Mister Olin also reveals that due to the superstitious practice of never recognizing the thirteenth floor (the room is listed on the fourteenth), it is a room cursed by existing on the thirteenth floor, the room numbers adding up to thirteen making it all the worse. While remarking that he doesn't believe there are ghosts in 1408, Olin insists there is 'something' that resides inside, something that causes terrible things to happen to people who stay within its walls for anything but the briefest periods of time, something that affects various electronic devices, causing digital wristwatches, pocket calculators, and cell phones to stop functioning or to operate unpredictably. According to the hotel's manager, Mister Olin (who has purposely left it vacant for over 20 years), room 1408 has been responsible for at least forty-two deaths, twelve of them suicides and at least thirty 'natural' deaths, all over a span of sixty-eight years.

At first Enslin is unfazed by 1408's morbid history. Nonetheless, he arrives at the Hotel Dolphin on 61st Street in New York City intent on spending the night in the hotel's infamous room 1408, as part of his research for his next book, Ten Nights in Ten Haunted Hotel Rooms.

His book series, Ten Nights in Ten Haunted Houses, Ten Nights in Ten Haunted Graveyards and Ten Nights in Ten Haunted Castles, prove to be best-sellers, but Enslin internally reveals some guilt and regret at their success, privately acknowledging that he is a believer in neither the paranormal nor the supernatural elements he espouses in these books. King also noted how the numbers of the title add up to the supposedly unlucky number 13.Īs in many of King's works, the protagonist of the story is a writer, Mike Enslin, who writes non-fiction works based on the theme of haunted places. He originally wrote the first few pages as part of an appendix for his non-fiction book, On Writing, to be used as an example of how a story changes from one draft document to the next. In the introduction to the story, King says that '1408' is his version of what he calls the 'Ghostly Room at the Inn', his term for the theme of haunted hotel or motel rooms in horror fiction. In 2002, it was reprinted in written form as the twelfth story in the compilation Everything's Eventual: 14 Dark Tales. '1408' is the second in the audiobook collection titled Blood and Smoke, by Stephen King, released in 1999 and published by Simon & Schuster Audio.

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