Hotel Chelsea

The Hotel Chelsea at 222 West 23rd Street has housed Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, and Leonard Cohen, and also accumulated at least a dozen documented deaths since 1908. Actor Michael Imperioli saw a sobbing Victorian ghost in 1996, Room 100 was demolished to stop Sid and Nancy pilgrimages, and a medium described dozens of era-dressed spirits crowding the halls.

Actor Michael Imperioli was staying at the Hotel Chelsea in 1996 when he saw a woman dressed in 19th-century clothing lying hunched on the floor, sobbing uncontrollably. A light fixture behind him made a popping sound. She vanished. The Sopranos star had just met Mary, the hotel's most famous ghost.

Mary's story goes like this: her husband was aboard the Titanic. In 1912, Titanic survivors were temporarily housed at the Chelsea, and Mary checked in to wait for news. When she learned he had drowned, she hanged herself on the fifth floor. Visitors now find her at the western end of the building, often under the archway, and occasionally checking herself in the mirror.

But Mary is not even close to the Chelsea's only ghost. The 12-story Queen Anne Revival building at 222 West 23rd Street, designed by Philip Hubert and built in 1883, has been home to so many famous people, and so many deaths, that the paranormal reports read more like a census than a haunting.

The documented deaths alone: Almyra Wilcox overdosed on sleep medication in 1908. Frank Kavecky shot himself in 1909. Etelka Graf slashed her own hand and jumped from a fifth-floor window in 1922. Dylan Thomas drank himself into a coma in Room 205 in 1953 (he claimed 18 straight whiskeys at the nearby White Horse Tavern, then collapsed at the hotel and died at St. Vincent's Hospital). Edie Sedgwick set her room on fire in 1967. Author Charles R. Jackson killed himself in 1968. Photographer Billy Maynard was beaten to death in 1974. Nancy Spungen was stabbed in Room 100 in 1978 while Sid Vicious nodded off on heroin.

Room 100 doesn't exist anymore. The hotel demolished it and merged the space into another unit, specifically to stop the pilgrimages from Sid and Nancy fans. Guests still reported Nancy's presence in the area, crying sounds near the old bathroom.

The more interesting ghosts are the ones with personality. A 1960s spirit named Larry communicated through a medium to author Sherill Tippins (who wrote Inside the Dream Palace, the definitive Chelsea history). Larry's message: "It's not about the art, man. It's about the life!" He also told Tippins to investigate the basement, where a medium later described being "overwhelmed by remnants of a sense of evil," connected to a death during an 1800s fire.

Abstract painter Lindsey Nobel lived in Room 507 from 2003 to 2005 and reported an encounter with what she believed was the ghost of William S. Burroughs. "He was floating above me," Nobel said. "When I breathed in, he breathed in." She asked the ghost to keep the other spirits away. It reportedly worked.

Night security guard Timor told musician Timothy Connor Sullivan about Victoria, a call girl who died of AIDS at the hotel. A new tenant saw her in the mirror, Betty Boop bangs and all. On the 10th floor, artist Jennifer Elise Schaperow described a night around 1997 when "My hair just stood up and I knew I had to run." Her roommate had already seen a ghostly man standing in the kitchen at 2 AM.

Novelist Sparkle Hayter heard typing coming from an empty apartment while she was on a book tour. She also witnessed the shadow of a crouched woman in a corner, accompanied by weeping.

When renovations hit the building in 2011, make-up artist Meli Pennington said the air "felt thicker and thicker." Residents reported spirits crowding into their apartments, apparently fleeing the construction. One tenant specifically asked a "lecherous-looking guy in a wife-beater" spirit to leave.

Tippins brought a medium to Room 325 for four nights. The medium described dozens of ghosts from different eras "crowding in around beds by the dozens." The elevator carries them up and down. The lobby, according to the medium, is full of spirits "constantly trying to tell their stories."

That might be the most honest description of the Chelsea Hotel ever written, living or dead. It was always a place where people showed up with something to say. Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Patti Smith, Robert Mapplethorpe, Arthur C. Clarke, Janis Joplin, Andy Warhol's entire Factory crowd. The building collected people with big lives and, frequently, early deaths. That the ghosts are talky and opinionated and refuse to leave feels less like a haunting and more like the building is just doing what it's always done.