Danny's encounter with the dead woman in Room 217

Danny Torrance's encounter with the dead woman in Room 217 is the pivotal event that shatters the Torrance family's fragile peace at the Overlook Hotel, transforming Danny's vague, prophetic nightmares into a tangible, violent assault and forcing his parents to confront the hotel's malevolent power. The incident, which leaves Danny catatonic and marked with bruises, directly contradicts the rational explanations offered by Dr. Bill Edmonds and exposes the hotel's ability to physically harm the living, setting the stage for the family's desperate struggle for survival.

Background and Prohibition

Dick Hallorann, the Overlook's cook who shares Danny's psychic ability, had specifically warned the boy to stay away from Room 217. Hallorann told Danny that a maid, Delores Vickery, had seen something terrible in that room and was fired for talking about it. Hallorann himself had investigated and confirmed the presence of a "bad thing" there, though he tried to reassure Danny that such things were like scary pictures in a book that could not hurt him. Despite this warning, Danny was drawn to the room by a morbid curiosity, a feeling that the hotel itself seemed to amplify. He remembered the story of Bluebeard, which his father had once read to him while drunk, a tale of a locked room containing the severed heads of a monster's previous wives. The parallel was inescapable: the locked door, the forbidden secret, the terrible consequence of discovery.

The Encounter

Danny, having taken the passkey from the office, stood before the door of Room 217, his heart thumping. He inserted the key, turned the lock, and pushed the door open. The room was dark, but he found the light switch. He stepped inside, his eyes drawn to the bathroom door, which was ajar. He walked toward it, feeling as if he were being propelled by an outside force. He pulled back the shower curtain to reveal a woman in the tub, dead for a long time. She was bloated and purple, her gas-filled belly rising out of the cold, ice-rimmed water. Her eyes were fixed on Danny's, glassy and huge like marbles. She was grinning, her purple lips pulled back in a grimace. Danny shrieked, but the sound never escaped his lips. He took a single blundering step backward, and at that moment, the woman began to sit up. Still grinning, her dead palms making squittering noises on the porcelain, she sat up. She was not breathing; she was a corpse, dead for long years. Danny turned and ran, bolting through the bathroom door, his eyes starting from their sockets. He ran full-tilt into the outer door of 217, which was now closed. He began hammering on it, far beyond realizing that it was unlocked. He could only hammer on the door and hear the dead woman coming for him. Then, the voice of Dick Hallorann came to him, sudden and calm, telling him to close his eyes and that the things would be gone. Danny's eyelids snapped down, and he concentrated on the thought that there was nothing there. But as he began to relax, the years-damp, bloated, fish-smelling hands closed softly around his throat, and he was turned implacably around to stare into that dead and purple face.

Consequences and Aftermath

Danny was found by his parents standing catatonic on the first-floor landing, his thumb in his mouth, with puffy bruises on his neck. He was unresponsive, his eyes blank and indifferent. Wendy, finding him in this state, immediately accused Jack of having harmed him, a flashback to the time Jack broke Danny's arm. Jack, who had been sleepwalking and smashing the CB radio after a nightmare about his abusive father, was horrified and denied any involvement. The accusation and counter-accusation deepened the rift between the parents, with Jack feeling unjustly blamed and Wendy terrified that her husband was having a breakdown. When Danny finally came out of his catatonic state, he screamed, "It was her! Her! Her!" and ran to Jack, clinging to him. This act of seeking comfort from his father momentarily shifted the blame away from Jack, but the damage was done. The family's trust was broken, and the hotel's power to manipulate them was now undeniable. The incident forced a family conference in the kitchen, where Danny revealed the full extent of his psychic abilities, his conversations with Hallorann, and his belief that the hotel was a malevolent force that wanted to harm them all. This revelation, combined with Jack's own secret hallucination of the hedge animals moving, set the stage for the family's desperate plan to escape the Overlook, a plan that would ultimately fail as the hotel's influence over Jack grew stronger.