Guests were asleep when a black bear walked into the lobby of the Stanley Hotel.
A bear walks into a bar ... a bear checks into hotel, says he needs only the bare necessities ... a bear walks into hotel that inspired "The Shining" and says he ain't afraid of no ghosts.
Seemingly no bad pun or silly media reference went unposted after the Stanley Hotel in the Rocky Mountains put up video of a black bear moseying into its vaulted lobby and taking a look around.
The 142-room Colonial Revival was the inspiration for Stephen King's "The Shining" after the horror king stayed there with his wife, Tabitha, in 1973 and the couple had the rambling estate to themselves.
The majestic edifice overlooking Lake Estes in Colorado opened in 1909 as an escape for America's upper class and was built by Freelan Oscar Stanley of Stanley Steemer fame.
In the wee hours of a recent night, the bear walked right into the hotel, stood on the furniture and ambled by the front desk, where the night managers calmly filmed the four-legged visitor. After the footage was posted to the hotel's Facebook page, more than 9,000 people reacted, leaving nearly 3,000 comments.
"All she need was the bear necessities hahah!!" wrote one pundit. "I just need the bear essentials," wrote another. "And I thought you only had ghosts!" chimed in a third.
"We think the door was closed and he was able to get in," hotel spokesman Reed Rowley told InsideEdition.com Monday. "Bears are pretty clever around here."
Rowley thinks the bear was able to open the front door. The night staff wasn't really concerned about the lumbering beast, he said. "Black bears are more afraid of people than we are of them. We live in a wilderness community," he said.
Frequent visitors include bears, mountain lions, elk and opossums, but heretofore they have stuck to the landscape and not checked out the building's interiors.
"This is the first time we've seen wildlife inside the hotel," Rowley said.
But even Rowley couldn't resist joining the pun fray. "It's a wild story," he said. Cue drumroll, please.
Ghosts are also not uncommon visitors, according to some who claim to have captured them in the photos, including an image taken by Jay Mausling, who was on a "spirit tour" of the luxury hotel when he snapped a photo that later appeared to show a "ghostly" girl standing among his group, he told InsideEdition.com last year.
"I was kind of lagging behind the group and putting myself in different positions,” Mausling said. "I was standing on top of the stairs when I took the picture. I just took a picture of a wall a couple times and under the staircase. We looked at the photos later and sure enough, we caught something.“
In "The Shining," King chronicled the murdered guests trapped inside the gothic manse, including two young twin sisters who appeared in the hallways, scaring the poor protagonist, a little boy named Danny Torrance, half to death.
The terrifying girls were also mentioned in the bear posts.
"Those twins are never around when you need them," wrote one person.
The bear didn't cause any damage, despite jumping on the furniture.
"He walked around and saw that the restaurant was closed, and then he walked out," Rowley said.
And then the employees locked the front door.
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