Living with Legends: Hotel Chelsea Blog

Spielberg Should Visit Chelsea

It seems that Steven Spielberg is launching a social networking site for people who have encountered ghosts or other manifestations of the super natural.  The site ought to get a lot of traffic from this place, that’s for sure.  Spielberg once saw a ghost at a hotel called the Excelsior House and fled in terror.  Well, not all the ghosts here are quite that scary, so we’d like to invite Spielberg to check in (if he can tolerate the frosty welcome from BD) and see what happens.  (Just don’t get a room on the 1^st floor, and for God’s sake stay out of the basement!) The accommodations might not be quite up to his standards, but the spirits don’t seem to mind. -- Ed Hamilton

The Strung-Out Junkie Ghost of the Chelsea Hotel

He was the angel-headed hipster who dragged himself through the Negro streets at dawn, looking for an angry fix.  He was the man who taught Bill Burroughs how to shoot heroin, and helped him grow marijuana on his farm in Texas.  His exploits are recounted in Ginsberg’s Howl, Kerouac’s On the Road, Burroughs’ Junky, and sundry other staples of Beat literature.  Con man, junkie, Times Square hustler, jailbird, and muse to the Beats, Herbert Huncke was also a fine writer in his own right, penning, among other works, the autobiographical Guilty of Everything, some of it written in a stall of a Times Square subway station.

Unlike the more famous Beats, Huncke was never able to make a living off his writings, and so his story is, in a sense, one of failed ambition.  He felt that he was the real deal, that these other figures were all to some extent poseurs, and that, perhaps due to his lack of an Ivy League education, his own work had never received the attention it deserved.  Always a gentleman, Huncke’s old age found him living in a tiny room at the Chelsea Hotel with a bathroom down the hall, struggling to maintain a quiet dignity in the face of failing health and the addiction that had dogged him throughout his life.

            Like all junkies, Huncke liked to shoot up in the bathroom and nod off while sitting on the toilet.  A private bathroom would, of course, have been ideal, but since his finances didn’t permit the extravagance, Huncke was forced to make do with the shared bathroom.  For the most part, however, this arrangement worked out fine, as Huncke’s neighbors and bathroom-mates knew his schedule and were respectful of his privacy and special needs.

            That was until the whores moved in.  There were usually three of these strumpets, though sometimes up to five, living together in a small room with a shared bathroom—Huncke’s bathroom.  They were all really young, teenagers in fact, except for their leader—a girl with one leg, the other cut off at the knee--who may have been twenty or so.  The youngest girl, who was fat and had a bad case of acne, looked to be all of about 16 and was no doubt a runaway.

            No stranger to the sex trade himself, Huncke had absolutely nothing against such “ladies of the evening,” and at first didn’t give their presence a second thought.  Though he did kind of wonder about the one with the stump, he soon learned that she was in great demand, a specialist, it turned out, esteemed for her singular endowment and thereby respected in her field.

            However, through some odd coincidence, some ironic quirk of fate, in all his time living in Hell’s Kitchen and Bowery flophouses, Huncke had somehow avoided ever having to share accommodations with such beings.  Perhaps if he had been subjected to such an arrangement at an earlier age--say in his twenties—he would have cleaned up his act and gone to dental school, or moved to New Jersey and founded a dry-cleaning dynasty.  But as it turned out, this deficit in Huncke’s lived experience would allow Destiny or Providence to exploit what can only be viewed as a sort of tragic flaw in a man who had for so long lived a heroic outlaw existence on the fringe of society.

            The whores were, to say the least, heavy bathroom users.  They were forever taking long bubble baths or fussing over their hair and makeup, either singly, or in teams. Besides that, Huncke soon noticed that they seemed to own, collectively or not, an incredible amount of lingerie—which makes sense when you think about it—which they rotated strategically, washing the various filmy garments out by hand and draping them to dry over the shower curtain rod, the sink, and the toilet, even hanging some over the mirror.         

            Even outside of that, it soon turned out that the bathroom was an integral part of their business operation.  They were in there constantly, because—barring the occasional twosome or (prohibitively expensive) threesome--when one of them had a john the others had to have somewhere to hang out for the duration, and it would have been rather inconvenient to bother putting their clothes on and heading down to the lobby.  Especially since their turn might come next.  Nor did they merely idle away their downtime: they took with them their cell phones—huge, clunky things at the time--and appointment books, and transformed the bathroom into their makeshift office.  In that way they were able to assure a steady stream of clients, one every half-hour, from afternoon until the early hours of the morning.

            The whores ran around in the hallway in their skimpy negligee, and when Huncke knocked on the bathroom door they often answered it fully nude, and though this might have made the whole ordeal bearable for a heterosexual man, Huncke was gay, and so it didn’t do a thing for him.  At first Huncke asked them politely if they would mind not staying in the bathroom for so long.

