Living with Legends

Today we kick off our blog-of-horror week. Everyday, leading up to Halloween, we will be running ghost stories set in our favorite spooky, old hotel. So don’t miss a single scare!

            It’s well known that underground filmmaker Harry Smith was also a painter, folklorist and ethnomusicologist, and that he collected string figures and paper airplanes.  Less well know is that, during his time at the Chelsea, Harry kept a Zombie.  A disciple of uber-Satanist Aleister Crowley— whom he often claimed, much to his mother’s embarrassment, to be his real father—Harry was a consecrated bishop in the O.T.O., the Ordo Templi Orientis, a mystical order founded in Germany in 1902 and reorganized by Crowley in 1912.  The order is fairly eclectic, embracing all world traditions of magic, and that’s what led Harry to the study of Voodoo.  Traveling to Haiti in the sixties in order to fully immerse himself in the dark art, Harry soon attained the rank of Houngan, or Voodoo priest, amazing even seasoned practitioners with the ease with which he channeled the spirit of the powerful snake god Damballah Wedo.

            Raising the dead, however, is another matter altogether, and it would take Harry the greater part of the next two decades to attain the competence necessary to negotiate the intricacies—and to avoid the myriad perils–of the arcane reanimation ceremony.  (In Harry’s defense I should note that he did have a lot of irons on the fire.)  Finally, by the end of the eighties, he was ready to give it a go.  Knowing that the only place in New York that would tolerate such an abomination was the Chelsea Hotel, he made an appointment to see our illustrious proprietor, Stanley Bard, and he was moving his stuff into the Dowager of 23^rd St. that very afternoon.  Now, all Harry lacked was a suitable subject for his diabolical ministrations.

            Luckily, in my early years at the Chelsea, there were still several residents around who remembered Harry and the Zombie, and by questioning them at length I have been able to reconstruct the events surrounding the Zombie’s tenure at the hotel.  I spoke with a man—for obvious reasons he chooses to remain anonymous–who was involved in the actual ceremony, and what follows is an account, in his own words, of that terrible night:

At the time I was Harry’s disciple, so when he mentioned the idea to me I was all for it, since I figured with a Zombie slave around that meant less work for me.  One night this deadhead dude came over, and Harry sat him down on the bed with a big bowl of reefer and a bottle of Jack.  I had never seen the dude before and I don’t know where Harry picked him up.  But while he was busy with the pot and the liquor, Harry went around lighting all the candles around his tiny junked-up room, dozens of them, stuck with melted wax onto every flat surface.  Then he put on a ratty yellow robe and a cardboard headdress, and started chanting and dancing around, and it wasn’t long before he was possessed by the spirit of Daballah Wedo.

      The deadhead didn’t seem to care, or even to really notice, what was going on, until Harry began to anoint him with cat’s urine and a greasy, foul-smelling pitch-like substance.  “What the fuck, man!” the deadhead dude said.  “Smoke some more reefer, dude,” Harry said.  “Try some bong hits  this time.”  Harry drug a bong out from under the bed.  It should come as no surprise that the bong was shaped like a skull, except this was a real skull, bored out and fitted with a pipe stem and mouth piece.  “Try a couple of these Quaaludes, too,” Harry said.  “OK, don’t mind if I do,” the deadhead said.

      Harry pulled a cage containing a live chicken from under his bed, and grabbed the chicken out by the neck.  It was squawking and flapping and making a hell of a racket, but Harry quickly put an end to that, holding it down and sacrificing it with a sacrificial knife on a sacrificial altar made from the cabinet of an old stereo speaker.  “Alright, man! Fry it up!” the deadhead said.  “I got the munchies like a motherfucker!”  Harry squirted blood from the chicken’s all over the deadhead, and in general all over the room, and then he threw the headless chicken down and it ran around slamming into boxes and rolling in the cat litter.  “Hey man, be careful with that thing!” the deadhead said.  “Where’s the skillet.  Put that shit on the stove.”  Of course, Harry’s room had no kitchen, but that’s another story.

      Producing a handful of white Zombie powder, Harry blew a huge puff of it in the deadhead dude’s face.  The dude started sneezing wildly and blowing his nose on the blood-and-urine-stained sheets, but soon he grew quiet.  “Far out man,” he said.  “I’m hallucinating my ass off.  Where can I get hold of some of that shit?”  But soon he stopped speaking altogether and his eyes glazed over and he flopped back onto the bed.  I then helped Harry to strip off the dude’s clothes and prepare his body for the final stages of the ceremony.

            Now of course, as everyone knows, a Zombie must be buried in order to “die” and subsequently be reborn in his new incarnation as the living dead.  And further, as anyone who has had to keep dead pets in their freezer knows, it is not easy to find a place to bury a mammal—even a small one–in New York City.  Harry was able to accomplish this feat in the rooftop garden of the Chelsea.  Although he caught hell from the woman whose tomato plants he uprooted, in three days time Harry was able to dig up the deadhead and reanimate him beneath the light of the full moon as a fully-functional Zombie.  (As you might imagine, it was incidents such as this that led Stanley Bard to restrict rooftop access.)

