The salesman claimed his soda can was very different from the others; it was “über rare”, a “serious collector’s item.” It was “likely possessed by God knows what.” It may have, at one point, contained a demon, which may or may not have escaped.

The Power of the Internet

For a few weeks in March, a soda can captivated tens of thousands of people. The Wall Street Journal ran a story about it. It appeared on the front page of the Santa Barbara News-Press. Over 109,000 people have looked at the can and the salesman’s description since it was posted on eBay March 5, although the auction ended March 12. The mastermind behind it all was UCSB business economics major and salesman Lars Callary.

“This all started as just a joke,” Callary said. “I put the soda can up for sale on eBay, expecting to sell it for one or two bucks on the strength of its description, maybe have something funny that my friends could laugh at. About 12 hours after posting it, I had a request for a radio interview in Tel Aviv, Israel, and about 20,000 people had looked at its webpage. So far I’ve received over 1,500 e-mails about it. It just blew up.”

Some of the e-mails Callary received presented legitimate questions.

“How safe is this to ship?” one potential customer asked through e-mail. “I’m located in New York and I think the spirit or ghost that might be located inside the can would escape during shipping. Is there any way you can protect against this? I am interested mainly in the ghost or spirit inside, as I collect rare ghosts.”

Other people wrote to express anger toward Callary personally, his attempt to sell a soda can and the fact that so many people seemed to care about it.

“Dude, you are a fucking retard,” one angry web surfer wrote. “If you need money that bad, donate blood or something. I’m a Marine and my brothers are dying overseas while you sit here under the blanket of security that we provide you trying to sell a fucking Coke can on eBay. Get a life and a job… I can’t believe that we Marines put our lives on the line for the freedoms of assholes like you. Grab a rifle and stand a post.”

Some say the idea to sell the can was genius, a stroke of marketing savvy. Others say it is taking advantage of people’s gullibility. But if there’s one irrefutable thing that can be said of the auction of the can, it is that it is historic: Never before has a soda can been sold for $212.50, let alone an empty one.

The Tale of the Can

The tale of the empty soda can begins and ends in Santa Barbara. Callary said he purchased it at Albertsons in Santa Barbara before taking a vacation to Australia several months ago. After buying the can, he brought it home, placed it in his traveling bag, and subsequently forgot about it, carrying it to Australia and back without consuming it.

Upon returning to America, a surprised Callary discovered the can still in his bag.

“Being the lazy person I am,” Callary wrote in his eBay description, “it was unpacked and spent about 6 months on my nightstand because making the trek all the way downstairs to the kitchen was far too daunting a task.”

According to the Coke auction page, after six months of sitting on Callary’s nightstand, he entered his room one night and found that the can had “mysteriously sprung open, as if to let out some inner demon.”

The can, Callary claims on the website, had “opened itself. The tab … that should be pushed down into the can has burst out, undoubtedly letting some little demon into my seriously unholy house.”

Many people have written Callary to offer a scientific explanation of what happened. The most detailed of these letters reasoned that “when you are on a plane, air pressure rises and decreases during the flight. Because of diffusion, the air must have filled the cells of [the] carbonated Coke, creating a highly pressurized container … the chemical reactions within this container must have built up the pressure even more until it one day exploded through where we would usually open it.”

“I don’t know how it happened,” Callary said. “I’m not a physics major and I don’t believe in ghosts. I’ve seen a lot of odd things, though. Like waking up and seeing things that had been knocked over. I attribute that to being drunk, not ghosts. Well, I suppose it could have been both: drunkenness and ghosts.”

As a business economics major studying marketing, Callary knew a craze when he saw it and quickly capitalized on the can’s publicity a few days into the auction, setting up a separate webpage dedicated to the can. He also contacted Pepsi to see if they would be interested in buying the can and using it in anti-Coke ads. However they didn’t respond to his suggestion positively.

“Here’s my anti-Coke ad: The Coke can springs open, a bad ghost pops out, eats the last slices of cold pizza this guy was going to eat for breakfast, steals his girlfriend, and slashes his tires. It’s a catastrophic event for the guy. He’s late to work one more time, loses his job, goes into a drunken rage, hangs himself. The ghost would be a poorly animated computer graphic. The message: Drink Pepsi. It’s not possessed.”