            “If you need in, just knock,” said the one-legged leader, cheerfully smacking her gum.

But they would mill around right outside the bathroom door in their faux-silken teddies and polyester nighties while Huncke fumbled nervously with his works.  If he took more than a couple of minutes they started banging on the door: “We’re freezing out here!  Come on, we’re in our underwear!”

            Huncke didn’t really want to get into a nasty argument with the women themselves, because, from experience, he knew that where there are whores, there are inevitably pimps, and he didn’t relish the thought of a rangy, gold-toothed young man lurking in the dark hallways to spring upon him with a knife.  At his wits end, he finally could think of only one recourse.  Though he’d never been a squealer, not even when it could have saved him from hard time in the can, he sucked it up and went down to complain to the management.

            The result--which Huncke knew in retrospect to be inevitable--was that the guys at the front desk acted like he was completely out of his gourd, like they’d never heard anything so crack-brained and loony in all their lives.  As they guffawed and rolled their eyes and suggested he check into a mental hospital, Huncke, disheartened, slunk back to his tiny room.

            Nevertheless, the management did do something about it: they called the whores and told them that Huncke had complained.

            Later that afternoon, dozing in his bed, Huncke was startled by a loud wooden thumping at his door.  Opening the door, he found himself confronted by the leader of the whores.  “Why do you hate us?!” she demanded, as two of her scantily clad co-workers stood behind her for back-up.

            Huncke started to explain that he didn’t hate them at all, that he just needed to use his bathroom sometimes, but she cut him off abruptly. “You’re just jealous because we’re young and beautiful!” she declared, her boob bouncing out of her negligee as she hopped in place on her crutch.

            “Yeah, and you’re just a shriveled up old man!” her co-worker with the acne, pointing at Huncke accusingly, added over her leader’s shoulder.

            After that, the situation progressed from bad to worse, ten times worse.  It may be an overstatement to say that the whores drove Huncke to his grave, but they certainly didn’t help matters, and may have hastened the progression of the illness that would eventually consume him.  After the confrontation at Huncke’s door, the whores made it a point of staying in the bathroom round the clock, smoking crack and eating their lunch in there, and, Huncke came to believe, even sleeping curled up on the floor sometimes.  Now they wouldn’t come out even if he knocked, but would simply shout back that he should use the sink in his room--or just go in his pants for all they cared.

            Thus the poor man’s last days on earth were transformed into a living hell.  In his final hour, Huncke had but one simple desire: to get into the bathroom to inject the one blessed substance that would ease the pain of his tortured existence, relax the iron bonds of consciousness, and allow him to slip seamlessly into the next metaphysical realm.

            Alas, the whores were laundering their lingerie.  Because his longing had been so intense, and because he died agitated and unfulfilled, Huncke was consigned to a Limbo, a lonely, shadow-infested, half-aware state between living and final oblivion—that finds its God-forsaken locus within the crumbling red brick walls of the Chelsea Hotel.

            Often the door to Huncke’s old bathroom will be found standing open in the middle of the night, and his old neighbors know that Huncke has been by.  Sometimes the door will slam shut, for no apparent reason.  The wind?  Perhaps.  But if you’ve stayed at the Chelsea for long you’ve surely heard the mournful wail, howling up from the black depths of the airshaft in the wee hours of the morning like some forlorn Bohemian banshee: “Get out of my bathroooooooom, you fucking whoooooooooooooores!” -- Ed Hamilton

[Editor’s Note: The preceding story is fictional: ghosts don’t exist; and even if they did, Stanley would never have allowed them—or for that matter whores or junkies—to roam the halls of the Chelsea Hotel.]

The Spiritualist Who Foretold His Own Death

Arthur B. Davies, an artist, made "spiritual" paintings--dancing nudes, etc. (See below.) He also traveled the world, collecting both ancient and modern art.  By 1928 he had crammed into every available space of his Chelsea Hotel studio more than a dozen Picassos, five Cezannes, four Matisses, and various other valuable works too numerous to mention. In 1928, his collection had grown so large that he expanded into the studio next door.

People considered him shy and reclusive, but in fact Davies concealed a scandalous secret, Along with his wife, Virginia, and many children living on his upstate farm, he had a second wife, Edna, and daughter in the city. His "city" daughter, Ronnie, went to school with the children of Davies' artist acquaintances, but because she lived under the false last name of "Owen," the adults did not know that her father was their friend. Aside from the two families, Davies and his beautiful young model, Wreath McIntyre, had been close since she began posing for him at age 14.  By the time he moved into the Chelsea, Davies had shipped Edna and Ronnie to Europe to avoid detection. He spent his time at the Chelsea with Wreath.