            Over the next few years, Harry used the Zombie to go out for beer and cigarettes and the occasional sandwich.  Sometimes he sent him on more nefarious errands as well–I suppose that goes without saying—such as to stand in line at crack houses on the Lower East Side.  Toward the end, Harry’s legs hurt him and he didn’t like to walk down the hall to the bathroom, so he took a dump in a plastic bag and had the Zombie take it to the trash bin late at night.  The Zombie slept standing up in the hall closet, though sometimes Harry, a drug addict and somewhat forgetful himself, would leave the door ajar and the Zombie would get out and roam the hotel.  One time he was discovered huddled in a corner of the basement, nearly catatonic, his eyes glazed, blood and gore caked on his face and arms, the remains of a devoured cat strewn about him.  Stanley gave him a stern lecture and sent him back up to his closet.

            Now you might wonder at this last incident, as you might well wonder why none of the other hotel residents seemed to notice that there was a ravening, bloodthirsty Zombie in their midst.  Well, most likely, everybody who encountered him just thought he was a particularly down-and-out junkie.  For in truth, the Zombie—whose name, by the way, was Paul–was actually quite a bit more cogent and well-put-together than many of the nuts who were running the halls of the Chelsea in those days.  And besides, you know how self-involved these creative types can be.

            Only the hotel maids, hailing as they did from Old World cultures steeped in mysticism, understood what was going on.  They wouldn’t go anywhere near the Harry’s room, wouldn’t even clean the transient room next door to Harry.  Godfearing Christian women, they held no truck in Voodoo.  But eventually Stanley began to put pressure on them to clean the rooms in that corridor, as the area was beginning to smell like a privy on a hot August day.  Pushed to extremes, the maids knew they had to act to wipe this ungodly scourge off the earth.  Biding their time, they waited until one day when Harry had stumbled into his room and collapsed in a drug-induced stupor, and then, armed respectively with broom, feather duster, and bucket and mop, the three large, formidable women advanced into the dingy corridor to clean out once and for all Harry’s filthy den of perfidy.

            Knowing enough to go after the master rather than his servant, the maids found Harry passed out on his bed, immobile and seemingly lifeless.  They lit sacred deodorizing candles and took up their positions around the bed, chanting in the words of darkness forbidden by their religion of light.  After several minutes of such noise, Harry still did not stir.

            “He’s dead,” the maid with duster said, leaning over Harry.

            “Don’t get too close!” the one with the broom cautioned.

            The duster-wielder put her head to Harry’s chest.  “There’s no heartbeat.”  She poked him with her duster.  “He’s dead!  He’s dead!”

            “He’s dead, he’s dead!” the two of them chanted, dancing about the bed, poking Harry repeatedly with broom handle and dust mop.

            The third maid, wanting to get in on the fun, raised her sopping mop from the bucket.  “Should I give him the holy water?”

            “Yeah!  Give him the holy water, sister!” the other two sang out.

            And the third maid raised her mop from the bucket and swung it over her shoulder in a broad arc, strewing soapy brown water all about the walls and ceiling, and brought it down with a resounding SPLAT! right square in Harry’s face.

            Sputtering and cursing, Harry sat bolt upright.  His detailed knowledge of the occult allowed him to immediately intuit the gravity of the situation.  Grimacing at the worst hangover of his life, Harry reached under his bed and then sprung to his feet.  And then the tiny, bearded, gray haired man chased the three big maids down the hallway in his underwear, wielding a Ceremonial Aztec Dagger that he had stolen from the Met.

            Harry’s anonymous disciple had this to add:

The problem was, they forgot to sacrifice the chicken! Can you believe it! Anybody knows that!  For anything related to Voodoo you gotta sacrifice a chicken!  In Voodoo you gotta sacrifice a goddamn chicken to get outta bed in the morning!  What a laugh.  Harry and I spent many a night howling with laughter at their ignorant gaffe.

            In the end, however, the maids’ spells, amateurish as they no doubt were, seem to have weakened Harry.  For he gave up the ghost not long after, famously singing, “I’m dying, I’m dying, I’m dying!” as he bubbled with excitement at the prospect of moving on to the next plane of existence.

            Naturally, Harry made one final attempt to exercise control of the Zombie from beyond the grave.  Unfortunately, he had spent too much time on filmmaking and ethnomusicology, and not enough time on necromancy.  It’s a competitive art, and those who succeed in it these days are generally narrow specialists.  Harry was one of the last of the Renaissance men, and ultimately he paid the price.  Alas, his like will not soon be seen again.

            After Harry was dead, as is well know, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs came to collect Harry’s papers and films and other artifacts.  Among these items was Paul the Zombie, still holed up in the hall closet.  Ginsberg, in an attempt to draw Paul back to the world of the living, attempted to coax him into a lotus position and persuaded him to chant a few mantras, but this had no lasting effect.  Burroughs, on seeing someone so down-and-out that even he could draw no inspiration from his existence,  finally decided to sell out, and the result was his infamous Nike commercial.  In the end, not even these giants of literature could figure out what to do with Paul, so they just left him in the closet, where he seemed happiest anyway.

            Although the rent on the hall closet was actually fairly low, especially since Chelsea was a depressed neighborhood at the time, Paul the Zombie could not afford it; still believing himself to be dead, he saw no reason to get a job.  And so, after a few months of hounding him, Stanley had no choice but to have Paul evicted.  Since then, in between stints in the mental hospital, Paul sleeps in a cardboard box on 22^nd street, sneaking back into the Chelsea periodically, or, when he manages to save enough money through panhandling, checking into one of the more modest rooms for a night or two of ungodly revelry. (Ed Hamilton) (Zombie Photos — here and here)