In Brief
Most haunted buildings have one ghost. The Hotel Chelsea on West 23rd Street in Manhattan has a crowd. Famous lives and famous deaths stacked up here for a century, and the spirits, by one account, never left the lobby.
The Full Story
In 1996, years before The Sopranos, the actor Michael Imperioli was living at the Hotel Chelsea on West 23rd Street in Manhattan when he saw a woman in 19th-century clothing hunched on the hallway floor, sobbing. A light fixture behind him popped. When he looked back, she was gone.
He had met Mary, the Chelsea's most famous ghost. The story goes that she was the widow of a man lost on the Titanic, and that she hanged herself on the fifth floor in 1912 after the news reached her. None of that is in any record, and probably none of it happened. People report her anyway, at the western end of the building, under a hallway archway, where she pauses to check herself in a mirror. They call her the vain ghost.
But Mary is barely the start. The building went up in 1883, and across the century it collected lives the way other hotels collect guests. Dylan Thomas was in Room 205 in 1953 when he drank himself into a coma and died; people report his footsteps there still. Nancy Spungen bled to death in the bathroom of Room 100 in 1978. The hotel later erased Room 100, merging it into a larger suite to stop fans from making pilgrimages. In 1922, the wife of a concert pianist cut off her own left hand and went out a fifth-story window. A photographer was beaten to death in his eighth-floor room in 1974. The Warhol star Edie Sedgwick set fire to her rooms with candles so many times that staff moved her to Room 105, just above the lobby, where they could keep an eye on her. Leonard Cohen, who lived there too, warned her the candles were "extremely dangerous."
So when the historian Sherill Tippins checked in with a medium for four nights, the medium had a lot to work with. She said the Chelsea was more haunted than anywhere she had been except the New York Public Library, the lobby full of spirits trying to tell their stories, others riding the elevator up and down. One of them, a 1960s hipster ghost named Larry, had a message he wanted passed along: "It's not about the art, man. It's about the life!"
The hotel closed for renovation in 2011. A make-up artist who lived there said the air "felt thicker and thicker" as the work went on, the residents reporting that spirits were crowding into their apartments, as if fleeing the construction. The building had room for the living again by 2022. Whether it had room for the rest of them, nobody asked.
