Andy Hallorann

Andy Hallorann is Dick Hallorann’s paternal grandfather, a wealthy funeral-parlor owner in rural Mississippi and the source of a childhood terror Dick carries into adulthood. His abuse and threats shaped Dick’s early understanding of silence and danger; his apparent return after burial turns that history into a literal haunting. Dick recounts the story to Dan Torrance, whose horrified listening makes the family history feel both intimate and impossible to dismiss.

Identity and Family

Andy lived in Dunbrie, Mississippi, not far from Oxford. His wife had died before Dick was born, and he was wealthy for a Black man in that place and period. He owned a funeral parlor, and Dick’s parents took their son to visit him four times a year. Dick dreaded those visits. In his private thoughts he called his grandfather Black Grampa, a name set against the White Gramma on his mother’s side. That grandmother lived in Clearwater and was called White not because she was Caucasian, Dick explains, but because she was good. The contrast gives the names the force of a child’s moral map: one grandparent represented safety, the other fear.

Abuse and Silence

During the visits, Andy found ways to control Dick even in ordinary settings such as the dinner table. He pressured the boy to eat food he had tampered with and, when Dick tried moving his dessert, moved it back himself. The ritual left Dick unable to finish meals without becoming upset. In private, Andy assaulted him and used threats to discourage him from telling anyone. He warned that Dick’s father already knew his ways and would not intervene, presenting the family’s dependence on his money as another reason Dick would not be believed.

Andy also invoked Charlie Manx, claiming that he could summon him to take Dick away to a place for stolen children. Dick later understood Manx as an invented figure, but the threat gave Andy’s control an imagined reach beyond the household. He used fear of punishment, abandonment, and disbelief to make disclosure seem useless. Dick tells Dan that Gramma Rose sensed that something was wrong, yet Dick kept the experience blocked away. She did not force him to explain; she told him she would listen when he was ready. Her willingness to wait stands in sharp contrast to Andy’s coercive demands.

Death and Return

Andy died of a stroke. Dick was allowed to stay with Gramma Rose instead of attending the funeral, but chose to go because he wanted to be certain his grandfather was dead. In the rain, beneath black umbrellas, he watched the coffin being lowered into the grave and recalled the abuse, the poisoned desserts, and Andy’s command of the dinner table. He also thought of Charlie Manx and the threat that had once made Andy seem able to reach him even at night. The burial offered a brief, concrete answer to the fear: Andy was in the ground, and could no longer summon anyone.

Six months later, Dick came home from school to find Andy returned in a decaying state. Dick fled and did not go back into the room until his parents were home; Andy was then gone, leaving evidence that he was deteriorating. About a week later, Dick saw him sitting on a park swing in his suit, which was covered with gray material Dick took to be mold from the coffin. The sequence reverses the reassurance of the funeral. Burial had seemed to end Andy’s power, but his return makes death no reliable boundary and brings the old terror back into Dick’s ordinary surroundings.

Narrative Role and Legacy

Dick tells this account to Dan Torrance as an explanation of what a frightening adult can do to a child. Dan recognizes the emotional weight of the story, and its truth makes it more disturbing to him than a familiar fairy tale. Dick’s recollection does not present Andy as a complicated family protector: the account centers on the harm he inflicted and on the fear that kept it hidden. At the same time, the contrasting presence of Gramma Rose shows that Dick’s childhood included someone prepared to hear him without forcing him to speak before he was ready.

Andy’s role extends beyond his death because the story links family violence with supernatural persistence. In a later conversation, Dan tells Abra about violence in his own family history: Don Torrance beat his wife, and Don’s son, Jack Torrance, later assaulted Dan’s mother. That account does not make Andy part of Dan’s family; rather, it places Dick’s story within the book’s wider attention to violence repeated across generations. Andy’s return gives that history a further, uncanny consequence: the past is not only remembered, but appears to come back.