One day, Davies, who believed in spirtualism and the life beyond, consulted an astrologer who told him he would soon die abroad. Convinced that one's fate could not be avoided, he planned a trip to Europe

anyway. At the end of his last day of work with Wreath, he escorted her out of the Chelsea, turned to her and said, "I've never wanted anyone else to pose for me. It's been a wonderful fourteen years." Then he lifted his hat to her and walked away. Later that evening, he dined sumptuously with Virginia at a favorite restaurant in the city. The next day, he set sail for Europe, where his second wife, Edna, and their child were waiting.

Two months later, he was dead of a heart attack. His last words, Edna claimed, concerned a "great spiritual light which has come to me this night." In his wallet she found a scrap of paper on which were scribbled the words, "That light which never wintry blast / Blows out, nor rain nor snow extinguishes, / That light that shines from loving eyes upon, / Eyes that love back."

Edna had his remains cremated, brought them back to America, and presented them to Virginia--introducing herself and her daughter for the first time. Eventually, Virginia gained access to her husband's treasure trove at the top of the Chelsea Hotel, which she had never seen. After a life of hardship on her upstate farm, Virginia was amazed to find "an Arabian-Nights treasure trove" of abandoned works of art. She auctioned off most of the collection.  But she brought much of Davies' own work back to her farmhouse, where she burned a large portion of it, claiming that she considered it "unsuitable." That was quite and expensive bonfire, a New York Times reporter remarked.

Davies' works were included in the original collections for the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum. But thanks largely to his first wife's mishandling of his legacy, his body of work rapidly dropped out of sight and lost much of its value.  The strange, sensitive, secretive believer in unseen vibrations and psychic phenomena had been unable to influence his own legacy from beyond the grave. – Sherill Tippins

[Most of this information comes from the book, The Lives, Loves, and Art of Arthur B. Davies, by Bennard B. Perlmann, The State University of New York Press, 1998.]

The Severed Hand

By 1920, the theatre district had moved uptown to Herald Square, except for a few bawdy houses and burlesque palaces that remained on 23^rd Street, and the neighborhood was getting a bit rundown.  The Chelsea Hotel, however, was still at or near its peak, the stained glass windows and plate glass mirrors remaining intact, the ornate woodwork not yet obscured by the thick layers of paint that would one day cover it.

Nadia lived in the Chelsea with her well-to-do parents in a large suite of rooms.  That’s where she was born, in 1896, where she grew up, spoiled like a princess, where the artistic spirit of the Chelsea grew within her, and where, enlivened by that spirit, she was inspired to learn to paint: delicate work in the Japanese style on sheets of silk cut from bolts her father, a successful silk merchant, sometimes brought home from the warehouse.

And the theatre district, in full bloom while Nadia was a child, was where she met her handsome husband, a playwright and song writer who sold his songs on the old Tin Pan Alley on 27th Street.  They struggled for awhile on their own, moving from rooming house to rooming house, but her husband was an alcoholic and, though he managed to avoid serving in the war, could rarely find work.  And Nadia’s paintings failed to sell.  By the late teens they had two children, and soon no way to feed or cloth or even shelter them.

Her father made Nadia a deal.  She and her family could move back into the Chelsea Hotel—there was an extra room for them—in exchange for housework.  It was a great deal for everyone except Nadia, but her husband convinced her to accept.  Soon she was single-handedly cleaning the large suite, cooking three meals a day for the extended family, and washing out by hand her incontinent and demanding mother’s underwear.  All the while her husband sank further into drink, and was soon unable to bring in even the paltry few dollars he previously was able to earn through his songwriting.

            Nadia believed that her father, wealthy as he was, could have helped out with the money, but he was a tightwad, and what’s more, he wanted to teach her a lesson.  The old man had warned her about marrying that good-for-nothing dandy, and now, like a stern prophet of the Old Testament, he declared from his moral mountaintop that she must reap what she had sewn.  Already stretched near to the breaking point, Nadia was forced to take in piece work to made ends meet.

Amazingly, with the brats squalling in the background, the incontinent mother calling for fresh underwear, and the weak-willed husband calling for more drink, Nadia still managed to snatch a few minutes here and there for her intricate art.  Unfortunately, far from consoling her, this only served to reinforce her feelings of bitterness and disillusionment, as she found that her hands lacked the power to translate her ideas onto the canvas.  Looking at the offending appendages, she saw that the house work had coarsened and calloused her palms, knotted and gnarled her knuckles, aging and discoloring her skin before its time.  Flexing her hands, the joints felt tight, stiff, the result of the exacting needlework she so loathed, and Nadia came to believe that she was developing early arthritis.  “I’m working my fingers to the bone!” she cried out in anguish.

            That was to become her constant refrain. The early twenties are the time of life when mental illness typically first manifests, and at one point Nadia had to be hospitalized for two weeks at a rest facility on Long Island for a nervous disorder akin to hysteria.  (No one could see anything wrong with her hands.)  But she was much too valuable to the household to be allowed any further leisure, nor was her father willing to part with any more money to pay “those quarks” their  “extortionate” fees, and soon Nadia was back at work, and almost immediately her problems returned.

