Inside the historic building and the inspiration behind Stephen King’s The Shining, the cryogenically frozen body of Bredo Morstøl now resides. The town of Estes Park got the Norwegian man and related Frozen Dead Guy Days festival in 2023.
That’s the same year the legal team at Taft, then Sherman & Howard, started working on the acquisition of the famous Stanley Hotel. While Taft’s public finance group was approached five or six years ago with early-stage project financing discussions, the deal team noted that as time went on, the structure morphed into a completely different project.
The firm represented the Colorado Educational and Cultural Facilities Authority as issuer’s counsel and the Stanley Partnership for Art Culture and Education, a wholly-owned subsidiary and instrumentality of CECFA, as borrower’s counsel. The transaction closed last month on May 15.
The 41-acre Stanley Hotel campus is not only home to a frozen dead guy and reported ghosts, it will soon house a new 65,000 square foot event center and will undergo a major expansion of the two historic lodging buildings, which were first constructed in 1907. According to CECFA, the expansion will add 65 rooms and connect the two buildings with a new porte-cochère arrival with four-star service. The event center will include an 864-person auditorium and a horror film museum curated by horror movie production company Blumhouse Productions and featuring new exhibits approximately every other month. The Stanley will also host the Sundance Institute’s 2025 Directors Lab this month.
Taft’s public finance practice group chair Cory Kalanick and the firm’s Mountain West business group lead Bill Peffer led the Taft’s legal team through a public-private partnership and negotiations with CECFA, private bond investors, former owner of the Stanley and Chair and CEO of SPACE John Cullen, the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade, the Colorado Economic Development Commission, Blumhouse Productions and Sage Hospitality Group. The nearly $400 million bond offering will finance the acquisition of the Stanley Hotel and support extensive upgrades.
Peffer told Law Week the legal team navigated some interesting demands and sensitivity around insurance and risk for the museum’s priceless artifacts as part of the deal. Aside from some of them being difficult to value, the legal team needed to work hard to ensure the parties for the deal were comfortable with the campus, management and team.
There were a number of bonds financing this deal, and Peffer noted that some are taxable, allowing for-profit enterprises like Blumhouse to operate on parts of the campus, and some are tax-exempt, allowing public uses on other parts of the campus.
He went on to explain that the largest challenge was probably the number of parties involved with the deal. When the legal team would finish negotiating compromises on elements of the deal, another interested party would come to a different conclusion on some of those decisions.
“Accommodating everybody and threading that needle was a difficult and challenging [thing] to do, which made it a lot of fun,” Peffer added.
“Putting together this public-private partnership was a Herculean task for sure,” Kalanick said. “And the old adage about public-private partnerships is, ‘If you’ve done one, you’ve done one,’ because every single public-private partnership is different.”
The deal was intricate legally for many reasons, but Kalanick noted of particular concern was ensuring the project remained public to take advantage of the tax-exempt bond financing.
“Also, we were doing this at a time when the market was changing,” Kalanick said. “When we went to the market, it looked a lot different than when we started the deal in terms of what interest rates were doing, and what the tariff environment was — all of those things”
“I think there was always a commitment to make it happen,” Kalanick added. “Everybody continued to move forward despite those challenges and [tried] to find ways to solve them.” He noted that while the deal changed over time, it was ultimately positive and the deal team made it to the finish line.
“Now I think it’s one of those things where we’ll have a lot of stories,” Kalanick told Law Week. “Not just ghost stories from the Stanley, but we’ll be able to tell our grandkids about working on this.”
Not only is the Frozen Dead Guy now at the Stanley, but Kalanick noted the famous axe from The Shining is also at the hotel.
For the frozen body, Peffer explained that the legal team was able to get a special insurance rider for the body and the equipment that goes with it. “You know, one of many unique objects of the Stanley,” Peffer added.
As for the hotel, Peffer and Kalanick noted people can still book a stay in the hotel during both phases of construction, which are currently projected to wrap up early to mid-2028.
Sherman & Howard was in the process of its 2025 merger with Taft while the legal team was working on this deal, but Peffer and Kalanick explained that having access to an even deeper bench of legal professionals was a fortunate happenstance and allowed the team to offer a fairly seamless experience for the acquisition.