OVERLOOK HOTEL

The 'Overlook Hotel' is the fictional hotel from Stephen King's novel ''The Shining'' and its adaptations. Timberline Lodge, a mountain resort in Oregon, was used in Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of the book while the Stanley Hotel, King's inspiration for the Overlook, was used in a TV adaptation for ABC.

Contents

Construction

Location

Layout

Features

History

Supernatural attributes

Construction

The Overlook was built by a man named Robert Townley Watson between the years of 1907 and 1909 on an ancient Indian burial ground. (A number of human remains were unearthed and removed to another location.)

Location

The Overlook Hotel was located in the Rocky Mountains, 40 miles West of the nearest town, (the fictitious) Sidewinder, Colorado. (The novel references a close proximity to Estes Park, Boulder, and the Rocky Mountain National Park.)
Due to its isolation, relatively poor access, and the Colorado winters, the hotel is only open from May 1 until October 30 each year; it is almost inaccessible for 5 to 6 months each winter.

Layout

The Overlook contains a total of 110 guest quarters. (Coincidentally, from May 1 to October 30, when the hotel is open, the Overlook employs 110 full-time staff.)
Basement: Boiler, furnace, storage (newspapers, paperwork, scrapbooks)
Lobby level: Overlook Dining Room and Colorado Lounge in the West wing, registration desk and offices behind a 160 foot lobby in the center section, and banquet/ballroom facility in the East wing
First floor: 20 single rooms, 20 double rooms, and a storeroom at the extreme West end
Second floor: 10 single rooms, 30 double rooms, and a storeroom at the extreme East end
Third floor: 10 suites in the West wing (including the Presidential Suite), 10 suites in the center section, and 10 suites in the East wing; all command magnificent views
Top floor (attic): storage (furniture, etc.)

Features

The Overlook Hotel is a world-class hotel whose location provides an "overlook" of a magnificent section of the Rocky Mountain range.
Its amenities include a roque court (possibly the finest in North America), a putting green, a topiary garden, a playground, and a pool.

History

The Overlook was considered to be one of the most beautiful resort hotels in the Rockies, if not the world. It had many illustrious guests: Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, Astors, Du Ponts, Marilyn Monroe, Truman Capote, and presidents Wilson, Harding, Roosevelt, and Nixon.

The Overlook was built by a man named Robert Townley Watson between the years of 1907 and 1909. During the construction, an ancient Indian burial ground was discovered on the site and a number of human remains were unearthed and removed to another location. Following this, a number of mysterious deaths were involved in the building of the hotel, inspiring local tales of vengeful Indian spirits full of anger due to the disturbance of their resting bodies. The Overlook Hotel was finally completed in 1909 and first opened to the public in 1910. Despite the strange, untimely deaths surrounding it and the eerie tales, the hotel itself was an attractive, elegant and spacious hotel with panoramic views of the mountains and proved immensely popular, receiving more visitors than expected.
The fledgling hotel proved to be a burden on Watson, so he sold the hotel in 1915. Many strange events occurred and rumours of hauntings and a curse abounded. It was sold again and again in 1922, 1929, and 1936. The hotel was finally abandoned, vacant until the end of World War II, when it was purchased and renovated by Horace Derwent. The Overlook became one of Derwent's most valuable holdings in Colorado. Derwent boasted that his Overlook would be the "Showplace of the World," but it would have a history as anything but. He poured over 3 million dollars into restoring the hotel in his attempts to create his showplace before a single patron ever walked through the doors. Even with all of the Overlook's faboulously wealthy guests, the hotel never made a single dime back.
The Overlook's financial loss proved to be too great, and in 1952, Derwent sold the hotel to Charles Grondin, the head of a group of investors based in California. The group ran the hotel for two seasons before it was sold to a company called Mountainview Resorts. The company went bankrupt in 1957, closing the Overlook for the rest of the decade. The Overlook fell into disrepair during this period, but it was leased and repaired in 1961 by four writers who reopened it as a writers' school. However, the school closed when a drunk student died after falling out of his third-story window onto the terrace below.
In 1963, the Overlook was bought yet again by a Las Vegas investment firm. It opened a few months later. However, the sale was peculiar because the head of the firm was Charles Grondin, who had bought the hotel from Horace Derwent in 1952. Grondin had been tried and acquitted for tax evasion in 1960, and had become the executive vice president of the Chicago office of Derwent's company. These facts led to speculation that Derwent controlled Grondin's Vegas organization and had bought the Overlook a second time under peculiar circumstances. In 1964, it was discovered that the Vegas firm that owned the Overlook had connections with Mafia s. Grondin denied the charges. In 1966, however, a gangland-style triple murder was committed in the Overlook's presidential suite, one of the victims being a notorious mafia hit man named Vito the Chopper.
The Overlook recovered from the scandal and business continued as usual. Eventually, management of the hotel was given to a man named Stuart Ullman in 1970. Soon after he started his tenure, more unusual and horrific events occurred in the Overlook. A panicked cleaning woman claimed to have seen the corpse of a guest in the bathroom of Room 217 (the guest's corpse was en route to her funeral at the time of the sighting), and she was promptly fired by Ullman.

