In Brief
Montgomery Clift lived in Room 928 of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel for about three months in 1952, rehearsing bugle scenes late into the night. He left. Guests since say the bugle didn't — and that a man still paces the ninth floor.
The Full Story
In Room 928 of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, on Hollywood Boulevard, guests say they hear a bugle at night with no source for it. The man who used to play one lived there in 1952.
Montgomery Clift had taken the room for about three months while shooting *From Here to Eternity*, the film where he played a soldier who blows taps for a dead friend. He rehearsed the bugle scenes in 928 late into the night, the part that would earn him a Best Actor nomination. Then filming wrapped and he checked out.
Decades of guests say he didn't really leave. People on the ninth floor report the trumpet again, cold spots near the closet and the bathroom, the sense of being watched, and a shadowy man who paces the hallway as if he's still working a scene. The room is sometimes listed as 929 or 930 now — the hotel renumbered over the years — but the bugle stays attached to 928.
He isn't the only star the place kept. Marilyn Monroe lived at the Roosevelt for about two years early in her career, in a suite near the pool. In mid-December 1985, just before the hotel reopened from a long restoration, a staffer named Suzanne Leonard was dusting a tall framed mirror in the manager's office when she saw, in her words, "the reflection of a blonde girl right where her hand was dusting." She turned. No one was behind her. The reflection stayed.
She never said it was Marilyn. The manager told her the mirror had come from Monroe's old poolside suite, and the name took hold and grew from there. The mirror sits today outside the lower-level elevator, and people still stop to look. A paranormal investigator, Joe Nickell, has a flatter answer: pareidolia, the brain reading a face into the streaks left on glass.
The hotel opened in 1927 and hosted the very first Academy Awards two years later, a 15-minute dinner for about 270 people. Stars have been checking in ever since. Some of them, the stories go, never finished checking out.
