L
ast month, I found myself in La Honda for the very first time. This cozy corner of the Santa Cruz mountains is best known for providing safe havens over the years for the likes of Steve Jobs, Neil Young and Ken Kesey. I was there visiting friends who’d recently purchased a house nestled—as is the entire town—in a vast sea of towering redwoods.
As I stood on my friend’s deck, drinking tea and admiring the view, a strange noise interrupted the chorus of birdsong.
“Ooh-ah-ah-ah-ah!”
“What the hell kind of bird is that?” I laughed. “It sounded exactly like a monkey!”
“Well, it might be a bird,” my friend replied. “Or … it might be the offspring of one of Ken Kesey’s LSD test monkeys.”
There is a story here, of course. And it’s a very good one. But before I go any further, I need to explain a few things about La Honda. La Honda is no ordinary countryside community. Hunter S. Thompson once referred to it as “the world capital of madness.” Of his time hanging out there he said, “There were no rules, fear was unknown, and sleep was out of the question.”
In 1962, after the success of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey moved to La Honda in pursuit of both privacy and freedom. He lived there for over a decade before renting his house out to various tenants and selling the home in 1997.
Kesey was infamous in the ’60s for regularly throwing LSD-laced ragers there. Frequent guests included the Grateful Dead, Kesey’s band of Merry Pranksters, and an abundance of writers including Thompson, Allen Ginsberg, Tom Wolfe and Frank Reynolds. In 1965, Ginsberg wrote the poem, First Party at Ken Kesey’s With Hell’s Angels about a night at Kesey’s La Honda home. Wolfe later wrote about hanging out there in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
Today, a sense of paranoia imbues the very bricks and mortar of the town. I cannot find one person from La Honda who will do an interview about La Honda without the cloak of anonymity. “It’s like a village,” one man who grew up there told me. “It’s really tight, isolated, everyone knows each other—but it’s got a lot of fringy, eccentric people in it and they don’t necessarily want outsiders knowing their business.”
M
y friend with the new house wasn’t clear on some of the details of what exactly happened with Ken Kesey and the LSD monkeys, so he directed me to a friend of his, who we’ll call Clyde. (This, of course, is not his real name.) Clyde grew up in Half Moon Bay but spent most of his youth in La Honda, hanging out with “the offspring of the Merry Pranksters.” Clyde says that, in the 1980s, sightings of the monkeys were so common, kids in La Honda had a nickname for them: “The Shaved.”
“Kids I knew talked about The Shaved,” Clyde explains. “Some had seen one. At first they thought it was a little kid—a lost kid or something. Because it was a little bit taller than knee-high and it was bald. Or at least kind of patchy—a little mangy, right? And so at first they would talk about this lost kid. But then other people said, ‘No, that’s a monkey.’ Because other people had seen this patchy, mangy dog-monkey too.”
Clyde’s version of how The Shaved came to roam the hills of La Honda is rooted in what he refers to as “lore” and “legend.” But he is convinced most of the rumors are true because of how many sources he’s heard them from. “I got the puzzle pieces at different points in my life,” he says, “from different people who weren’t connected.”
Clyde says that in the 1960s, Stanford University was receiving money from the government to conduct research into the effects of hallucinogens. This element of the story is almost certainly true. In fact, Ken Kesey’s first introduction to LSD happened in 1959, while studying at Stanford. He was given the drug after volunteering as a research subject at the university. Kesey’s experience of being drugged and studied at Menlo Park Veterans Hospital famously provided him with the inspiration for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Clyde says that the research involved testing drugs on monkeys too, and that one of the “three or four professors” conducting the Stanford research was a man named Bill Marquis. Marquis remains legendary in La Honda, and is referred to exclusively by locals as either “Monkey” or “Monkey Bill.” One man in a 2006 LSD documentary by Aron Ranen notes that Monkey Bill “never [gave the monkeys] one thing that he didn’t try first.”
