14 bands reveal the scariest thing that’s happened to them
It’s Halloween, and bands have plenty of spooky stories to share. Whether it’s a real-life haunted house, a prank that went too far or a really strange church function, these musicians have witnessed some pretty freaky stuff.
We asked a few artists to share the scariest thing that’s ever happened to them, and things got chilling.
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Sadie Dupuis, SPEEDY ORTIZ
Well, I love haunted houses, and when we stay at hotels, which is rare, I try to find haunted ones.A girl died in a car accident outside of [my friend’s] house before her family bought it. There would be knocking at the door every day around 5 o’clock, like the same time as this accident had happened. This is real. We always thought there was some logical explanation for it, like maybe it was the pipes heating up, or maybe the oven causing the door to rattle. There was one day that I stayed over at her house, and we locked all of the doors, and started hearing knocking at all of the doors at the same time. We went downstairs to look, and all of the doors were still locked. There was no way anyone had come in or out of the house. But every door inside of the house we’d heard knocking on it, and they had all been opened. That was when I was 14, and I’ve loved haunted stuff since then.
THE FEVER 333
Jason Aalon Butler: I met a ghost in Milwaukee. There was no handshake, but we certainly encountered each other, and I’ve got about six other people that could corroborate that story. [It was at] the top floor of The Rave/Eagles Ballroom. The ghost was inquisitive and seemingly young, which was a bit of a bummer. The Rave is fully haunted. My brother is very involved in the Milwaukee PD, and he knows plenty of stories that would at least have strange displaced energy left there.
Aric Improta: I broke into an old hospital on Halloween, and then we got chased out by the cops.
Stevis Harrison: I’m not scared of anything. I don’t know what that’s like. Fuck. Well, I was scared last July, July 4, when we played our first show and I slipped a disc in my neck, and I couldn’t really move for a week, and I thought maybe it would get worse, and I wouldn’t be able to move or walk. I’m fine now, but it took a lot of passing out and falling out, doctors, physical therapy. I guess I was pretty scared. I was thinking of other guitarists who could do this. It was like that.
Mike Muir, SUICIDAL TENDENCIES
I got dragged to one of those Halloween places, probably 1982-83, with a girlfriend at the time. So she was getting her costume and the person was like, “What about you?” and I’m like, “Nah dude.” And, “No no no, we’ll get a costume for you.” And I was like, “Nah man,” being kind of reluctant and he was like, “Nah man, I got it.” And I was like, “Yeah?” and he goes, “punk rocker.” And I was like, “What?” and he goes, “Yeah, we can make you look like a punk rocker, too.” So that was pretty scary to me. There was a bit of lost in translation. The secret service had come to my house. I’d been arrested all kinds of times and doing Suicidal. You can make me into a punk rocker, OK! So we have these weird colored clown things and stuff. Generational thing, the time back then was different.
UNDEROATH
Aaron Gillespie: So, I grew up in a super-conservative, Christian community, and there’s this thing that churches do around Halloween because they think Halloween is evil. So what they do is, they have something called Hell House or Savior House. It’s a gym at a church, and they build it to look like a car crash, like someone drank or young couples having premarital sex and they got in a wreck. At the end, they go to hell because they weren’t Christians. And it fucked me up. Dude, it scared me so bad. I was like 8. At the end, they ask you if want to become a Christian. So they scared the shit out of you for three hours, and you got hell with the guy who dies, and you meet Satan. The girl is Christian and the guy is not, so she goes to heaven, and there’s billowy clouds and angels and stuff. He goes to hell at the end, and you have to pick where you want to go.
Spencer Chamberlain: We lived in North Carolina off a street called Battleground where I think part of the Civil War stuff had happened. I lived off a street called Brass Cannon Court, and we had a room above the garage which was the play room. It was a long hallway that led up these stairs. I remember my brother and I had a TV up there. We’d play, G.I. Joe’s; we were super young. I’ll never forget this because every time I was up there alone, my mom turned the TV off and the lights off, and the light switch was behind the door, and the TV was on the far end. So, the lights would normally be off, and I would go to the TV and turn it off, and I’d run and go downstairs, and sometimes the TV would turn back on, and [when] the tube would punch the screen, it would make this noise. I would freak out and run out. Behind where the light switch was, I realized it was super-cold. Later in life, I read that that’s ghost energy. This TV would do that. It happened 10 or 15 times, and it would turn back on; the tube would punch the screen the same place, off Brass Court, off Battleground, which was [where] clearly a lot of people had died. When we moved to a different house, that TV came and never did it again. Ten years later, me and my brother moved out into our own place, and that TV came and it never did it again. So looking back at that, I was always scared of turning off that TV in that room. That was the most haunted shit that’s ever happened to me. It was a haunted house. That house used to make the craziest noises.
