The fictional Overlook Hotel has a pantry we wouldn’t want to tour in person, even if we could.

We are introduced to the Overlook hotel’s pantry in the Chapter 10 of Stephen King’s book The Shining by the hotel’s cook, Dick Hallorann. Jack, Wendy, and their child Danny Torrance get a tour of the well-stocked pantry that will feed them over the winter while they are snowbound at the malevolent hotel. Dick Hallorann is leaving for sunny Florida and he shows them through the kitchen and pantry before he leaves.

“You three folks could eat up here for a year, I guess,” Hallorann said. “We got a cold-pantry, a walk-in freezer, all sorts of vegetable bins, and two refrigerators. Come on and let me show you.”

“For the next ten minutes Hallorann opened bins and doors, disclosing food in such amounts as Wendy had never seen before. The food supplies amazed her but did not reassure her as much as she might have thought: the Donner Party kept recurring to her, not with thoughts of cannibalism (with all this food it would indeed be a long time before they were reduced to such poor rations as each other), but with the reinforced idea that this was indeed a serious business: when snow fell, getting out of here would not be a matter of an hour’s drive to Sidewinder but a major operation. They would sit up here in this deserted grand hotel, eating the food that had been left them like creatures in a fairy tale and listening to the bitter wind around their snowbound eaves.”

“There were more wonders in the cold-pantry. A hundred boxes of dried milk (Hallorann advised her gravely to buy fresh milk for the boy in Sidewinder as long as it was feasible), five twelve-pound bags of sugar, a gallon jug of black strap molasses, cereals, glass jugs of rice, macaroni, spaghetti; ranked cans of fruit and fruit salad; a bushel of fresh apples that scented the whole room with autumn; dried raisins, prunes, and apricots (“You got to be regular if you want to be happy,” Hallorann said, and pealed laughter at the cold-pantry ceiling, where one old-fashioned light globe hung down on an iron chain); a deep bin filled with potatoes; and a smaller cache of tomatoes, onions, turnips, squashes, and cabbages.”

Hallorann goes on to describe the cabinets and fridges as full of “cheeses, canned milk, sweetened condensed milk, yeast, baking soda, a whole bagful of those Table Talk pies, a few bunches of bananas that ain’t even near to ripe yet…”

The freezers have a Thanksgiving turkey and a Christmas capon. And more: “Hamburger in big plastic bags, ten pounds in each bag, a dozen bags. Forty whole chickens hanging from a row of hooks in the wood-planked walls. Canned hams stacked up like poker chips, a dozen of them. Below the chickens, ten roasts of beef, ten roasts of pork, and a huge leg of lamb.”  A little later: “twelve packages of sausages, twelve packages of bacon… (snip) twenty pounds of butter (snip) in this bin you got your bread–thirty loaves of white, twenty of dark (snip) plenty of makings and fresh is then frozen.”

You can see the movie version of this tour in a clip on YouTube

As you likely already know, the Overlook is a fictional hotel based on the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado.

The pantry tour is also memorable because it is where we see that Danny and Dick Hallorann share a talent known as the shining. And later in the book, Jack Torrance is locked into the pantry and horrifyingly and mysteriously gets out. Something lets him out.

If you have not read the book and have only seen the movie you are missing reading something truly terrifying. The book is scary in a way the movie doesn’t capture or come close to. Within the book the hotel is a stronger malevolent force worthy of more fear and terror than a human, even crazy raving mad Jack Torrance from the movie. The Overlook Hotel is one pantry I don’t want to tour.

Many thanks to Mary for suggesting a post on the pantry in The Shining. If you have a pantry you would like to share or a post idea please leave a comment below.

Cover image credit photo by Sgerbic.