US hotel that's home to largest Ouija board gets even spookier with cenotaph collection
The Grand Midway Hotel in Pennsylvania, USA, just got even spookier.
The Windber property was already home to the world’s largest tarot card (6.42 m; 21 ft 1 in) and the largest Ouija board (121.01 m²; 1,302.54 ft²).
And now, owner Blair Murphy, alongside his daughter Luna Zamboni-Murphy, has unveiled his latest record-breaking attraction – the world’s largest cenotaph collection.
The father-daughter duo are paying homage to famous literary figures and early icons of the horror genre with the 27 cenotaphs lined up at their property.
Take a walk through the mini cemetery and you’ll find tributes to legendary poet Edgar Allan Poe, Frankenstein author Mary Shelley and Boris Karloff, who famously played Frankenstein’s Monster in the 1931 film adaptation.
You’ll also find cenotaphs for late singer David Bowie, writer Oscar Wilde, and Bram Stoker, best known for penning iconic horror novel Dracula.
Blair and Luna
Taking us on a tour, little Luna said: “Welcome to our private cemetery of cenotaphs.”
And her dad Blair added with a grin: “These are some of our favourite dead people.”
Speaking of how the idea came about, Blair continued: “First it was the concept, what is a cenotaph?
“Well it’s a gravestone but there’s no body. The largest one, I believe, is in D.C. – that’s a public one, but we wanted to create a private one that is full of literary figures and early horror icons.
“The beginning came out of that – a fun literary cemetery.
“Friends of mine have travelled to graves around the world, to Oscar Wilde’s grave or wherever, I thought ‘what if they were all gathered together in one cemetery? How fun would that be?’”
Read about more amazing record-breaking collections in our dedicated section.
Blair explained how he picked up the tombstones from a nearby engraving place.
He said: “Apparently if you make a single mistake, if one letter is off, they can’t sell the tombstone – it’s an error.
“So they had this pile of errors that they hadn’t buried yet and they sold them to me.”
Blair said it cost “thousands” to transport all the tombstones back home.
He had to hire a truck with a winch that could lift the heavy stones up from the pile, transport them, and then drop them in the right places.
Blair flipped the tombstones over so that the partial engravings they already had were buried.
“So, then I had an engraving guy come,” he added. “And it took a long time for this person to engrave one, he’d maybe do two a day, and we’ve got almost 30.”
Blair has more tombstones lined up waiting to be carved and added to the collection.
A local resident told Blair of his spooky display: “There’s something very romantic and very inviting about being surrounded by dead people and stones and earth that honour them.”
Another neighbour joked: “I’m just glad my name’s not on one of them yet.”
Blair added that he puts candles out by the tombstones at night time and that people often come by to lay coins and flowers on the tombstones of people who mean something to them.
He said: “I sometimes come out here at night and it’s fascinating to me just to walk from tomb to tomb and to just dwell on some of these people.”
Blair’s next project is to add QR codes to the tombstones so people can scan them with their phone and read an online biography to find out more about that person.