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 2000 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.

When I relocated to the hotel project in Windber, Pennsylvania, 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.

At times, even though we don't know his official monkey-speech name, I and others have referred to the monkey with the name Pepe. The monkey Pepe 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.

To be continued...