Finally, late one night, the children asleep in their beds, her husband passed out dead drunk on the floor, Nadia was able to tear herself away from the washtub of soiled undergarments long enough to put the finishing touches on what was to be her masterpiece, a scene of cranes cavorting in the Bethesda Fountain.  With intense concentration she willed her ravaged hand to put the final subtle stroke to the ambitious silken creation.  Stepping back, she surveyed her work critically.

It was crap!  Enraged, she seized a huge pair of industrial shears that she used to cut the silk and slashed her painting to shreds.  And then, very deliberately, she wedged the sheers into the corner, placed her right wrist between the blades, and fell upon the handles with all her weight, severing her delicate hand.

She hadn’t counted on the pain: searing, unbearable.  Howling in agony, and knowing her time was about up anyway, Nadia rushed to the window, threw open the French doors, and flung herself over the balcony, plunging the five floors to her death.

Since that fateful night, Nadia returns to the Chelsea on moonless nights, hovering outside people’s balconies, waving her bloody stump, barred by some infernal power of cosmic retribution from ever again re-entering the hotel.  So if you ever see a ghostly shape flit by your window at night, it’s hair and gown billowing though the air, you’ll know it’s Nadia, come to reclaim her hand. -- Ed Hamilton (photo: bluehour)

[Editor’s Note: The names and details have been changed to protect the ectoplasmic.  Thanks to Sherrill Tippins for pointing us toward the March 6, 1922 New York Times article that inspired this story: there really was a woman who chopped off her hand and jumped out the window at the Chelsea, and if that won’t make you leave a ghost behind, I don’t know what will.]

The Mad Baroness of the Chelsea Hotel

Today, our thoughts turn to Halloween.  Last year, we published a slew of ghost stories some of which were sent in by guest contributors.  We've got even more scary in store for you this year.  As Sherill Tippins admits, this isn't much of a ghost story, but it's still kind of scary since everybody in it loses their sanity. (And then at the end the whole country goes bonkers and gives women the right to vote!) It also features a dwarf:

In 1901, the glamorous Mrs. Frank Leslie moved into the Chelsea--probably onto the sixth floor. Born Miriam Florence Follin in 1836 to an old New Orleans family run to seed, she was rumored to be the
illegitimate product of a liason between the debonair, French-born Southerner Charles Follin and one of his slaves. Be that as it may, Miriam was raised by Charles and his wife as a precious flower whose beauty and brilliant intellect might, through a clever marriage, pull the family out of their economic decline. Tutored at home, she learned to speak and read in four languages, to dress to her advantage and charm well-born gentlemen with her quick wit and deceptive submissiveness.
     As she approached womanhood, the family moved to to New York, where the marriage market promised the highest return on their investment. They established a boarding house precariously near the slums of the Lower East Side. When 17-year-old Miriam allowed David Peacock, an older jewelry store clerk, to seduce her in exchange for the chance to adorn herself with the shop's diamonds, her parents efficiently arranged a shotgun wedding and then a quick annullment to preserve her reputation. Peacock ended up in an insane asylum, where he died.
     Miriam went on to perform onstage with a new mentor, Lola Montez, and then to become the mistress of a retired United States Senator, before finally making the marriage her parents had hoped for--to the famous archeologist and diplomat Ephraim G. Squier. But Squier was much older, and Miriam was bored. When the couple went to work for the even richer and more powerful Frank Leslie, founder of New York's Frank Leslie Illustrated Newspaper publishing empire, she encouraged Leslie's divorce and invited him to move in. For several years, the Squires and Frank Leslie enjoyed the era's most celebrated menage a trois, until Miriam divorced Squire (leaving him to go mad and die alone), married Leslie, and took over Frank Leslie's Illustrated after Leslie's death.
     By 1901 Mrs. Frank Leslie had become a multi-millionaire, building her late husband's business into one of New York's most successful publishing houses. She had dabbled in romance--marrying Oscar Wilde's drunken brother Willie and then returning him to his mother and filing for divorce; and engaging in a flirtation with the Marquis Campo Allegre Villaverde, Court Chamberlain to King Alfonso of Spain. But by the time she arrived at the Chelsea, she had decided to simply give herself the royal title she craved, without the bother of another marriage. She checked into the Chelsea as the diamond-bedecked "Frank Leslie, Baroness de Bazus," and began presiding over Thursday evening salons with her coddled Yorkshire terrior, featuring Ella Wheeler Wilcox, the "poetess of passion" ("Laugh and the world laughs with you/ Weep, and you weep alone") and Marshall P. Wilder, the well known hunchback, dwarf vaudeville performer who "broke the ice during dull afternoons" by hiding behind the grand piano and making baby-squalling noises until the others collapsed with laughter.
     As the years passed, rumors spread that the Baroness was losing her sanity. She forgot things, they said; her conversation drifted off in directions. The rumors increased dramatically after her death in 1914, when it was learned that she had left her $2 million fortune to the Suffragist movement. Family members sued; reporters sneered, the legal case dragged on. In the end, half of the legacy was wasted on lawyers, administration fees, taxes, and legal settlements. But about $1 million did go to the Suffragists in time for the final push toward ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. -- Sherill Tippins

