High Spirits

"Back in the late '80s or early '90s, a couple guys rented it as basically a sex slave den," he says. "They would kidnap these kids, lock them in there and sexually abuse them. People knew about it, you know, but that was back when this neighborhood was pure shit. Everybody out there was smoking crack."

Now that 3700 Main is regularly inhabited again, Beebe thinks the strange psychic energy he felt when he moved in is mostly gone. "It seemed to me like once we actually fixed the building somewhat, like actually got the thing remotely functioning again, all that weird air in here kind of cleared out," he says. "I'm not saying it's totally gone, but there's no longer this weird vibe."

"I know what that's like, because I used to have a place in Second Ward that was like that," says Octanes, Umbrella Man and Billy Joe Shaver bassist Nick Gaitan, who has lived upstairs for about four years. "But all the crazy shit I've seen here has been from the living."