Vol. 32: The Haunted Sessions
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Imagine you’re in a rock and roll band, finishing an album inside an 18th-century château in the French countryside.
Tape machines begin running inside locked rooms. Equipment stops whenever you approach the end of the same song. So, naturally, somebody suggests holding a séance.
The response arrives:
“I am Baal. I create chaos. You will never leave here.”
That was only the beginning.
This is what Ronnie James Dio said happened while Rainbow recorded Long Live Rock ’n’ Roll.
For anyone unfamiliar with the band, Rainbow was formed by guitarist Ritchie Blackmore after he left Deep Purple. Its singer was Ronnie James Dio, years before he would front Black Sabbath and later lead his own band, Dio.
What happened at the château depends on who you believe. But Rainbow’s story is only one of several in which a recording session became inseparable from the strange things musicians thought were happening around them.
No Thanks to Baal
The Château d’Hérouville was already famous long before Rainbow arrived in 1977. About 25 miles northwest of Paris, the residential studio had hosted Elton John, Pink Floyd, David Bowie and others. Musicians could live, eat and record without ever having to leave the property.
That isolation was part of its appeal. It may also have been part of the problem.
According to Dio, Rainbow kept encountering trouble while trying to finish “Gates of Babylon.” Tape would break. Machines would stop. On other occasions, the band would enter the studio and find a tape machine running even though nobody was inside.
Eventually, members of the group held a séance using a glass that moved across letters and numbers. The first spirit they claimed to contact was a woman named Sarah. Then came something far more threatening, calling itself Baal.
Dio said the glass began moving in ways the band couldn’t explain. He also claimed a piano played with nobody sitting at it. The group became frightened enough to seek help from a local priest, but according to Dio, the priest refused to enter the château. The band put a large cross on the studio wall instead.
Then, as they were preparing to leave, Dio’s wife Wendy fell down a winding stone staircase while carrying a box of antique china. The box broke her fall. She immediately accused her husband of pushing her, but drummer Cozy Powell reportedly told her that Dio hadn’t been close enough to touch her.
Dio believed Baal had done it.
Years later, he called the experience “the most scary thing any of us had ever been through.”
There is no independent evidence that a spirit interfered with Rainbow’s recording equipment or pushed Wendy Dio down the stairs. The detailed version of the story comes primarily from Dio himself, told in interviews years after the album was made.
There is, however, one detail that made it onto the record. On the back cover of Long Live Rock ’n’ Roll, among the acknowledgements, the band included the words: “no thanks to Baal.”
You have to wonder how much the atmosphere, exhaustion, alcohol or psychedelic drugs may have influenced what people thought they were experiencing. That was the 1970s, after all. But speculation can’t settle it. All we can say for certain is that Dio believed something happened there, and he continued warning people against séances for the rest of his life.
The Woman in the Mansion
Fourteen years later, the Red Hot Chili Peppers moved into a large house in Laurel Canyon to record Blood Sugar Sex Magik with producer Rick Rubin.
The idea was to escape the restrictions of a normal recording studio. Anthony Kiedis, Flea and John Frusciante lived in the house during the sessions. Chad Smith initially chose a room there too, but his bathroom was always strangely cold.
Stories about the house being haunted were already circulating. Flea remembered hearing things at night. Frusciante said he distinctly heard a woman. A security guard also claimed to have experienced something supernatural.
At one point, the band used a Ouija board. Flea later recalled that it moved wildly around the board.
Anybody who has ever used a Ouija board with a group of friends probably has a story about it. I’ve always assumed one of my friends was fucking with me. People want something to happen, so eventually someone makes it happen.
Smith was sceptical too. When two paranormal investigators visited, he compared them to the Siskel and Ebert of the spiritual world. Then they walked into his bathroom and said something terrible had happened there.
That was enough for him. Smith began sleeping at home.
He later explained that fear wasn’t the only reason. He had a new wife and wanted some separation between recording all day and living with the band all night. That ordinary explanation matters because ghost stories often grow by leaving ordinary details out.
Flea offered perhaps the most honest summary: “We might have smoked too much weed and been making stuff up, I don’t know.”
A plumbing noise becomes a footstep. A cold bathroom becomes a room where something terrible happened. An old house settling in the night begins to sound like someone moving through it.
Once a group starts telling itself that a place is haunted, every unexplained noise becomes evidence. But the belief can also affect the work. The musicians become more alert, more suggestible and more emotionally connected to the place around them.
Whatever was or wasn’t in that house, the band emerged with the album that changed its career. Blood Sugar Sex Magik included “Give It Away,” “Breaking the Girl,” “Suck My Kiss” and “Under the Bridge.” The freedom of living and recording together helped produce something they hadn’t captured in a conventional studio.
