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Horace Derwent
A former guest at the Overlook Hotel. Mrs. Massey checked into the hotel with her lover—a young man of about 17—sometime in the early 1970s, and her ghost is in the Colorado Lounge drinking Singapore slings the night Jack goes insane in 1975. One night, while Mrs. Massey was drunk, her lover left in Mrs. Massey’s Porsche and never came back. Ullman offered to call the police, but Mrs. Massey refused and proceeded to drink all day in the Colorado Lounge. She swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills in the bathtub of room 217 that same night, killing herself. Several characters in The Shining have experiences with the ghost of Mrs. Massey in room 217, including Delores Vickery, Hallorann, Danny, and Jack. Mrs. Massey is an example of the hotel’s more “unsavory” past and is evidence that people often die in hotels for one reason or another (Watson, the Overlook’s maintenance man, says some 40 or 50 people have died in the Overlook since it opened in 1910). As the ghost of room 217, Mrs. Massey is also an example of the paranormal and the abject horror of the Overlook Hotel, which keeps the characters in a constant state of terror for most of the novel.
The Ghost of Room 217/Mrs. Massey Quotes in The Shining
The The Shining quotes below are all either spoken by The Ghost of Room 217/Mrs. Massey or refer to The Ghost of Room 217/Mrs. Massey. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 27 Quotes
And still she agonized over it, looking for another alternative. She did not want to put Danny back within Jack’s reach. She was aware now that she had made one bad decision when she had gone against her feelings (and Danny’s) and allowed the snow to close them in . . . for Jack’s sake. Another bad decision when she had shelved the idea of divorce. Now she was nearly paralyzed by the idea that she might be making another mistake, one she would regret every minute of every day of the rest of her life.
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Chapter 30 Quotes
As the number 2 rose on the shaft wall, he threw the brass handle back to the home position and the elevator car creaked to a stop. He took his Excedrin from his pocket, shook three of them into his hand, and opened the elevator door. Nothing in the Overlook frightened him. He felt that he and it were simpático.
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Chapter 37 Quotes
But it wasn’t really empty. Because here in the Overlook things just went on and on. Here in the Overlook all times were one. There was an endless night in August of 1945, with laughter and drinks and a chosen shining few going up and coming down in the elevator, drinking champagne and popping party favors in each other’s faces. It was a not-yet-light morning in June some twenty years later and the organization hitters endlessly pumped shotgun shells into the torn and bleeding bodies of three men who went through their agony endlessly. In a room on the second floor a woman lolled in her tub and waited for visitors.
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Chapter 44 Quotes
He had no idea what time it was, how long he had spent in the Colorado Lounge or how long he had been here in the ballroom. Time had ceased to matter.
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Get the entire The Shining LitChart as a printable PDF.
The Ghost of Room 217/Mrs. Massey Character Timeline in The Shining
The timeline below shows where the character The Ghost of Room 217/Mrs. Massey appears in The Shining. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 3: Watson
All big hotels have scandals, Watson tells Jack, and ghosts, too. Lots of people come and go in hotels, and some of those people die...
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...Mrs. Massey stayed, and Delores screamed and promptly fainted. She said she saw Mrs. Massey’s ghost, a purple and bloated corpse, in the bathtub. Mr. Ullman had given Delores two weeks’...
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Chapter 25: Inside 217
...walks to the bathtub and pulls back the curtain. Sitting in the tub is the ghost of room 217—a bloated and purple corpse—and Danny stands frozen, staring into her dead eyes....
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...and realizes that the door isn’t locked. He goes to turn the doorknob, but the ghost of room 217 places her bloated and purple hands around his throat. Danny turns around...
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Chapter 26: Dreamland
...grow heavy, and she begins to fall asleep at the exact moment Danny meets the ghost of room 217. Wendy sleeps deeply and does not dream. At the same time, Jack...
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Chapter 29: Kitchen Talk
...about the hotel. Jack is shocked and asks Danny who strangled him. “Her,” Danny says—the ghost of room 217. Danny tells his parents that he knew things were bad at the...
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...says he stole the skeleton key and let himself into room 217 and found the ghost in the bathtub. She chased him, and he was so scared that he couldn’t get...
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Chapter 30: 217 Revisited
...and enters. He isn’t exactly sure, but Jack bets that this is the room where Mrs. Massey killed herself. The light is still on, but nothing looks disturbed. The bed is zipped...
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Chapter 32: The Bedroom
Wendy reminds Jack of the ghost of room 217 and asks if he thinks Danny is going crazy. Jack doesn’t know....
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Chapter 35: The Lobby
...ask about the animal topiaries, so that he can tell her everything—the animal hedges, the ghost of room 217, the firehose—but she doesn’t ask.
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Chapter 38: Florida
...to Hallorann in tears one day, not because she was fired, but because she saw Mrs. Massey ’s dead and bloated corpse in the bathtub of room 217. Impossible, Hallorann had said....
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...working hard, her cigarettes and magazines safely hidden away. Delores was so terrified after seeing Mrs. Massey ’s corpse that she cared very little when Ullman fired her.
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Hallorann doesn’t know why Delores came crying to him when she saw Mrs. Massey ’s corpse, other than that a shine always knows a shine. He decided to check...
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Since Hallorann expected to see Mrs. Massey ’s corpse, he wasn’t completely terrified. He was scared all right, but terror didn’t come...
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Chapter 39: On the Stairs
...The hotel made him do it. Danny dreamed about it. Jack knows all about the ghost of room 217, too, but Danny doesn’t care if Wendy believes him anymore or not.
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Chapter 43: Drinks on the House
...Jack is pretty sure the woman next to him, staring into her Singapore sling, is Mrs. Massey from room 217. Jack demands to see the manger. Danny isn’t part of all this,...
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