Rockin’ Interviews has decided to get in the Halloween spirit with a group of musicians who have experienced the paranormal. I present to you tales of lightning strikes, ghosts, and ghouls.
Britt Lightning (Vixen):
“I was about 15 or 16 years old, living with my parents back in Massachusetts and it was storming out. There was really bad thunder and lightning, the dog was freaking out and we were freaking out, so we decided to just watch a movie. I went up to the TV to change something on the VCR, so I was standing right in front of the TV. All of a sudden there was this huge boom and this bolt of lightning hit the house and a branch of lightning came down and connected to me through the TV. The TV popped and it went black and it totally hit me through my arm. I got zapped like touching and electric fence and I was super freaked out. My parents were like, ‘oh my god, are you okay?’ and I was totally fine but my hair was standing up. I was like wow, this is a rare thing to have happen, getting struck by lightning. So it’s quite fitting for my name.”
“We were in a hotel in Disney World for a family vacation. It was my mom, my dad, my sister and I all in the hotel room. Me and my dad are really light sleepers, but my mom and my sister can sleep through anything. There was something that fell and it woke me and my dad up and it was this can of complimentary peanuts that fell off the dresser. My dad told me not to worry about it and to go back to bed. So he put the can of peanuts back on the dresser. About five minutes later, they fell again. It’s not like the fan was blowing it and the AC was not on high enough to move a can of peanuts. So he picked up the can and put it all the way against the wall behind the dresser. Five minutes later, we hear the can sliding slowly and then dropping off the dresser. He never put the peanuts back on the shelf after that. There was a fortune teller in the lobby of the hotel the next morning and we told her the story and she asked what room and she said the room was haunted by a boy who jumped off the balcony three years before. My dad and I were convinced it was a ghost, but my mom and my sister didn’t believe us.”
Patrick Kennison (Lita Ford Band, Heaven Below, The Union Underground):
“Way back when in the early 2000s, I had a band called The Union Underground. We traveled to Los Angeles to work on our video production that would be seen on our video screens when we performed in concert. We had just signed a major record deal with Sony Columbia and we had collected a lot of video footage. One of the clips we had was from the movie Pink Floyd The Wall, which is famous from the early ’80s or late 70’s. We had a song in Union Underground called “South Texas Death Ride” and we were working on the video footage that was gonna be played when we play that song in concert. We decided we wanted to use parts of the Pink Floyd movie and it depicted hammers marching like a German army. We decided it would be cool if the hammers marched in time to “South Texas Death Ride” while we were performing. So the video editor could slow or speed up the film and the percentage ranged from 0-1000% and the hammers marched perfectly in time at 666%. 667% was too fast and 665% was too slow for “South Texas Death Ride”. We all thought that was very odd and I grew up religious but I’m not very superstitious. I’ve got another similar story from a few days ago. Heaven Below was doing a photoshoot with one of our favorite photographer friends and we did all kinds of photos and one of the concepts was a biblical shoot and some of the members depicted biblical characters, Virgin Mary, Satan, a priest, a monk, we were going for something different. So it was time for us to pay him and he sent me a message on the Bank Of America app and he titled the invoice “Biblical Photoshoot” and sends it to my phone and then Bank Of America app gives you a code to punch in to verify it’s you. The first three numbers were 666. So I’m gonna need to shave my head and we need to find the 666 on my head because every few years I get 666 in unexpected situations. Some people believe the Devil is one being, but I think all humans have a devil inside them. Sometimes it comes out and sometimes we repress it. But I guess 666 loves to follow me around.”
Courtney Cox (The Iron Maidens, Femme Fatale):
“Back in 2010-2011, Nita (Strauss) and I shared an apartment in Chatsworth, CA. When we had time off at home we would always sit on the couch with our pets (her dog Bentley and my cat Cheese) and watch shows like Desperate Housewives and Say Yes to the Dress or sit and laugh at funny old REH guitar videos. Our living room was adjacent to the kitchen. One night when we were sitting on the couch watching a show, in the corner of our eyes we watched and heard the microwave door open on its own. It was a microwave that you really needed to put some force behind to open the door. We heard the loud click and all as the door swung open. I remember Nita asking me ‘did you see that?’ … I responded with a quick ‘Um….yep’. It was funny because we didn’t look over until we asked each other about it. I think we didn’t want to acknowledge that it even happened. We didn’t enter or walk by the kitchen until the following morning.”
