Jack Torrance experiences a haunting of his own when he goes to the bar and finds the supposedly empty hotel crowded full of people. One of them is his predecessor, Delbert Grady. Or is he? When Mr. Ullman describes the Grady murders, he says the caretaker's name was Charles. That may explain why Delbert denies being the murderer Jack heard about, but he contradicts himself a few moments later, in his own euphemistic way. He never admits to murdering his girls, but he does say, "I ... corrected them, sir. And when my wife tried to prevent me from doing my duty, I ... corrected her, too."
So if both Gradys are the same, does that make the name change a mistake? Or is something stranger going on? Ullman says the murders took place in 1970, but here Grady is at a party full of Roaring '20s-era ghosts. Could two Gradys have worked at the Overlook at different times, and both murdered their families? The chilling ending, where a photo from 1921 shows Jack front-and-center, raises further possibilities. Could both caretakers be reincarnations of earlier hotel staff, doomed to repeat the same cycle of violence over and over again? Or could the hotel somehow exist outside of time, absorbing Jack and Grady into its history after it corrupts them?
