The Chelsea Horror Hotel Horror.
Never one to travel light, I dragged myself into the Chelsea with the sleep mask from the last flight still fetchingly atop my head.
As I struggled through the only hotel door in Manhattan without a doorman, I felt like I’d come home at last. I had arranged well in advance with Stanley that I should have ‘my room’, the room I stayed in on my first visit to the Chelsea, 626. A very New York negotiation went on that I was too tired to contribute a lot more to than pretending to comprehend.
The only thing that was clear was that Stanley seemed to want me to take 821 rather than 626. The small saving made by sharing a bathroom and the treat of being at the front of the Hotel swayed me to agree. I had a sense that Stanley was telling me something in code that I wasn’t understanding. I would never question the senior Mr Bard’s wisdom- he knows all.
As soon as the door to 821 was opened to me I knew that it was the room I was meant to be in. It was long and thin with a huge walk in closet, larger than some of the Manhattan apartments I saw, and very sparsely furnished.
The first impulse in marking out my space for the coming months was determined by the room. Two bay windows with shelves below sat waiting for me. They said perfectly ‘desk and bookshelves’.
I put my laptop in place and unpacked the ridiculous number of Chelsea related books that I was carrying onto the shelves. With a few pictures gathered in SF displayed on the remains of what must once have been a fireplace, I felt sufficiently like custodian of the room to be off into the Manhattan night, still avec sleep mask, in search of food.
Returning with an enormous thing from the Tex-Mex take away on 23rd, I sprawled on the bed and started picking through a nearby copy of Dee Dee Ramone’s Chelsea Horror Hotel book. At the time, it didn’t occur to me that when I left the room, the book had been shelved with the others. It would take until the next day to notice something very peculiar happening.
Every time I was out, Chelsea Horror Hotel would move. I tried to convince myself that I was imagining it but that only served to produce the evidence that I wasn’t imagining it. No matter how often I returned the book to the shelves, it would be somewhere else when I returned.
Rational explanations are very sparse. It wasn’t a matter of the book falling. From the shelves to the TV top is a strange fall. As far as I could tell, nobody had been in the room unless next door had been shimmying along the ledge to move my Dee Dee book each time I went out. This seems an unlikely prospect and it still leaves the problem to be answered- if I was being subjected to an elaborate prank, how did these people know that Dee Dee’s book would spook me the most effectively? This simply wasn’t a situation that could be explained rationally.
I called three objective witnesses to this phenomenon. Two of them were young people I met at the theatre who wanted to see the Hotel and the other a yuppie who did not want to believe in the Chelsea spooks. The book put on a special performance for the doubting yuppie. When we returned from an evening on the tiles it had travelled the length of the room to land in the sink.
The yuppie was so spooked that he avoided coming back. He was last seem wandering off muttering about ancient Indian burial grounds.
It was on day three, if memory serves, that I met a former resident of room 821- a woman who lives near by and still visits regularly. I was more than pleased to welcome her for a look at her old room- we already had a Saturday morning Starbucks party happening anyway.
It was this visitor who revealed the piece of the puzzle that brought this strange series of events to some sort of conclusive ending. I WAS OCCUPYING THE ROOM THAT ONCE HOUSED DEE DEE RAMONE!
I have absolutely no doubt that some form of energy left behind by Dee Dee had been trying to get my attention by tossing the book around. He likely wrote that book at the very place I had set up my desk. Once I knew that the room had once been Dee Dee’s the book de-animated and has behaved normally ever since.
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