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Mike Enslin is the author of the successful Ten Nights in Ten Haunted... series.
He appears as the protagonist of the short story 1408 and it film adaptation, where he is portrayed by John Cusack.
1408[]
Once a smoker, Enslin quit after his brother died of lung cancer. However, he does carry a cigarette around everywhere he goes by placing it above his ear, just in case a nuclear bomb should be dropped, so he could enjoy one last smoke. Enslin is a skeptic on ghosts, but nonetheless pretends to believe so he can stay in supposedly haunted places and make a bunch of money by writing the lucrative Ten Nights in Ten Haunted.... book series.
One day, he is called about the Hotel Dolphin on Lexington Street in New York, where he is offered a job in investigating the hotel. Eventually, he goes to the hotel, where he checks in, but the Gerald Olin, the hotel manager, tries to convince him otherwise, even offering a penthouse suite in favor of staying in 1408, and even trying to scare and bribe him with a whiskey out of it, but he remains dedicated to this. Eventually, he is brought to the room, where as the night progresses, he starts experiencing the supernatural horrors of the room. A timer starts going down for an hour, and Mike believes that this is the timer for how long he has to live. After managing to survive a lot of the horrors, he experiences an hallucination, where he is supposedly back in Miami in the hospital, with his wife, Lilly, by his side. Eventually, as he goes to a post office, after recognizing a mailman as the hotel baggage clerk, everything starts falling apart around him, with his yelling that he thought he was out. Then, after finding a door, he eventually reunites with his deceased daughter, Katie, who tells him that she wishes they could stay together as a family, with Mike breaking down and saying that they can. However, she crumbles in front of him and Mike collapses to the ground and watched as the clock begins counting down from the hour, but instead of dying, he comes back to reality in the room. He picks up the ringing phone, which he asks why they couldn’t just kill him. The woman answers that all of the guests enjoy free will and tells him that he can either relive the hour over again, or use their “express checkout system”. After looking across the room and seeing more hallucinations, even a noose, he refuses her offer. She calls again, telling him that his wife, Lilly is there and wants to come up, but he refuses to put her in harm’s way and decides to take his whiskey and put an end to the cursed room once and for call. He puts a piece of cloth in his whiskey, lights it, and tosses it at a wall, starting a devastating fire. Mike then has a cigarette as he hears deep moaning, telling it to keep quiet. After enjoying his final smoke, he records his observations on his tape recorder and after giving the Dolphin his final shiver scale, he tosses his ashtray at the window, causing a backdraft explosion. He is badly burnt by the explosion, but is still alive. As he is crawling across the ground, he laughs as he hears his daughter say what she said to him before she died, saying that everyone dies. As he laughs after finally freeing himself from the horror, firefighters arrive in the nick of time to save Mike from burning to death in the room. He weakly tells them not to go in the room. Eventually, he is taken to a hospital, where he recovers, with Lilly by his side.
He retired from writing after surviving the explosion and moves back in with Lilly, where he tosses out his tapes, but keeps the one from his time in 1408, where the two hear Mike and Katie’s voice in the tape from his final hallucination, horrifying Lilly.
In an alternative ending, Mike dies in the fire, and is buried, with Lilly and several other people attending his funeral. Gerald tries to explain that Mike died a hero’s death, but is cut off by a man, who tells him to let her mourn. As Gerald listens to the tape from Mike’s final hallucination with Katie, he is saddened and sees a man and his daughter playing, symbolizing Mike and Katie, but as he adjusts his mirror, he sees Mike’s burnt corpse, but as he looks behind, he sees nothing. In the end, Mike’s spirit is seen in the charred remains of the hotel, having a smoke, but he walks back into the room and disappears after hearing his daughter call for him.
Appearances[]
Trivia[]
- Mike, similar to Danny Torrance, can die in a different variation of his story, but Mike survives in the Theatrical Version while Danny dies in the film canon.