Man photographs eerie figure in stairway of infamously haunted hotel

Alex Lasker
Updated ·2 min read

A visitor at a notoriously-haunted Colorado hotel realized he took home an unexpected souvenir when he spotted a ghostly figure hiding in one of his photos.

Jay Mausling was on a "spirit tour" of The Stanley Hotel with his wife, Jessica, and a few other family members last month when a paranormal occurrence my have taken place.

Mausling said he snapped a bunch of photos inside the 108-year-old hotel, which is known to have inspired Stephen King's bestselling horror novel "The Shining," but didn't realize until he arrived home that he'd unwittingly captured an otherworldly being on film.

“We were just instructed to take a bunch of photos so that’s basically all I did. I was kind of lagging behind the group and putting myself in different positions,” Mausling told InsideEdition.com. “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."

A quick glance at Mausling's photos reveals the figure of a little girl in a white nightgown standing near the top of the staircase -- but neither Jay nor Jessica recall being photobombed by a pajama-clad child.

"At first I thought maybe a little girl ran by," Jessica Mausling said. "I was in shock. How could all of us miss her, especially a little girl in a white gown?"

Even spookier, Mausling swears that no one on his 11-member tour group even slightly matched the girl's description.

"At first we tried to be logical and think we somehow missed her so we asked our kids, their girlfriends and our friend if they remembered seeing a little girl," Mausling told HuffPost. "Nobody did. We do not remember seeing anything on the stairs when we took the picture."

After Mausling began showing the photo to friends and coworkers, he said they concluded that it was somehow tampered with -- but the amateur paranormal photographer is sticking to his guns.

“People are like, ‘You photoshopped this’ and I am like, ‘I don’t even know how to use my cell phone,’” Mausling joked. “I couldn’t believe it and everyone I show finds it hard to believe.”

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