Mrs. Massey

Mrs. Massey is a deceased guest of the Overlook Hotel whose corpse, found in the bathtub of Room 217, becomes a recurring supernatural presence that attacks Danny Torrance and embodies the hotel's malevolent power. Her manifestation is the most direct physical threat Danny faces, and her story is woven into the hotel's history of scandal, suicide, and the lingering residue of violent death that Dick Hallorann calls "the shining."

Identity and Background

Mrs. Massey was a wealthy, elderly guest who stayed at the Overlook Hotel during the summer season. She arrived with a much younger male companion, a boy of no more than seventeen, whom she introduced as her husband. Watson, the maintenance man, described her as a woman in her sixties with dyed red hair, sagging breasts, and varicose veins, dripping with jewelry. Each evening she drank heavily in the Colorado Lounge, consuming Singapore slings while her companion nursed a single bottle of beer. After a week or ten days, the young man disappeared, ostensibly to get stomach medicine for his "wife," who had passed out drunk. He never returned. Mrs. Massey spent the next day growing increasingly pale, refusing Ullman's offer to notify the state police. That afternoon she began drinking again at three o'clock, went to her room around ten-thirty, and was found dead the next morning. The county coroner ruled that she had taken approximately thirty sleeping pills on top of a large quantity of alcohol. Her husband, a prominent New York lawyer, arrived the following day and threatened to sue, but Ullman managed to quiet him by implying the scandal of her relationship with the young man would be made public. The coroner's verdict was changed to accidental death.

Supernatural Manifestation and Attack on Danny

Mrs. Massey's corpse did not remain at rest. A chambermaid named Delores Vickery, who had a small amount of the shining, entered Room 217 to change the towels and found Mrs. Massey lying dead in the bathtub. She screamed and fainted. When she came to, she claimed she had seen the dead woman in the bathroom, "lying naked in the tub," with her face "all purple an puffy" and grinning at her. Ullman fired her for talking about it. Dick Hallorann, the cook, who also possessed the shining, went to investigate. He found Mrs. Massey's body in the tub, swollen and purple. When she opened her eyes, revealing blank silver pupils, and began to grin at him, he fled in terror. He later told Danny that the thing in the bathtub was worse than any picture in any book, and he warned Danny to stay out of Room 217. Danny, driven by a morbid curiosity that felt irresistible, eventually took the passkey and entered the room. He found the bathroom empty at first, but when he pulled back the shower curtain, he saw the dead woman: bloated and purple, her gas-filled belly rising out of cold, ice-rimmed water, her eyes fixed on him like glassy marbles, grinning with purple lips. She sat up, her dead palms making squittering noises on the porcelain, and Danny fled. He reached the door, but it was closed. He closed his eyes and tried to will her away, as Hallorann had advised, but the dead woman's hands closed softly around his throat, and she turned him around to stare into her purple face. He passed out, and when he came to, he had bruises on his neck.

Narrative Role and Thematic Significance

Mrs. Massey functions as the Overlook Hotel's most direct and personal threat to Danny, a tangible horror that violates Hallorann's assurance that the things in the hotel "can't hurt you." Her attack leaves physical marks, proving that the hotel's supernatural residue has become actively dangerous. She is also a figure of the hotel's accumulated history of scandal and death, a secret that the management tries to suppress. Her presence in Room 217, a room that Hallorann explicitly warns Danny to avoid, becomes a test of Danny's obedience and a catalyst for the family's crisis. The attack on Danny, and Jack's subsequent denial of seeing anything in the room, deepens the rift between Jack and his family and accelerates Jack's psychological deterioration. Mrs. Massey's corpse, a symbol of the hotel's power to trap and hold the dead, is ultimately destroyed when the boiler explosion rips the hotel apart, splitting her bathtub in two and releasing a flood of noxious water.