Lamp-Inspired Monster Chair
Gassaway, West Virginia
This is the first of five Monster Chairs that appeared in and around Flatwoods in 2015-2016; it was completed in May 2015. All five were built by Allan Johnson, a local woodworker, then painted on-site by Andrew Smith, director of the Braxton County Visitors Bureau. Smith, with a fine arts degree from Fairmont State University, patterned this chair after the ceramic Braxton County Monster Lamps that we're first produced in the area in the 1960s. You can tell by the painted-on yellow vent holes in the Monster's shoulders.
Each monster chair is ten feet tall, the same height as the Monster itself, which briefly visited Flatwoods and terrified the locals in the late summer of 1952. Three steps at the front of the chair lead to a platform seat between the Monster's outstretched arms, big enough to hold several panic-stricken-posing people at once.
All five chairs have the same wooden design, but Andrew painted each slightly differently, with the first chairs being truer to the Monster's reported appearance, and the last being examples of Andrew more-or-less winging it. "We figured if they were all the same, why would anyone visit more than one?" he told us.