up or whatnot and just see kind of like how far this thing has spread um and how many people are using it. And I think it's a very fun experiment for thinking creatively too, because you talk about doing two people under at the same time,

or recording the feed and thinking them up later. You know, experiments that we've tried that I'd love to try more if I had more opportunity for it of recording a session in advance and then having somebody plug into either that or the spirit box and seeing as almost sort of a debunking experiment, you know, seeing if it's just chance, or having a speaker playing the feed while somebody's under so you can hear what they're hearing in real time.

There's so many variations on it that I think, you know, I don't pretend to be a scientist. They're call myself scientific because I'm not. But it's fun to inspire sort of amateur scientific thinking where you can think about the variations on it. You can think about the variables like what do you want to control, what do you want to change, what do you want to answer? And that's always fun to sort of encourage that and see where

people take it next. Yeah, it raises so many questions about what it is that we're even so it's wild. But and you know, I will say, years and years ago at the Stanley Hotel, I met Frank Sumption. Frank Sumption is the person who invented the spirit box. He invented it to talk to aliens originally, and there are a number of his boxes out there. Frank's Box is what they're called, and they're very highly sought after in the paranormal community. But he was a lovely man. He

was very, very interesting, very interesting. You know, I'll never forget me eating him in I want to say, the music room and he was there with Bill Murphy, i believe, and he had a bunch of his boxes out and he was using one of them and it said my name like three times. And I was sitting there and there are a few of us, and he was like, Amy, is there an Amy in here? And I was like, I'm right here, maybe you know, but it literally said Amy and it kept saying Amy over and over again.

You know, Amy's a pretty common name. But it's wild to like that. My first moment of seeing a Frank's Box, a spirit box in action was at the Stanley Hotel and now here we are just really furthering what they can do. That's perfect, that's awesome. The Frank's Box is very strange. If if anyone out there thinks spirit boxes, it's like, give him a weird vibe, Like check out a Frank's Box sometime. Yeah, so he puts like or put like crystals and things in there, and he's got

this distortion on it. We have one that we use on Kindred sometimes and that one actually does make me sick a lot because we use it for the s to his method a lot, and it does make me feel ill for some reason, so we don't use it too often. Yeah, they've got a weird tempo, weird sound like. It's just it's a it's a strange thing to listen to on loud volume for a long time. Yes, definitely. So well, tell me what are you up to? I know people have hell your questions, like what is Carl

up to right now? Where can we find you? How can people support you? You can find me on the old millennial social media's of Twitter and Instagram just under my name Carl Feiffer. But right now, we've got two seasons of our show Hellier out. We are slowly working away at at season three. Don't expect that anytime soon, but it is developing for for those that are excited about that. But in the meantime, we definitely do have

some other exciting projects working. We're in the final, barely at the end zone of new documentary project about one of Greg and Dana new Kirk's haunted objects, the Krone, and that one has been sort of a logistical mess with with COVID and with life scheduling and whatnot. But that one's almost done and we're hoping to get it out in the next couple of months, maybe early next year, hopefully at the latest. So that's gonna be the next big project that you can't miss. We'll be blowing up

the internet about it. But otherwise, yeah, for me, it's just been a busy summer of just getting client work and kind of making up for a couple of quiet years from COVID. Really well, hopefully we will catch up soon. It's always great to see you in person, but I think that people are going to love this conversation. There's just so many revelations here It's the perfect season finale for season three of Haunted Roads, so I really appreciate it. It was a great chat. Thank you for having me

on and let me talk about all this fun stuff again. Clearly, the Stanley Hotel holds a special place in the hearts of many a paranormal researcher, including me. It's iconic. It's where many of us felt those first moments of curiosity about the paranormal. I think and dream of it often, and I mean it when I say I hope I'm able to get back there soon. This was the season three finale of Haunted Road. I want to thank all of you for joining us on yet another amazing twelve

episode as a special treat. Come back next week as we drop a bonus live episode recorded at Michigan Para Con a couple of weeks ago. And also, fear not, looks like you've got a lot more Haunted Road in your future. So until next time, I'm Amy Bruney and this was Haunted Road. Haunted Road is hosted and written by me Amy Bruney, with additional research by Taylor Haggerdorn and Cassandra day Alba. This show is edited and produced by rema El Kali, with supervising producer Josh Thane and

executive producers Aaron Mankey, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. Haunted Road is a production of I Heart Radio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Mankey. Learn more about this show over at Grim and Mild dot com, and for more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.