Alicia Bognenao, BULLY
One time, I ate an edible that was too strong, and my dog started barking. I thought someone was breaking into my house. I swung open the door and was like, “WHO’S THERE” and then there was no one there. I’m like, “I’m going to bed. This sucks.”
Trever Keith, FACE TO FACE
A long time ago, when we first signed to Doctor Strange records, the guy who owned the label, Bill Plaster, had made a secret deal behind my back with my wife to get the keys to my house, unbeknownst to me. He and a bunch of other people, I think Matt from my band and a couple other guys, went into my house before I got home and set the dinner table and put what looked like blood in the glasses and everything. I came home from work thinking someone broke into my house and wondering why the fuck the table was set for a formal dinner with blood in the [glasses], and I was freaking out. I was like, “Who the fuck, who did this, who’s here, I’ll kill you,” and they come around the corner laughing their asses off. I was like, “That wasn’t cool man; you guys scared the hell out of me.” It totally freaked me out because I never would have thought in a million years that my wife would have given them the key to sneak into the house. That one was not awesome.
KEVIN DEVINE
Oh my God, in my life? It’s probably more serious than funny. I was hospitalized for alcohol poisoning, and I was vomiting bile and blood, and that was pretty scary. I don’t really do that anymore, but that happened once. Once I was in a car that spun around a complete four lanes of traffic in an ice storm, but nothing hit us, so that was more scary than worst-case scenario. There’s probably scarier shit, but those two are the things that come to mind immediately.
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CALPURNIA
Ayla Tesler-Mabe: There is one time we played a festival and unfortunately, we went a little over time, and we got cut off, and it was a little scary. We were not prepared for that, but now we’ve learned our lesson, and we will make sure we have songs that allow us to go undertime, so if unforeseen things come up, we can uh…yeah!
Finn Wolfhard: I think getting followed home [by two fans] was pretty scary. They were a middle-aged couple. I finally get to the door of my apartment, and they’re like, “Can I take a picture?” I’m like, “No, you followed me. Bye!” I left.
Jack Anderson: Every Halloween, I collect canned food for the food bank, so I have a big wagon behind me. At the end of the night, I’m going up the big hill to my house. It’s a very big trick-or-treat area, so I have 200 pounds of canned food in my wagon, and it slips out of my hands, and the wagon is drifting downhill, and there’s hundreds of kids in costume. So, I chase this thing and run after it, and I get dragged by the wagon on the pavement until I stop. I almost killed a bunch of kids on Halloween.
Malcolm Craig: I was skiing once and I did this mountain adventure thing, and they took me down some pretty steep things. I was over this big drop and I was like, “I do not want to do this, no,” and then I did it.
MANNEQUIN PUSSY
Marisa Dabice: I went white-water rafting with Wrecking Crew. It was like that summer thing where all the kids met up at the beach ,and then we did a trip when we went white-water rafting. I fell out of the tube, and I was held under water for a really long time. “Gotta go back to the light” I remember thinking, and I was like, 9. It really shook things up, and I’m like, “I don’t know if I wanna do things that put my body at risk from here on out.”
Bear: We had to drive from Denver, Colorado to Omaha, Nebraska. There was a hailstorm that hit us, and I didn’t know if we were going to make it. We just kept driving past the most wildest, overturned trucks. It was supposed to be a seven-to-eight-8 [hour] drive, and it ended up turning into a 10-11-hour drive just because we could only go like 40 miles an hour because of the amount of rain, wind, snow and hail. It was like, I was like sending text messages to people like, “I love you, just hope you know, it’s been a wild ride.” I didn’t say anything. I just sat in the back and was like, “I’m just gonna go to sleep and hopefully I’ll just die in my sleep.
Kaleen Reading: One time I was punched in the head, and I bled out of my ear. And I was really scared. That was when I was on tour with the Butthole Surfers in Europe. I was more in the crowd during the show, and I just got hit. I didn’t know. I was just not sure what was going on. And then I was chased by a dog. Same tour, not the same show.
Thanasi Paul: Bear mentioned that hailstorm. That’s definitely close to the top of my list as far as scary moments. Because Bear had to pull over and switch driving. Bear couldn’t do it anymore; he got too shook, which is understandable [because] it was scary as hell. I took over, and it was truly death defying. [I] could not see more than 4 feet in front of us. But we made it. When we parked at the motel and we got out of the van, I almost vomited from stress. All my other scary moments also involve driving, driving through a blizzard on I-90. The snow was like 3 feet deep on the highway, [so] we had to pull over. We stayed at some stranger’s house.
