The Shining, an all-time classic in the horror genre — both literature and film — was inspired by author Stephen King’s stay at Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado, a hotel some patrons and staff members still insist is haunted.
If you believe such things, then the photo that Henry Yau snapped of the hotel’s famous grand stairwell might be enough to make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. Taken early last week during his stay at the hotel, Yau’s picture appears to show a ghostly figure at the top of the first flight of stairs — despite his insistence that there was no one else there at the time it was captured.
By golly! I think I may have captured a #ghost at #StanleyHotel. #EstesPark
Sure, the circled portion of this picture could be any number of things and in the era of Photoshop. It’s always smart to take these with an industrial-sized grain of salt … it’s just much less fun that way.
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Since the photo was released, says the Oregonian, plenty have offered their opinions, including a paranormal investigator that claims there are actually two ghosts in the photo, a woman and a child immediately to her left.
Said the photographer behind this paranormal kerfuffle “When I took it, I didn’t notice anything.” But upon further inspection, he posted the above image on Instagram with the caption “By golly! I think I may have captured a #ghost at #StanleyHotel. #EstesPark.”
This is by no means the first alleged ghost sighting at Stanley Hotel, as guests have been seeing and hearing strange things there for years. In fact, this kind of thing has become so common that the hotel’s website has a special section for its “haunted history.”
Here’s what King had to say on his website about his stay at the Stanley and how he dreamed up The Shining:
“In late September of 1974, Tabby and I spent a night at a grand old hotel in Estes Park, the Stanley. We were the only guests as it turned out; the following day they were going to close the place down for the winter. Wandering through its corridors, I thought that it seemed the perfect — maybe the archetypical — setting for a ghost story. That night I dreamed of my three-year-old son running through the corridors, looking back over his shoulder, 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 the chair looking out the window at the Rockies, and by the time the cigarette was done, I had the bones of the book firmly set in my mind.”
Hmm … if you scare easily, you might want to steer clear of this place during your next trip to the Rockies.
China just gave Hollywood a cautionary tale about AI filmmaking. Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country's first fully AI-generated movie, hit theaters on October 23 and bombed at the box office.
According to Futurism, the film's reported $1.5 million production budget landed on more than 10,000 screens. Yet it pulled in only about $181,000, averaging roughly $20 per screen, making the budget difficult to recover.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?