During a recent trip to the Big Apple, my friend and I decided to call the Chelsea Hotel home for 4 days. It has always been a secret fantasy of mine to stay here and my friend was just content to get away from home for a while. Upon our arrival, the guy at the front desk put us up in room 124 as it was the “last room available” for the weekend. He could’ve put us up on the roof and I would’ve been just as happy. Its the Chelsea Hotel! I was to meet another guy who worked at the hotel later that evening who informed us that more rooms were available. I didn’t think twice about why they put us in 124. Like I said, we were in the Chelsea freakin’ Hotel!
Our room was quite spacious complete with a kitchenette, 2 large beds, a couple of desks and an old Victorian styled couch which looked like a prop from The Munsters’ TV set. My friend commented on the couch and likened it to a couch old school funeral parlors used to prop dead people up on so they could be photographed. We got to joking around about this and my friend decided to have me pose on the couch as if I had been murdered. A few hours after our impromptu photo session and after having been out to explore the golden secrets Manhattan has to offer, we found ourselves back at the Chelsea shooting the shit. I was sitting on my bed as my friend was relaxing on the couch. All of a sudden, his demeanor took a 360 and he turned pale. He very nonchalantly remarked, “I just saw a ghost.” I laughed. Ghosts aren’t real, they only exist in movies and Joseph Arthur songs. Supposedly he had seen a fuzzy image of a man walk out of our bathroom and disappear.
Afterwards, some dark gloomy cloud of sadness settled over him. “I’ve got to get up off this couch before I start crying,” he said, face red and eyes full of tears. “Something bad happened here, in this room, on this couch. I have to delete those pics we took earlier. It was wrong for us to have joked around about that. I HAVE to delete them now to make things right again.” I agreed with him. We did get carried away. After pressing him for a good 10 minutes about what it was he had seen, a small part of me began to believe him. This guy and I have been friends for our entire lives and our jokes never last longer than a minute or two. I was just finding it hard to wrap my head around such an abstract idea such as ghosts, and I’m the poet, go figure. Anyways, I suggested he call our friend who works at the hotel and see if he could answer some of our questions. As he was on the phone with the front desk trying to get connected to our friend, I made my way to the bathroom to take a leak. Midway through my business, I felt something pulling up 3-4 hairs on my right forearm. It wasn’t just that weird feeling you get like with static. It was something tugging on a few of my arm hairs. I looked down to see if something had gotten stuck on my arm like piece of thread from jeans and nothing was there. I then felt something like cold droplets of water falling on my left forearm. Again, I scanned my surroundings in search of a leak or something that would explain this weird sensation. I could find nothing.
Startled, I emerged from the bathroom and suggested to my friend that we head downstairs and try and get some answers. Half-dazed and in our bed clothes, we made our way to the front desk. The lady smiled at us and we just kind of stood there in a strange stupor. Moments later my friend opened his mouth, “Is this place haunted? We saw something in our room…” The lady behind the front desk just kind of laughed and said that the place wasn’t haunted and, with a fierce look in her eyes, silently asked us to go away. Back at the room, I suggested we Google the hotel to see if it was haunted. To our surprise, we stumbled upon countless stories of run-ins with the paranormal at the Chelsea.
I’m not sure what happened in room 124 of the Hotel Chelsea but both my friend and I experienced something in that room that we’ll never forget. I walked into the Chelsea believing that ghosts were figments of crazy people’s minds to walking out of the Chelsea believing in the paranormal. Life sure is crazy, ain’t it?
Matt
Living with Legends 
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