Maybe the house was haunted. Maybe they were young, sleep-deprived and smoking a lot of weed. Perhaps both explanations belong to the story because both describe how the place felt to the people who were there.
The Ghost That Understood Pro Tools
In 2019, Foo Fighters moved into a 1940s house in Encino, California, to make Medicine at Midnight.
Dave Grohl already knew the house. He had rented it years earlier, and his children and a babysitter had thought it was haunted. Grohl didn’t pay much attention at the time. It was only after spending long days and nights there alone that the house began to get to him.
When the band returned to record, he said, “the vibes were definitely off, but the sound was fucking on.”
Then came the stories. Guitars were supposedly detuned overnight. Settings on the mixing board returned to zero. Tracks disappeared from Pro Tools sessions, while other recordings appeared that nobody remembered making. Grohl said open microphones captured unexplained sounds. He also described footsteps, the feeling that someone was standing nearby and recurring dreams about an old woman.
That last detail reminded me of something that happened when I was in my early 20s.
I was sleeping on a pullout bed in my parents’ basement. My summer job required me to be up at the crack of dawn, so sleeping downstairs meant I wouldn’t wake my parents. The same logic applied when I stumbled in at two in the morning on a Friday night.
One night, I was having a tense dream. I don’t remember what it was about, but I remember opening my eyes and feeling relieved that it wasn’t real.
That relief disappeared almost immediately.
At the foot of the bed, I saw what appeared to be the glowing white outline of an older woman pulling at my covers. I couldn’t move. I wanted to scream, but physically couldn’t. Eventually, the woman disappeared. I caught my breath, buried my head in the pillow and hoped it had all been part of the dream.
What stayed with me was that she resembled a friend of my parents. Later that day, my mother told us that the woman had died during the night.
I didn’t tell my family what I had seen until years later. But it bothered me enough that I wrote about it in a song I recorded back then called “My Life.” I know, very original.
The lyric was:
“Silhouettes of spirits pulling at my covers, telling me wake up and live. I did, now I’m living.”
This was before streaming, so the song isn’t online, although I may still have the MP3 somewhere.
There is a possible medical explanation for part of what happened. Sleep paralysis can leave a person awake but unable to move or speak, sometimes while seeing a vivid figure in the room. That could explain the old woman at the foot of the bed and why I couldn’t scream. It doesn’t explain why she looked like a family friend who died that same night.
The Foo Fighters story eventually became even harder to separate from performance. Grohl and the band used the house as the setting for the 2022 horror comedy Studio 666, in which a supernatural force possesses Grohl while the band records an album.
During the film’s promotion, Grohl admitted they had planned a Blair Witch-style campaign. They would tell the public that the house was haunted, build up stories about instruments being detuned and voices appearing in Pro Tools, and then release the movie without warning. He later referred to some of those claims as “bullshit.”
That admission doesn’t prove that every uneasy feeling in the house was invented. Grohl has said that he genuinely became frightened while spending time there alone. But once a ghost story also becomes marketing, it’s impossible to know exactly where the experience ends and the performance begins.
What Happens After Midnight
Recording studios are built to capture things we can’t see. A voice enters a microphone, travels through wires and reappears as sound that can be stored, manipulated and played long after the room has gone silent.
Maybe that makes musicians especially receptive to ghost stories.
Sessions also happen late at night. People work irregular hours, sleep poorly, drink, smoke and spend days listening closely for tiny sounds. In a residential studio, there is no clean line between working and resting. The same old hallway connects the control room to the bedroom.
Add a story about a woman who died in the house, a priest who refuses to enter or a child who saw someone standing in an empty room, and suggestion begins doing some of the work.
These stories exist at different points between belief and performance.
Dio seemed convinced that Rainbow had contacted something dangerous. The Red Hot Chili Peppers could laugh about smoking too much weed while still insisting the house held an energy they could feel. Grohl turned a frightening atmosphere into a horror movie, then admitted that some of the haunting had been deliberately exaggerated.
No one has to believe in ghosts to understand how an experience can stay with the person who lived through it.
I can’t say with certainty that what I saw in my parents’ basement was a ghost. Sleep paralysis could explain why I couldn’t move or scream. What I still can’t explain is why the woman pulling at my covers resembled a family friend who died that same night.
I remembered it well enough to put it in a song.
Maybe that’s why music and ghost stories fit together so naturally. Both give shape to things we can feel but can’t always explain.
This Week’s Playlist
This week’s playlist enters the same shadowy rooms as The Haunted Sessions, bringing together songs connected to haunted studios, supernatural encounters, strange dreams and the things musicians hear after midnight.
Listen to the DMM Vol. 32 playlist on Spotify
Listen to the DMM Vol. 32 playlist on Apple Music