The Shining is hailed as a spine-tingling horror classic, gripping audiences with its chilling psychological twists. It’s also mired with countless conspiracy theories. Now, one of those theories has finally been cracked: the mystery of where the infamous final photo, which ends the film on a haunting cliffhanger, came from.
In 2024, a Reddit user named Connor Plunkett used a facial recognition tool to try and identify the man at the front of the crowd. It returned a match: Santos Casani, a famous ballroom dancer in 1920s London.
The photo, it turns out, was taken at a Valentine’s Day dance on February 14, 1921, in the Empress Ballroom at the Royal Palace Hotel in London.
You missed the man’s real name, though:
I was so close