How To Learn German in 25 Minutes or Less

We've always wanted to learn German, but it just seemed like too much time and effort.  Now we find   that it wasn't that hard at all.  Here we are, speaking fluent German on German Public Radio (download mp3), with nary a trace of an accent at all!  Here's a picture of our instructor, Martina Buttler, who taught us all we know of the language in the course of a 25 minute interview.  She's the best!

Ghosts, Aliens, Jon Bon Jovi: Nothing Can Ruffle This Chelsea Painter

            Last week, with a documentary film crew in tow (It was a shoot for New York Streets, a documentary that will be aired on Dec. 10th on channel NHK BS1 in Japan (and a small subscribed Japanese cable channel here). Debbie and I went to visit the painter Robert Lambert in his apartment/studio in the Chelsea Hotel.  Robert’s willowy figures exude a weird, otherworldly, spiritual beauty that captivates and transports the viewer.  Surrounded by Robert’s magnificent large canvases, Debbie asked the questions and I scribbled the answers down in my yellow note pad. 

-When did you first move in?

1998.  I had just come back from Paris.  My friend was living here and he introduced me to Stanley.  That always helps.  I was in 831.  [Editors’ Note: this is part of Thomas Wolfe’s old suite, and, more recently, the inspiration for the fragrance Kyle.831]

-What had you heard about the Chelsea before you moved in?

I never gave the history any thought.  The place had a nice vibe to it, and I liked it.  Stanley was pretty good about it and showed me a few places, and so I moved in.  I stayed 19 months, went back to Paris and lived there for 3 years, then came back to the Chelsea and I’ve been here ever since.

-How has the Chelsea changed your art?

It’s been changed by every place I stay.  There’s differences in light and color everywhere you go.  I’d have to say that it was hard for me to get a feeling for my art after 9-11.  When I moved in [in 2002] I used lots of paint, lots of texture, like in my piece about the killing of Theo Van Gogh.  But I got my first computer while I was living in the Chelsea, and it enabled my new work, which is flat, mixed media, with a very rough texture [it’s burlap on wood].  All this is drawn from my life at the Chelsea, though I can’t be specific about how it influenced me.

-Which city has the better light, New York or Paris?

I don’t know, I use construction lights.  That’s only  impressionists who care about that.  The only way light influences me is by the mood it creates: I go outside and I come back in, and I see the seasons changing.  It affects the way I express myself.

-According to legend, Stanley will take a painting in exchange for rent.  Any truth to that?

Not with me.  Maybe in the olden days.  Stanley has a good collection.  He has a good eye and certainly came up with a lot of great art.  But he also missed some of the great ones.  When Cristo moved out they found that he had wrapped all the doors and furniture, everything in the apartment, but Stanley didn’t know what it was and so he threw it all out.  But the artist can get away with a lot more than the ordinary person.  He’ll come up and look at my work once in awhile, nod his head, not say much, but let me know that he supports my work.

-How have old science fiction movies influenced your art?

They are classic, not old!  They haven’t really influenced my art at all.  They are hokey, silly, you have to suspend disbelief, so it feeds the imagination.  You have to add color yourself and pretend that somebody with a tea kettle on his head is an alien.  It’s like a good painting, never finished.  You have to work at it.

-Do you have a ghost?

I don’t know who it is.  It knocks on my door at 2 or 3 in the morning, a definite knock.  Sometimes I have the feeling that it’s in here, a presence.  But it’s a nice ghost.  Stanley told me an actress lived her, and perhaps she died here.  It’s a female presence.  I would say it was even if it wasn’t anyway.

-Do you think the Chelsea has a Creative spirit?

Yes, a lot of them.  But if I had to single one out I’d say it’s probably the drama.  There’s a drama being played out every day in the lobby, and watching it can’t help but give you some juice.  Sometimes the drama is sad and pathetic, sometimes just plain silly.  A lot of times it doesn’t even make any sense.  It’s like a Guatemalan soap opera, it’s so outrageous. It’s unlike anywhere else in this regard.

-Did you ever meet Andy Warhol?

Not here.  But I lived diagonally across the street from him on East 66^th Street in the 80s.  I saw him walking his dog everyday, and going around handing out Interview Magazine to all the doormen.  I never spoke to him, and we just nodded at each other as we passed.  But the strange thing was that, after he died, over the next few months the tree in front of his house withered and died as well.