Mark Schenker (KIX, Sun Dogs):
“I worked as a contractor in a prominent government museum building that looks like a castle. I was working late one night in the tower, it was maybe 2002-2003. It was after 9/11, but I had worked there since ‘97-’98. This was after I had settled down, I had gotten to know everybody and I was a decent contractor. In this building, I was configuring some laptops after hours, somewhere between 7:00 and 8:00 in the evening. I started to hear what sounded like dinner being served as if you were in a restaurant where there are a bunch of people are eating. Then I started to hear string music, like maybe a jazz trio over in the corner. So I thought to myself, that’s interesting, I didn’t see anything on the schedule for any events tonight. What they would do is have events where they would invite donors or Congresspeople or people from the Hill to a get-together with caterers and set up tables and have people running in and out. They weren’t super noisy events, but they had them often. When this story happened, it was winter so no events were going on outside and it was after hours so, I hate to use a cliché, but it was a ghost town. I thought it was weird that I was hearing those noises because I usually like to see what exhibit gets an event because it’s usually something interesting. I went down into the main part of the building and looked around and it was just me. So I went back upstairs into the turret and I started hearing the same thing again. Being a sound and audio engineer and a musician, your ear becomes tuned into exactly what you’re listening to. I heard glasses clinking and silverware being used as if someone was cutting their steak, hushed voices and again the string music. I thought maybe I was getting the sound through the duct system, but there was no ductwork in the building because it was too old. I went downstairs again and a guard was sitting in his place, he may have been doing his rounds when I went down the first time. The guard was just sitting there filling out his paperwork and I asked what event was going on in the castle tonight and he looked at me like I was crazy. He was like, ‘What event, there is no event here all week’ and I said ‘Well I’ve heard noises, is there anything going on in the building next door?’ There wouldn’t have been anything going on outside because it was December or January and it would’ve been too cold. He said no and so I went back upstairs and heard it a third time. That’s when I decided to leave. It was real enough to me that I never forgot it. Being a sound engineer and understanding what I’m listening to, I believe I heard something that was unexplainable. What I heard was, I’m sure, what I described to you. Sometimes you can hear things at night that can be mistaken for something else, but there is no mistaking the sounds I heard in that castle that night. There was nothing sinister going on, but it was certainly some sort of auditory imprint of something that happened in the past that may have moved through the dimension, or however that stuff works. I do believe in the imprints of dramatic events can be heard in old buildings like that. I had actually gone outside to see if anything was going on in the courtyard. It was one of those cold winter nights where it was dead silent: no street sounds, empty city, no wind. There were a lot of things that I was able to cross off the list of the book of skepticism. Getting rid of the wind was big.”
Mark Schenker (KIX, Sun Dogs):
“I was working in the old patent and trademark office downtown. It’s a very, very old building, partially destroyed by fire in the 1800’s. Some of the inside is still black because it’s made of marble. It’s just a beautiful building and I worked there for many years as a contractor. Lincoln held both of his inaugural balls there. You can still go in there and see where he held his ball, it’s the same floor, they haven’t changed anything. It hadn’t fallen into disrepair or anything, they have a beautiful library in there. The part of the building I was working in was actually used during the Civil War as a morgue. This sounds like another cliché story, here we go piling up the bodies, dead people walking around the marble floors. I had seen pictures of body stacked up in the exact area I was working in. None of the people that worked there had ever reported anything unusual. A couple of the curators had said it was haunted and that there was always stuff moving about at night, a very, very old building and there was lots of weird stuff in there. You’re imagination could get carried away very easily. I was working as in I.T. worker there very late at night, I think it was Christmas Eve of the early 2000’s or late ‘90s. Since it as Christmas Eve, I had a couple things I had to stay and finish before I could go home and celebrate the holidays. It was 8 or 9 and they have guards all night at this place. I got up and started to walk down this hallway and I felt somebody push me. I turned around because thinking it was one of the guards, I was friendly with the guards because I had worked late all the time. I felt a distinct force on my right shoulder. It wasn’t a push-me-down in terms of I could’ve fallen over, but something touched me. I walked back to my office, where they had stacked the bodies, thinking that it probably didn’t happen and I was probably really tired. I had sat down and I got this feeling that I shouldn’t be there. So I was like, alright, and I picked up my stuff and was getting ready to leave. I started walking down a long ballroom area and through the doors and I felt the same thing happen again. I remember, you could look through the courtyard to the rest of the building. I was looking across and I saw there was a light in one of the other buildings. It’s not like a light that was turned on because this place was pitch black after-hours, you can’t even see your hand in front of your own face. It looked like somebody that was carrying a candle, but there was nobody there. After I saw that light, I felt the urge to run. If somebody was sending me a message, I was getting it loud and clear: I had to leave. Then as I was picking up speed, it felt like somebody was breathing down my neck. I’m open to the idea of it just being something I concocted with my imagination. But I certainly did get touched, everybody knows what that feels like and when you turn around and there’s no one there it’s like ‘what the fuck?’”