pursechristianvalue

The main staircase in the Stanley Hotel sits directly across from the main doors and takes hotel patrons ("Guests Only please", as the sign says!) up to the second floor.

Directly behind the staircase is another set of stairs leading to the basement and the employee tunnels. Beyond that is the exit the courtyard and on the left hand side you can just make out the entrance to the hotel bar (a favorite destination).

The hotel is said to be haunted not only by the spirits of its builders, F.O Stanley and his wife Flora Stanley, but also by the ghost of the man who owned the land before the Stanleys, a Lord Dunraven.

Being an Irish peer and non-American, it was illegal at the time for Lord Dunraven to own any land in Colorado under the Homesteaders Act. This didn't stop Dunraven from acquiring most of of Estes Park - 15,000 acres - through... lets say nefarious means. His plan was to turn the park into a hunting ground for himself and his friends, which he effectively did. In the process he hunted into near extinction all the native elk, wolves, bears and other large animals.

Dunraven built an English Hotel (not the Stanley) which became the first tourist facility in Estes Park. Adding to his somewhat disreputable reputation, Dunraven went about hiring women from the local towns to staff it and act as Ladies of the Evening for his various friends. Once he had essentially exhausted the supply of willing ladies, it's said he would often be seen in the local towns proposing prostitution to any lady he happened upon and fancied. He used a little trick whereby he would take their left hands and introduce himself. Then, being an expert pick-pocket, he would remove their wedding rings without them knowing and ask if they would act as prostitutes in his hotel. When the lady he propositioned complained (usually loudly and with some slapping I've no doubt) she was married and her husband stepped in, Lord Dunraven would apologize and point out the lady was not wearing a wedding ring so he couldn't know she wasn't single. According to the stories this often lead to a fight between wife and husband, and several women were left without homes to return to... in which case Lord Dunraven was fortuitously available to help them!

Women who visit the Stanley Hotel still report encountering Lord Dunraven. Many feel someone take their hand. Others discover jewelry missing and some even report being felt in "inappropriate places" upon their person. The staircase, oddly, is one of the places where many of these encounters take place. Seems Lord Dunraven has set up a screening spot to survey the hotel's female guests.

In the end Lord Dunraven's hunting preserve and land grab plot came apart. The influx of new settlers brought demands for land and put pressure on him to sell, particularly as the local population had no interest in seeing Estes Park remain his private hunting grounds, or indeed of having Dunraven and his friends in Estes Park at all.

In the late 1880s Dunraven gave in and sold a large chunk of his holdings to F.O. Stanley. As Dunraven put it: "People came in disputing claims, kicking up rows: exorbitant land taxes got into arrears; and we were in constant litigation. The show could not be managed from home, and we were in constant danger of being frozen out. So we sold for what we could get and cleared out, and I have never been there since."

Well, he was never back in corporeal form anyway...

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