            

            Robert recently had the honor of serving as the Painter in Residence at Rockefeller University, where his paintings commemorating 9-11 hung for a year, and where he himself hung out with Nobel laureates in the various sciences.  He wants everyone to know that he believes himself to be the only one from the Chelsea to have ever spliced genes—and he doesn’t mean Levis either!  (That joke is better when you hear it rather than read it.)

            As we were about to leave after the interview, Robert mentioned casually that Jon Bon Jovi had once shot part of a video in his room.  Eureka! Now we know who the ghost was!  Of course, you might argue, Bon Jovi is not dead, but we think a dynamic international superstar of his magnitude is most likely able to generate a ghost even while living.  Bon Jovi is not really a female presence, but oh, what the hell.  Who ever said ghosts were supposed to be logical:  “Like a cowboy, on a steel horse he rides...”

THE GRAY MAN OF THE CHELSEA

An old Chelsea babysitter writes:

            Though I never lived at the Chelsea Hotel myself, I used to babysit for a young couple who lived there back in the early nineties.  They were not artists. The man was an engineer and the woman owned a small business and I’m not sure why they chose the Chelsea.  Perhaps because they liked to enjoy a hedonistic lifestyle (they had an active social life) or maybe they wanted to be thought of as artistic or daring.  Or maybe just because it was cheap.  That’s the only thing I can think of.  I was a teenager at the time, and since they were gone all the time I babysat for them nearly every day one summer, and they went out a lot at night too.

            Their little boy was six or seven years old.  They were very protective of the child, and tried to keep him away from the dubious characters that roamed the halls of the Chelsea, and they were always complaining to Stanley about somebody doing something immoral. In fact, that’s probably why they hired me, because I came from outside the hotel.

            Now, what I’m going to say is the God’s honest truth, though the couple won’t admit it and they called me a liar to my face, but one night they had gone out to a cocktail party and they came home really late with another couple and they were all talking and joking around out in the stairwell.  I wanted to leave and I was waiting to get paid. The cocktail party was in the hotel I think, or at least there was some sort of party on one of the lower floors.  All I know is it was really loud.  They lived on the tenth floor.

            The boy, for obvious reasons I don’t want to say his name, came out in his pajamas.  When we noticed him we all said, what are you doing out here, go back to bed, but he wouldn’t.  Instead he went to the railing of the stairs and looked up at the skylight.  He just kept looking up and finally he said, “Mommy, who is that man up there?”    His parents just laughed and said, “Oh, what are you talking about?”  But instead of dropping it, the boy became increasingly excited, pointing and screaming: “Mommy, why is that man up there?!”  “There’s nobody up there honey,” his mother said.  “That man!  That gray man up there!”  “There’s nobody up there,” his father said sternly.  “Get back to bed.”

            Then the boy got quiet.  He kept staring at the skylight, but he was quiet.  I probably should have taken him to bed, but it was late and I really wanted to get paid and go home.  “He’s just tired,” the parents said to their friends, who said their goodbyes and got on the elevator and went down.  But while we were distracted watching them leave the boy had somehow managed to climb up on the railing and stand there, I don’t know how he did it, balanced on the top rail.

            Luckily, they saw him.  “Oh my God!” they said.  “What are you doing?!” the mother said, and the father grabbed him back down from there before he could jump or fall.  The boy started shaking and shivering all over as they both held him, almost having an epileptic fit, and he peed in his pants.  The parents were drunk and had been smoking pot I think, but that really sobered them up quick.  I didn’t even get my money that night but I guess after that I forgot about it and really just wanted to get the hell out of there as fast as possible.

            Like I said, they say I’m a liar about this.  But what they can’t deny is that their son changed after this incident.  I can’t prove anything but I personally think he was possessed by some kind of spirit that night.  He was a really sweet kid before but after that he was either like a zombie or else he would go into a violent rage.  They told me to keep sharp objects locked up and not to let him out of my sight and not to go anywhere.  They were keeping him locked in his room at night because he would try to sneak out and one time he turned on all the burners on the gas stove and almost killed them all.  When you took him out him out you had to hold onto him because he would go for the railing, not rushing for it but like pulled to it in a trance.  And he was strong too.  A couple of times he got away from me and tried to climb up onto the railing, whether to jump or what I don’t know, but I was able to pull him back down and get him into the elevator thank God.  I don’t know if he was trying to get to the man or to throw himself over but it was clear that if he kept doing it he would fall eventually.  Darkness was bad, but an overcast day was the worst.  He tore his room all up when he went into his violent rages and he graffitied all over the walls in crayons in gibberish or an unknown language.

            After a few days of this I wanted to quit but the parents begged me to stay and said they couldn’t get anyone else.  These days they would probably say the child had ADD, and they got a doctor and medicated the child and it kept him quiet but he still couldn’t be left alone or he would go out into the hallway and head for the railing.  I lasted about two weeks, it was not worth the money even though they agreed to pay me double.