Supernatural attributes

The Overlook Hotel is not only haunted by the ghosts of those who died violently within it, but the entire Hotel is itself a host to a being of unknown origin; apparently, the souls and, perhaps, special abilities of those killed in the building belong to the entity. Possibly, the Hotel believes that if it can harness sufficient "supernatural" power, it can "break free" of the building in which it has somehow become trapped.
==The events of ''The Shining''==
As part of the immediate backstory, in 1970, Ullman hired a man named Delbert Grady to be the Overlook's winter caretaker. Along with his wife and two daughters, Grady spent the winter months in the hotel. When the Overlook's staff returned to open the hotel for the season, they discovered that Grady had murdered his family with an axe before killing himself.
In 1977, Ullman hired a new winter caretaker named Jack Torrance. Torrance was an aspiring playwright and a recovering alcoholic who saw the caretaker job as an opportunity to repair his fractured family life. Torrance, along with his wife Wendy and son Danny spent the winter tenure in the Overlook, which was marred by terrifying occurrences.
Unbeknownst to Jack and Wendy, Danny Torrance had psychic abilities, such as mind reading. These abilities were referred to as "the shining" by Dick Hallorann, the hotel's cook (who also had the shining). And unbeknownst to the entire Torrance family, the Overlook Hotel had been somehow transformed into an evil sentient entity, filled with ghosts and evil spirits that sought to absorb Danny into the hotel to become something more. The Overlook's paranormal inhabitants, such as the dead woman in Room 217 (237 in the Stanley Kubrik adaption) and the living hedge animals on the roque court, started to attack the child, but to no avail.
Eventually, the Overlook started exploiting Jack and his desperation to get to Danny. The evil spirits in the Overlook, including the ghost of Delbert Grady, told Jack that Danny and Wendy were trying to oppress him and that he should kill them both. The Overlook also played on Jack's past in alcoholism against him and had him start drinking again. After he attacked Wendy and Danny in the ballroom, they locked him in the Overlook's pantry. The hotel let Jack out, equipping him with a roque mallet, so he could make Danny "take his medicine." Jack wounded Wendy and Hallorann (who had come back to the Overlook at the telepathic request of Danny) before cornering Danny.
Danny had realized that the person attacking him and his mother was not really Jack Torrance, but the hotel itself, which was possessing his father. Danny told Jack that the hotel had made him start drinking again and had given him false promises to correct past events. The real Jack emerged to tell Danny that he loved his son and to get out before the hotel took over again and used the mallet to kill him. The creature that remained was prepared to kill Danny until Danny realized that Jack had forgotten to release the Overlook's boiler pressure and the hotel itself had forgotten too. Danny, Dick, and Wendy barely escaped the Overlook before the hotel was destroyed as the Overlook's boiler exploded. The hotel's presence unsuccessfully tried to convince Hallorann to kill Danny and Wendy, but he resisted and they escaped.
Even though the Overlook seems to be a mere, inanimate hotel, certain parts of the book suggest that it is in fact a sentient entity. Delbert Grady's ghost refers to the hotel as the "manager" who has appointed Jack as the caretaker. A powerful voice, heard only though Hallorann though the shining, first tells him to turn back when he tries to help the Torrances and later tries to tempt Hallorann into killing them. Indeed, at the climax of the story, Danny discovers that the man attacking him is not the real Jack Torrance, but really the hotel itself. The hotel then kills Jack with the mallet, gruesomely "shedding" Jack's body, becoming a living composite of all the ghosts in the hotel. It is implied that this is the hotel's animate, supernatural form.
In Stanley Kubrick's film, the hotel was not destroyed. Instead, Jack Torrence was absorbed into the hotel in a ghostly time warp of madness and murder. After chasing his wife and son outside into a blizzard (and after which they escape in a Snowcat, Torrence dies of exposure whilst running around a hedge maze. His image then appears clearly in the forefront of an old photograph inside the hotel lobby (namely the July 4 Ball of 1921).