Ghost Can To Do Good Deeds

Callary said he believes the can is now sitting in a landfill somewhere.

“I think the buyer probably tossed it,” Callary said. “I think he has realized he bought an empty can for $200.”

Nothing could be further from the truth. The buyer, actor Eric Klein, said that not only has he kept the can, he has also yet to set eyes upon it. Upon receiving the package containing the can, Klein said he placed the box, unopened, underneath his desk. He said it will stay there until he can formulate a plan to use it as a force for good.

“I didn’t buy it because it was possessed, I bought it because there was so much controversy surrounding it,” Klein said. “I wanted to get the can and either re-auction it off or start some sort of charity fund. I saw it on eBay and said, ‘I should get the thing and try to do something positive with it, just because of the controversy.’ The whole reasoning is to take a silly idea … and turn it into something where you’re doing something for others.”

Klein said he has not yet decided how he wants to use the can for positive means, but that he has several ideas.

“The idea keeps changing. Originally I was going to start a fund for families that lost people in the Iraq war,” said Klein. “Now we think something with the troops would cause too much controversy, because there’s this frickin’ war. On top of that, we contacted Red Cross to see if they wanted to get involved and they gave us some schpiel. Now we’re going to do something with this woman Sweet Alice.”

Klein said he learned of Sweet Alice Harris from a reality television show entitled Extreme Makeovers, which he says went to her house and renovated it. Klein says that combining the publicity Sweet Alice received from the television program with the publicity the can has received to this point would equal a positive result, though he did not care to elaborate on how this added up.

“Yeah, she’s this old black woman from Watts. She feeds all the kids in Watts, and she takes people in and she’s like this amazing Mother Teresa of Watts. Every few months she has a huge event for all the kids in the neighborhood at her house, and she’s going to have this Halloween party in October. We decided we’re going to try to hook up with her, try to promote the can that way. I was like, ‘possessed Coke can? Halloween? Her party?’ I thought it might be like fate.”

However, although Sweet Alice has become a major component in their plans for the soda can, Eric has yet to contact her.

“I wrote her a letter but I haven’t sent it out yet,” Klein said. “She’ll absolutely respond positively, though. You’ll see. She’s like a saint in Watts.”

An Unwise Decision?

Klein said he is not fazed by people who say buying a soda can for over $200 is unwise.

“We get emails from people all the time saying, ‘What are you? Crazy? You paid $200 for a can.’ So, in response to these people, we wrote some letters to the troops saying what we were going to use it for, and they were like, ‘Ah. Now it’s a good idea.’”

Klein claims his decision to buy the can was instantaneous.

“When I saw the can on eBay, I turned to my girlfriend and said, ‘Shit! We should definitely get it.’ She thought I was crazy, but I just kept bouncing all these ideas off her, so we split the cost and bought it. It was a kind of a spur of the moment decision, but the can also had so much media bliss. It’s not that much money.”

Klein claims he is an actor and works mainly on television projects.

“I’ve been on soap operas, I did a few appearances on ‘Sex and the City’ as the personal trainer to Kim Cattrall’s love interest, I’ve done a lot of commercials,” Klein said. “Remember those cheesy Herbal Essences commercials, where the guys are washing the girl’s hair and she’s loving it? I did about five of those. My girlfriend is the model for Bowflex and Liz Claiborne.”

Klein said he has not though of what to do if his plans to use the can for good do not pan out.

“We could turn around and auction it off and say, ‘We’ve got the Coke can and it’s possessed,’ and we could friggin’ put it back out there and probably make $500, but we don’t want to do it that way. We don’t want to profit from the can. We want to show people how easy it is to help people with something as stupid as a can.”

For everyone involved, the empty soda can has become a vehicle for ambition. Salesman Callary hopes that his success in auctioning the can will prove his marketing skills and net him a job after graduation. Klein hopes the can will somehow make the world a better place, though he’s not sure how. Despite all the plans involving it, all the emotions and hopes invested in it, for now the empty soda can sits in the darkness of its box, brimming with potential like an unopened Christmas present.