            Now I’ve done some research on this issue since then and this type of possession is never straightforward.  (Though I was a babysitter then I went on to get a college education and studied psychology and parapsychology.)  The boy was smart and he knew what was happening to him in a way though understandably he would often become confused and I think this was the source of his violent rages.  Sometimes he thought that adults were trying to lead him to the railing or even to throw him over.  He would scream and run away and hide in his room.  I guess in these instances he was not possessed and maybe he even thought the adults were the Gray Man.  When he was like this then you couldn’t get him out the door for anything.

            I mention this because of what happened next.  I was trying to take him out to the dentist one day.  His parents were stupid for making me do this but they insisted because they wanted to pretend that nothing was wrong.  I knew better by this time and I kept a tight grip on the boy and kept my body between him and the railing as I steered him toward the elevator.  This time though he didn’t go into a trance like usual and try to make it to the railing.  Instead as soon as we got near the railing he started screaming hysterically and struggling against me.  I held on and told him to shut up as I pushed the elevator button.  But he bit my hand and got free and ran back to the room and started struggling to open the door, turning the handle and pulling and  pushing against it.  Of course it was locked but he started screaming at me and cursing me, calling me a fucking bitch and every other name in the book, telling me to open the door and let him in or he’d kill me.  Alright that’s it, we’re not going anywhere I thought, and I got the key out of my pocket and opened the door.  He burst in and before I could get in he grabbed the door and slammed it on me.  I got my body in the way and stuck my foot in the door so he couldn’t close it all the way but he was freakishly strong and I couldn’t push it open.  He got the chain on somehow and he ran back into the apartment.  I couldn’t just leave him in there because who knows what he was going to do so I tried to stick my hand in and get the chain off.  When he saw that he ran at the door but I had my foot in  it and though it hurt like hell he couldn’t close the door.  Where he got the scissors I’ll never know, but the next thing I know he stabs me in the hand!  I screamed and pulled my hand out and my foot too, and he slammed the door and threw the dead bolt.

            So then I was standing there bleeding and I didn’t know what to do.  I was bleeding profusely and I couldn’t even leave to go to the hospital because what if the kid got out and killed himself?  Or killed himself in there?  I tried calling for him in my confusion, begging him to open the door but of course that did no good.  Finally I banged on all the neighbors doors and finally somebody opened up and gave me a rag to wrap my hand in.  I told the lady to call the mother at work and she came home and tried to act like it was no big deal and I was the one who was crazy and caused the problem in the first place.  I don’t think anybody believed her, but still!  I was the one who was trying to help!  I had to get five stitches in my hand at the hospital.

            There was no way I was going back after that, and I told them they should get the child institutionalized.  They didn’t appreciate that one bit but there wasn’t much they could say after the kid had just stabbed me.  The man paid me, overpaid me by several times, trying to pay me off I guess, to buy my silence and it’s true I didn’t say anything to anybody for nearly a year after that and by that time they had already left the Chelsea.  And New York, I think.  The reason I didn’t say anything was not the money but because they made me feel like I was crazy for even mentioning it.  I was just seventeen, remember.

            They got another babysitter, a girl in her twenties who I knew from school, and the kid drove her crazy.  She started taking drugs, maybe she had been taking them before, and eventually she had to get psychiatric help.  I think she may have even spent some time in a mental hospital.  The couple tried to blame her for their child’s condition, saying she was a junkie, but she had nothing to do with it since like I said the child was like that before.  I feel more sorry for her than for anybody to tell you the truth.  Except for maybe the child.  He was supposed to start school in the fall, but they held him back and I doubt he was ever normal again.

            Since then I’ve often thought of the Gray Man, wondered who he was, perhaps the ghost of someone who committed suicide by throwing himself down the stairwell.  Or maybe a more elemental spirit, a sort of evil pied piper of children.  When I asked the boy one time who the Gray Man was, he said he was smoke.  I don’t know whether this makes any sense or not, but this was when the boy was in a good, or rational state of mind.  The parents and their child disappeared into middle America and obscurity, trying to put as much distance between themselves and the Chelsea as possible.  The boy would be in his early twenties now which is typically when a dormant mental illness manifests.  I assume they’ve had him on medication all this time, but now that he’s an adult what if he decides to stop taking it as often happens?  There was a powerful attraction working on him, that I know, pulling him toward that railing and that skylight.  And so I have to ask, is this paranormal force still drawing him to the Chelsea?  Will he return to the scene of his childhood and his lost innocence?  And what form will his madness take in adulthood?  It seems only time will tell.

