I Made a Promise to a Ghost and I Plan on Keeping My Word

Read Part 1— I Made a Promise to a Ghost and I Plan on Keeping My Word Part 1: Flying High at the Hotel Chelsea

Most people assume a debilitating anxiety like the one I had at the Trapeze School New York would be caused by acrophobia (the fear of heights). The opposite is true. I can sit perched above the world and look out at it forever provided I won’t slip over the edge.

My fear isn’t the high-up part, it’s about crashing down to earth.

And speaking of fallen stars, there’s simply no better place to meet them than at the Hotel Chelsea.

“You can’t go home again,” said the guy behind the reception desk of the Chelsea when my then-husband passed him our room key.

“Excuse me?” I responded, still groggy. I needed to reassure myself we weren’t at the Hotel California.

“You were staying in Thomas Wolfe’s old room,” the concierge replied, “829. It’s where he wrote You Can’t Go Home Again.”

“Fascinating,” I feigned interest in his quirky overview of Wolfe’s stay. But even running on little sleep, I knew the writer wasn’t my ghost.

Then we went home again.

Back in Phoenix, I couldn’t shake how unnerved I still was over my hotel encounter. I had made a promise, hadn’t I? I had to get to the bottom of the mystery. Plus, my new obsession gave me a respite from a husband I was trying to avoid. I wasn’t in love with the man, but I wasn’t ready to admit it to myself yet.

I sat on the sofa and started rifling through various Chelsea Hotel websites.

With no better place to begin, Thomas Wolfe was my first dig.  

As a high school English teacher, I knew of Wolfe’s work but little about the North Carolina native’s roots and his ultimate demise. Despite being hailed as the greatest novelist of the 20^th century, Wolfe’s last years were quite tragic.

He produced some prolific writing during his stay at the Chelsea, where he roamed the halls for inspiration a year before his death. But Wolfe didn’t die in the hotel. He traveled west and sustained an illness in Seattle that seemed very much like pneumonia. But it was tuberculous that Wolfe feared most. And rightly so, having grown up in a 29-room home where his mother boarded TB patients. Unfortunately, when he failed to recover from the episode, it was discovered that tuberculosis was the true culprit. It was most likely his mother’s boarding house where he contracted the disease that would later invade his brain and cause his death just 18 days shy of his 38^th birthday.1

While I was more curious about Wolfe than ever before, reading about him only proved he wasn’t the ghost I’d met at the Chelsea. In Rm 829, he’d churned out a whopping 4,000 pages of a book that would posthumously be separated into his final three novels.

Ghosts need to be remembered, but Wolfe had done all his own preparations. He didn’t need me at all. Hell, there was even a Thomas Wolfe plaque on the front of the hotel that remains to this day.

Besides, my ethereal encounter was with a female presence. I just knew it.

Unsurprisingly, Chelsea websites were crammed with the wild stories of Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and Bob Marley. You know, the biggest male rockers and writers of the 20th Century. Other than a fleeting footnote about Janis Joplin or Patti Smith (in 2010, I had not yet read Just Kids), there wasn’t much relevant content on the women who lived at the hotel.

Except for the one; yes, the most famous Hotel Chelsea guest of all time.

That revelation glared in my mind like some neon pink punk resistance sign. I had to investigate the unsolved murder of Nancy Spungen. Again. Like many teens of the early 1990s, I listened to punk alongside grunge and watched Sid and Nancy like it was our romantic punk playbook minus the drug addiction. Mostly.

Despite my nostalgia, I think it’s wise to reexamine what Far Out Magazine referred to in a 2022 article as the Cult of Sid Vicious. While he was lauded for being the bad boy of punk rock in the late 70s, Vicious (Simon John Ritchie) lived up to his chosen name if not much else. He couldn’t actually play his bass guitar and he embraced a violence that went far beyond stage antics.

And that’s about it.

Today, when Johnny Rotten (John Lydon) has been identified at the helm of a love affair so intoxicating it rivals The Notebook—yes, I’m serious— Sid and Nancy’s relationship hinged on abuse—and most likely not the abuse we were sold.

While Spungen was still a product of her generation—I’m sure she was a loudmouth with a drug problem, I was grateful to have had the opportunity to read Deborah Spungen’s (Nancy’s mother’s) book And I Don’t Want to Live This Life. In the book, Nancy is portrayed as fully human even if she was a difficult child who grew into a struggling adult rather than the groupie caricature that gets routinely trotted out as “Nauseating Nancy.”

I found a first edition of her mother’s memoir from a secondhand shop in Dublin back in 2000. I was stunned by the revelations of the senior Spungen as she recalled candid details of raising a daughter who was plagued with unrelenting screaming from birth and who was diagnosed with schizophrenia as a teen. Yet, Deborah Spungen also noted that Nancy had a strong aptitude for literature, a great love of animals, and a knack for embracing other children in need of friendship. She was also an abused young woman.

By the time readers reach the part of the book where Nancy is with Sid, we no longer see her as the single culprit behind Sid Vicious’s demise as portrayed in Alex Cox’s film. Nancy was often the victim of Vicious’s violent outbursts. As documented in Spungen’s memoir, this violence was so severe Nancy admitted to her mother that Sid had torn off her ear and had to have it reattached.

Deborah Spungen also does a good job of reminding her audience that she is the mother of a murder victim and that Nancy’s murder has never been solved. While it may be more “punk” to think of Nancy as some shooting star capable of taking down a rock legend, the truth is she was subjected to some real limitations as a woman with a mental illness and drug addiction in the 1970s. My guess is she was subjected to the whims of men and that included how her image got spun to the media.

Thankfully Deborah Spungen’s writing ensured we got a more balanced perspective of Nancy even if her perspective fails to perpetuate the rock myth. Still, Nancy had someone willing to tell her story, which should make a ghost proud.

For good or for bad, it’s storytelling that can turn a ghost into a real person again.

The Hotel Chelsea has stories crammed into every nook, cranny, hallway, and doorframe of its 12 floors. Most of those tales have been told ad nauseam. So, why did my ghost feel like she had a story left untold?

I continued to research, finding nothing that matched my spectral encounter, until…I spotted a rare death announcement:

Devon Wilson, girlfriend of Jimi Hendrix plummets to her death from an 8th-story window at the Chelsea Hotel.

Had I found my ghost? And if so who was this mysterious Devon Wilson?

Find out next Wednesday.