"THE SPIRIT(S) IN THE BOTTLE(S)"

It is what it is...  Our next ghost story is haunted by a very different kind of "Spirit(s)".



Lower East Side late Winter 1999...


I awoke very early one November morning shivering in my loft bed.  There was no heat... as usual... and I could see swirling designs of frost on my window pain. I knew that Id never be able to fall back asleep so I stood up on the cold wooden floor, blew out fake smoke (cold breath vapor) like a cigarette and dressed quickly to run out and get some coffee.  It was pre-dawn on a Sunday and the lonely streets of the lower east side were full of rubbish but empty of the perpetrators who left it there as I made my way several blocks to the nearest diner.  I cut down a side street only to stumble upon someone sleeping on the long church steps (that almost reached the pavement) rolled up in a long down jacket like the filling in a jelly-roll.  The young guy looked strung out and disheveled as he sat up to look at me.  I was shocked to see that it was an acquaintance of mine, who only lived around the corner from me.  So why was he sleeping on the church steps at 6:30 on a cold morning when his apartment was only seven blocks away?   Sebastian shook his head, shuddered and asked me what time it was.  He stood up to announce. "Well, the Sun is up now so I can go home and sleep".   I was puzzled and perplexed by this...   He can go home because the Suns up?  I noticed two empty quart bottles amongst his jacket/sleeping bag too. I also noticed his 101 proof breath, he was still high from the night before.  He seemed disoriented and lost as we walked to the diner together.  He waited for me outside in the cold while I got my extra large java to go.  He started to mumble as we walked back towards our nabe.  Sebastian claimed that he could not stay alone in his studio at night because "visitors" would come and keep him awake ...


Lower East Side,  earlier...

   He claimed to hail from South Carolina, but his slight accent (that he desperately tried to hide) sounded much more like South America to me, than the grits and palmetto state.  I still can not remember for the life of me how I actually met Sebastian...  he was just there all of a sudden living around the corner from me and part of the "film" of my anonymous life on the lower east side of Manhattan.  He looked like a slightly darker version of Italian, screen legend Nino Castelnouvo and was constantly smoking Gitanes cigarettes in a very debonair manner. 
The first time that I saw his studio I distinctly remember that there was an empty bottle of grain liquor (same brand) with a candle in it wherever I looked.  "Not that unusual" I said to myself,  as I knew that he worked nights in an after-hours bar... that had no name.  The candle and wax laden bottles looked charming placed in the windows and amongst small tables and shelves.  It also appeared that he had decorated his flat with whatever he found on the streets on the previously well known Friday garbage nights,  ( incredible back in the day, finding mint condition antiques and furniture was status quo).  I also noticed that he had numerous books about Astrology, paranormal phenomena, some science fiction paperbacks, the Zodiac and the occult.  Sebastian told me that most of the books had been left behind by the former tenant.  He seemed to always wear red and black, if I remember correctly, with a lot of bandanas tucked in his jeans which had several large key chains hanging from them.  He had a leather belt that had the Scorpio zodiac sign on the huge, metal buckle. 
     He was a fellow east villager and local so we saw each other all the time, for coffee or talks in the park.  He didn't actually talk a lot about anything except his lost nights working at the bar and spoke even less about himself or any details about his family or his past. 
He seemed very care free at first, but would soon take a nose dive and a dark turn that autumn just before I found him sleeping on the church steps.  
I was not surprised when I heard that Sebastian started reading tarot cards and performing seances in his little studio... always illuminated by his candle "lanterns" (empty liquor bottles which were growing in numbers, rapidly).  I couldn't believe that he had possibly drank all of the liquor from the bottles alone.  I was also very busy with my life and dreams at that time and things tend to happen around you unseen.
He disappeared from the world of daylight soon after,  in fact I did not see him at all for a three month sweep, after seeing him almost daily for over one year.   I knew he was still around though, as I could see the candles flickering in his windows very late at night whenever I walked by.  I heard that he had been getting into alcohol fueled arguments at work and was seen stumbling home nightly, often mumbling to himself.  I was shocked and clueless as to what was causing him to act so different from the quiet soul that I had met the year before.  

"Secrets of the Spirits in the Bottles"...

The story started to unfold when I ran into his neighbor Raymond one windy night after Sebastian had been let go from his job at the bar... reasons unspecified.  This was only one week after discovering him "napping" on the church steps.   Ray sat me down on my stoop to tell me a bizarre story of a lost soul living in fear and paranoia since beginning his new life... living in the bottle as he put it.  Ray told me that he found Sebastian wandering around their hallway by the roof door in his underwear in the middle of the night and he whispered to Ray (so as not to be heard by the unseen) that he could not sleep in his studio unless the back light was left on,  because he claimed that the visitors came out in the darkness walking around his bed and all through his apartment the entire night, every night if he forgot to keep a light on.  He said that they would stay quiet and disappear under the floor boards and inside the walls when the light was on,  hiding just like they did in the daytime.  He said he actually saw and talked to these spirits that he believed he had personally brought about from his tarot card readings and seances... and now they would not leave him alone or leave his space.  Neighbors heard Sebastian yelling in his sleep at night or would find him wandering around the stairwell and could smell the bon fire of sage smudges that he would burn until the safety of morning and the Sun.  Now I knew what Sebastian meant that morning that I found him "camping out" on the street. 
I wanted to talk to him and see if I could help in any way that I could but that would not happen.  
It was a few weeks later that I say Ray on the street,  it was snowing and dark already and he seemed very disturbed and preoccupied in his thoughts.  He saw me and announced.  "Oh Fritz" he exhaled loudly", " I meant to ring your bell to tell you about Sebastian... he's missing".  "He left his door wide open and left everything behind, his place looks so strange".
We ran over to his building without a word, (as Ray lived in the same building and had keys to the front door), racing up the dark stairs to Sebastian's apartment.  The door was slightly ajar and I pushed it open with a quick jab.  The hall lights flooded into what now looked like a macabre cavern.  I could not fathom the countless rows of empty liquor bottles with candles all laden with melted wax.  It looked like holiday boughs and wreathes made of glass and paraffin.  There were bottles on every possible space and the room smelled like an old tavern in the morning after a night of alcohol swilling, stale booze.  It also looked like a church in a bizarre way, the area where they have all the stands of remembrance candles.  We were both stupefied as well when we turned on the wall light (and it worked) exposing a room with everything covered in dripping wax.   I felt overwhelming sadness and pity over the vision of this graveyard of liquor bottles.  How could anyone do this to themselves, and why?  
In that frozen moment, with snow and wind howling at his windows I could only stand, staring at all of this... in limbo.  I could sense something in the shadows but could not process whatever I was feeling.  Were the spirits that haunted poor Sebastian really ghosts from his past,  or former deceased tenants of the building,  or even phantoms he brought back during his Ouija board sessions and nocturnal seances?   It still remains a mystery to this day many years later sitting here late at night a million worlds away in Wheeling.  Did those spirits drive him to down and drown in those countless bottles of hard liquor (haunted by a very different type of "spirits")?  Or was there something else behind this unsolvable mystery that we just can not comprehend? 

Sebastian. Disappeared Winter of 1999

Copyright @ 2017 by Fritz Von Ludwigslust