Wow, this place is even scarier than I thought.  Junkies and schizophrenics are one thing, but elemental spirits are more than I can handle.  Almost makes me want to live in the suburbs!  And this woman seems pretty authoritative too; after all, she’s studied parapsychology.  Keep your doors locked tonight!  (Ed Hamilton)

Larry The Ghost

Larry the Ghost is perhaps the Chelsea's most famous resident spirit.  Our Anonymous Hotel Chelsea Blogger # 3 interviewed several live residents in order to come to the following conclusions about Larry:

The main thing about Larry is that he never stops talking. This is upsetting to the other ghosts, because they're eager to tell their stories once they find someone who can hear/see them.  But Larry always pushes his way to the front and starts lecturing in such a loud voice that the others can't get a word in.  What he wants people to know, mainly is:
1) It's what's inside the Chelsea that's real. Everything out there, in the so-called city, is an illusion.
2) There was something there long before the Chelsea was built that is the source of the place's creative power.
3) It's not about the product--the specific art that's created; it's about the life that is led at the Chelsea Hotel.  "That's what's important, man," says Larry.

Though skeptics in the world at large might say that the residents who claim to have encountered Larry are a bit on the batty side, we take solace in the wisdom of Larry himself: he would have no doubt as to whom was really crazy.  (photo link)

A Crossroads for Spirits: A Medium Visits the Chelsea

We always knew the Chelsea was filled with ghosts.  There's just too many frustrated artists roaming the halls for it to be otherwise, too many lost souls with unfinished business.  But leave it to our Anonymous Hotel Chelsea Blogger # 3 to bring a medium to the hotel in order to provide the definitivie proof of this otherworldy infestation.  If you've ever felt the hairs on the back of your neck bristle as you've walked these halls late at night, then delve into this terrifying document at your own peril, for you may well see your deepest fears confirmed:

I remembered some more ghostly things that my "medium" friend saw at the Chelsea.  We took a tour from first to top floor, so I'll try to remember everything she said was there (provided to you anonymously, of course):

Lobby: There are half a dozen to a dozen spirits hanging around the lobby, hoping every day that someone will notice them, but almost no one ever does. They're lonely and very anxious to be recognized.

Elevator: Definitely someone lurking in there, just watching from the corner.

A room on the 3rd floor, West End: Something terrible--a beating or murder--happened in the bathroom.  Best not to go in there. Another friend who was with us ignored this warning and took a shower there, and found deep scratch marks on her chest afterwards.
Writer Sparkle Hayter, who lived for quite a while on the third floor had this to say about these findings: A hard drugs dealer lived there for a while (he was also into bestial porn, we later learned) and the cops came one day to say they had a report he was keeping a woman there against her will.  After he left, a lot of star-crossed lovers stayed in that room – had wall-shaking arguments, soul-rattling arguments.  When it was empty however, and I was away on a  book tour, people would hear someone typing, on a  typewriter in my room.  I often saw the shadow of a crouched woman in a corner of my room late at night and heard weeping, when I walked towards it, she disappeared.  Any connection?

And speaking of ghosts, you know about Sid haunting the east elevator? And about the man in the hat ghost (ask David Bard about the latter.)

Fifth floor, west end, one of the little halls leading north: An 1880s-era woman spirit, elegantly dressed, stands before a non-existent mirror touching up her hair, over and over, eternally. She's anxious about a meeting she's about to have.

One of the middle floors (6th?): A little boy-ghost in Thirties-era clothes kicked my friend in the shins hard enough to make her limp the rest of the way upstairs. She actually had a bruise there later.

A higher floor (7th or 8th), west wing pretty near the elevators: A spirit tried to lure my friend into a "womb-like purple room," telling her soothingly that she just needed to rest. My friend was sure that if she followed the spirit she'd be suffocated.

On one middle floor (I think), at the west end, someone had put up voodoo veves--colorful magic symbols--all over the walls, to counteract bad energy.  My friend said the person had an excellent reason to do that, but that the veves weren't working.

Around the 9th floor or so, west end, narrow corridor (I think it was leading north), there was something so upsetting that my friend started crying and ran upstairs to get away from it.

In the cellar--in a corridor leading away from the back (perhaps that tunnel that's supposed to lead to 22nd Street) there's a primal, powerful force too scary for my friend to go near.  Maybe that's what inspired DeeDee Ramone to put Sid Vicious' ghost down there in "Chelsea Horror Hotel."

Drifting through the halls is a young girl in a white Victorian-style nightgown, weeping helplessly and desperate to tell her story to someone. She tried to talk to my friend, but Larry, the famous hiptster ghost, kept interrupting.

As you can see, we had a great tour. (Interesting that she didn't mention seeing anything in the east half of the hotel, except in the cellar.) Overall, she said it was the most haunted building she'd visited in New York, except for the New York Public Library on 42nd Street.  The list here looks pretty negative, but she said there were a wide range of spirits, good and bad, happy and unhappy.  Also, she had the impression that many of them were able to come and go from the hotel. They weren't stuck inside the building.  So it's apparently a crossroads for spirits as well as artists.

Anonymous Hotel Chelsea Blogger #3