Music Blog
A quick Google search of the Hot Lake Hotel in Eastern Oregon will give you more than a few rabbit trails' worth of ghost-hunting sites, describing it as one of America's most haunted places. The twenty-member cast and crew of Laura Gibson's new other-worldly video for her song "La Grande" had free run of the hotel's entire third floor for two days & nights, and although they did spend part of their nights running around looking for ghosts, they were unsuccessful in validating any of the Internet's claims of haunting.
The group went east to the hotel, located outside the nearby city of La Grande, to create what Gibson describes as either a "Hitchcock-looking, woman-checks-into-a-hotel" ghost story, or "Mary Poppins meets The Shining". Director Alicia J. Rose describes the project by referencing the 2001 Nicole Kidman film The Others or 1955's Night of the Hunter. Gibson and Rose both draw inspiration from rumors about the hotel and its long and storied past.
Hot Lake Hotel was originally built in 1864, and during its heyday, it was both a hotel and hospital, home to the best x-ray equipment in the United States and considered to be the Mayo Clinic of the West (the Mayo brothers were among its many well-heeled guests). After a fire, the Great Depression and a re-routing of the highway, the building went through a series of much less lucrative incarnations, including a World War II training center, nursing home, mental hospital (which, according to lore, performed lobotomies and other procedures), night club, and finally massage parlor before it was closed entirely in 1991.
Through the next decade, vandals and curious teens would sneak in, returning with molding and doorknobs, or stories of former patients' spine-tingling screams or music played by the ghost of Robert E. Lee's wife, whose piano had been housed there at one time.
The hotel's current owners spent millions of dollars between 2003 and 2010, restoring it to its former glory. They welcomed Rose, Gibson and crew in with accommodations and unfettered access. Rose then sought to capture Gibson's understanding of La Grande—piled layers of the history of westward expansion. She populated the hotel with specters of staff, guests and patients who would have lived and died there in different eras. Also, with the adjacent lake vividly releasing 208° steam into the freezing air, Rose felt its ghostly appearance demanded it be the story's driving character opposite Laura.
Rose left the ending deliberately vague and impressionistic. But the video's narrative is of Gibson's character coming to terms with who and where she is, and perhaps being persuaded of what "going west" might mean for her.
More stills from the video shoot are on Flickr.
Laura Gibson recently visited our studios.
Alicia J. Rose recently directed a music video for Cake.
opbmusic@opb.org
@opbmusic on Twitter
Facebook.com/opbmusic
