From our first days of moving in we’d decided not to fix up one room, but to leave it as is.  This became known as the Monkey Room.

The History of the Monkey in the Monkey Room 

I have no idea where our little monkey friend originally came from, some jungle somewhere perhaps…  From his earlier tree-swinging jungle past, he eventually ended up working in a feature film with actor Sean Connery, the 1992 movie Medicine Man.  As his web page notes, Connery skyrocketed to international fame as the suave, confident (and many say definitive) Secret Agent 007 in six of Ian Fleming’s Bond movies over the next decade: Dr. No (1962), Goldfinger (1964), From Russia, With Love (1964), Thunderball (1965), and You Only Live Twice (1967), and Diamonds are Forever (1971).  Movie director Steven Spielberg said of him, “There are seven genuine movie stars in the world today, and Sean is one of them.” Queen Elizabeth II eventually knighted him in July 2000.   So, our little monkey was in pretty good company.

The plot summary for Medicine Man is listed as follows: An eccentric scientist working for a large drug company is working on a research project in the Amazon jungle. He sends for a research assistant and a gas chromatograph because he’s close to a cure for cancer. When the assistant turns out to be a “mere woman,” he rejects her help. Meanwhile the bulldozers get closer to the area in which they are conducting research, and they eventually learn to work together, and begin falling in love.  It should be noted that the monkey’s performance went uncredited in this film.

From his film role in the Amazon he was next shipped to Hollywood, California. This is where we crossed paths. I was working a film job at Cinergi Pictures when I heard some people going, “Eww! Jesus! Show it to Blair! He’ll like it. He’ll want it!”  They directed me to a wood crate no one wanted to go near. I looked it. It was instant love. I picked up our little monkey as my new favorite low-maintenance taxidermy friend. Yes, it is true, he was already dead. But I love dead things. So they gave him to me as the new caretaker.

He is missing his teeth, and somewhere along the line someone stitched a strange inner mouth-cap into his face. It almost looks like a tongue yawning out. I brought him to an LA taxidermist to have a new set of little money teeth created, but the going price for exotic monkey teeth was too high at the time, everything film and prop-related being so expensive in LA, so he remained gummed. It is a very odd look.

At one point while I was shooting Black Pearls a few actors were filmed drunkenly dancing with him. This came across as exceedingly creepy.

Later, while directing the documentary of the prestigious Dracula 97 convention in LA which boasted countless scholars from around the world, a second unit camera man with some free time filmed the monkey. He set the monkey up on the baby grand piano in the large hotel lobby. On film the monkey delivered a stellar performance, appearing to play the piano and sway Humphrey Bogart-like, looking off dreamily into the distance, a hairy, little taxidermy-fingered, dark wet-eyed, after-hours classic lounge solo act.  This film was hijacked in the post-production stage by the jerkoff producer W K Border, who stole the directing credit for himself long after the movie was shot and made a shameless piece of shit out of our serious efforts.  This raped Dracula 97 film came to be released as Sex, Death, and Eyeliner, 2000.   I was not invited to the film’s  Hollywood premiere.  I was never paid by Neo Art & Logic the $10,000 for bringing it to them and directing it.

The monkey was not pleased.  Nor was I.  I left Los Angeles disgusted.  I relocated to the hotel project in Windber, Pennsylvania, and I brought the monkey with me. We gave him his own room, The Monkey Room. We even bought him his own special little reclining chair.

This room has gotten a lot of attention over the years.  Many people have been photographed with the monkey.

Monkeys are way cool in many ways. They often appeared in music videos during the 1980s. There was a big dead monkey in the classic 1950 Sunset Blvd. In monkey-film stardom, the flying monkeys from The Wizard of Oz still hold the definitive enchantment among monkey roles. But Kong, in King Kong released in 1933, holds the heavy-weight champion of the world monkey film role. With the release of Planet of the Apes in 1968 we saw a future world populated by intelligent monkeys!

Filmmaker Rob Zombie is the only other horror filmmaker out there currently with a stuffed monkey in his home being referenced regularly in interviews.  But our monkey is far cooler, as is our home, which is an entire haunted hotel.

The monkey also recently appeared in several short films shot right here in his own room, among them Windber After Midnight by Bill Eggert, which he was fully credited for his role.  Damien Youth also wore the dead monkey like a shawl in Skot Jones’ film Enormous Hotel.

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Sleeping in the Monkey Room -By Leah Hanson

Since Blair didn’t necessarily want Adrian and I to sleep in the monkey room because of the mysterious deaths that have happened in the dark corners, I would love to write of the experience for one and all to read.

We arrived in Windber on Thursday afternoon. After being in the car since six o’clock that morning we were ready to find a room to crash for a bit before the music and poetry and general mayhem that first night. We were met by the lovely Blair Murphy and told we could crash anywhere and to just find a couch or a corner. So we went and explored the second and third floors to see what we could find. We discovered the whole glory of the Grand Midway Hotel, which reminded both of us of the house in the movie Fight Club. During our search for that perfect corner to throw our sleeping bags and Kerouac books and later lay our precious heads, we came across a room which looked unoccupied except for a child’s recliner chair with what appeared to be a monkey relaxing in it with a look of sheer terror on its face. A sick fascination came over us and we immediately ran and found Blair to ask if anyone was staying in Room 11. Of course nobody was. So we excitedly asked if we could stay there. He gave us a look of confusion and asked seriously, “Do you WANT to stay there? Nobody’s ever spent the night in that room before…” We figured it would be more fun than sleeping on any unoccupied couches we could find.

The only light in the room was a soft red glow which came from a single light bulb resting on a sink that had to be the original from some ancient time. The sink was non-functioning, of course, and had some kind of bones in it. The room was filthy and extremely beat (as in beaten-up), but that weekend anything that could be called “beat” in any sense of the word was like a god-send from heaven and we rejoiced in the glory of the dead monkey and his room.

The monkey must have used his magicks on me, for I don’t remember much about actually sleeping that night. I passed out rather quickly and was unaware of any unearthly or other-worldly activities that might have occurred. I do remember that the floor was very uncomfortable, for my sleeping bag kept rolling off the carpet and onto the wood floor next to the wall.

The next afternoon (or whenever we managed to awaken) we found Blair, who proceeded to tell us some extremely disturbing stories of what happened in that room in the past. Apparently I slept literally inches from a hole in the wall where charred human bones were found. On returning to the room, I stood in front of the sink mesmerized, thinking of the murderers of yesteryear washing the blood from their hands in that very sink. And the wall that kept drawing me closer and closer as I slept through the night seemed to imprison the ghost of a girl trying to grab me to help her escape.

We also learned the monkey was once a living creature, torn apart and resurrected by a taxidermist.  I’m not sure how he died, the expression on his face makes me wonder.  But no matter how eerie he appeared, he was the guardian of Room 11.

Needless to say, we were very happy to be moved to the third floor for the remainder of our stay at the Grand Midway.

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Photo Sessions and Music Sessions in the Monkey Room

The Monkey Room is often used for photo shoots.  Here Florida’s Cadillac Creeps pose for local photographer Jason Bafile.

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