In October 1974, Stephen King and his wife, Tabitha, checked into Room 217 of the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado. The couple’s one-night stay in the room, which is long-rumored to be haunted by the ghost of a former chambermaid named Elizabeth Wilson, served as the inspiration for King’s 1977 novel The Shining. In the book, the Overlook Hotel’s Room 217 is where Danny and Jack Torrance encounter the ghost of Lorraine Massey. For Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film adaptation, the room number was changed to 237.
17 years after King’s novel was released, the Farrelly brothers filmed part of their 1994 comedy Dumb and Dumber at the Stanley, using it as a stand-in for the fictional Danbury Hotel in Aspen. One night, while shooting the movie on location, Jim Carrey reportedly decided to check into the hotel himself. Having heard the history of The Shining and knowing that King was inspired by his earlier visit, Carrey naturally requested Room 217. Curiously, after just three hours in the infamous room, the comedian left without giving any explanation.
Jim Carrey Has ‘Never Spoken of’ His Time in The Shining Hotel
“That’s a shady one,” said hotel tour guide Kevin Lofy years later. “What happened to him in that room, we don’t know. He’s never spoken of it.” However, during a roundtable interview with The Hollywood Reporter in 2022, Everything Everywhere All at Once director Daniel Kwan revealed that Carrey once opened up to him a little bit about what his experience at the Stanley was like back in the day. According to Kwan, Carrey had reached out to him more than a decade earlier after seeing Paranormal Activity for the first time.
Carrey went on to explain that he’d never seen a found footage horror-comedy and wanted to try and make one as they were simultaneously filming Dumb and Dumber To. His reason for this, evidently, was because there’d been some spooky occurrences on the set of the original Dumb and Dumber. “The whole time we were shooting, things were breaking, people were getting hurt, doors were swinging, and it felt haunted,” Carrey told Kwan. Despite getting an entire outline written for the proposed film, the idea was abandoned before the Dumb and Dumber sequel went into production.
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