Skyler McKee, SUPERWHATVR
I lived in a house where a medium died, so things moved all the time, and it got so bad with my brother seeing stuff in the middle of the night and things slamming and doors shutting and my dog. Just crazy things were happening in the house. So we ended up moving same day because it got so gnarly and so scary. We lived there for six months. We moved in the same day that we ended up telling each other about it. I spoke up to my father and my brother and they were like, “Oh my God,” cause I was experiencing it without anyone else hearing my name in my house and all these crazy things. Nothing happening outside of the house. I ended up telling my dad, and he’s like, “Oh yeah, I hear and see things all the time, like, things singing to my little brother in the baby monitor.” Full on like The Conjuring. It sounded like frequencies, but it was like singing a lullaby to my little brother. So we moved out the same day. Growing up, I’m like, “OK, maybe it was this, maybe it was these different things,” but I just write it off and try not to talk about it. I’ve seen the lady who died in the house or a lady who walks up and down in the house.
THE BOMBPOPS
Jen Razavi: One time I was driving in a van with another band. Driving through Northern California super late at night. It was just like a two-lane, tiny highway through dense, dense sequoia trees. There was nothing around for at least 50 miles behind us and at least another 100 in front of us. All of a sudden, in the middle of the road, a guy is standing—just out of nowhere, [and] it is raining—standing with his hood down on the side of the road, just there out of nowhere. He had to have come from deep in the forest. I don’t know what he was doing, but it scared the shit out of me. It was terrifying.
Poli Van Dam: Scariest thing that ever happened to me was [when] I thought I was being a great mom by googl[ing] free fun stuff to do with your kid. And they’re like, take your kid to the fire station. Tthey’ll show you around or whatever. There’s one right by our house, so we walked down there, and the guy was showing us around. [My son] Adler was in the firetruck. All of a sudden, he got a call, and the guy stiffened up, and he’s like, “I’m gonna have to…” I’m like, “Do you guys have to leave?” And he goes, “No this is a call where someone got dropped off here, at the fire station. And um, I’m gonna escort you guys out this way.” Gunshot victim. Face. I had my kid, [and] we saw it full on. It was so gnarly, and that was pretty scary.
AJ Perdomo, THE DANGEROUS SUMMER
I’ve seen a ghost! In short, I still kind of lived with an ex-girlfriend. I woke up at 2 a.m. to get a glass of water. Her mom comes down, says, “Hey, what’re you doing?” I said “I’m getting a glass of water.” I go back and say, “I feel bad I woke your mom up.” and she says “My mom’s not here right now.” And I saw this woman, and I talked to her, and I said, “I swear it was your mom.” I was like, “Yeah, she had a pink robe on,” and she started crying. She’s like, “That’s my grandma. She used to live here.” And like, it’s crazy. So I saw a ghost. I talked to it. It was pretty fun.
Shaun Cooper, TAKING BACK SUNDAY
When I was playing in a band called Straylight Run, I flipped our van [and trailer] I was driving on an icy road. We flung around 180 degrees. We were in Pennsylvania about 100 yards from a deep ravine on the side of a mountain. We could have easily gone over. We hit some ice on a snow covered road, and we just start shimmying all over, fish tailing with a trailer that will flip your whole entire vehicle around. We landed on our side on the side of the road, and no one was really hurt. It was amazing, but in that moment, it was the most terrified I’ve ever been. It’s not paranormal. However, that van was fine. We were able to turn it over. We let it sit overnight. We stayed at a hotel, and somehow, I guess the fluids all redistributed themselves properly. And we were able to drive it home the very next day. However, the only thing broken [was the] CD player. And that CD got stuck in there. It wouldn’t play or anything [because] the power was shot. It might have been a fuse. But that CD is permanently in that van, wherever it may live.
Nick Woods, DIRECT HIT!
I went to school in Madison, Wisconsin, and they do this thing every year where they open up states for you, which is like the big college town street for everybody to come and hang out. I was all fucked up, and I was hanging down on State St. in college, and they sent mountain police with cans of tear gas to clear everybody out at the end of the night. And it’s literally like a Metallica concert in public, but there’s no Metallica. It’s like tens of thousands of people just hanging out on a public street. We were walking past circles of people just smashing stuff they looted from different stores and stuff like that, and the cops didn’t know what to do, so they sent cops on horseback with tear gas to be able to clear everybody out. As I was walking back, a friend of mine was going into his apartment, and I was trying to avoid all this gas, and he opened the door, and I ran in after him and ran straight into the elevator that was going up to his apartment, and they shot a can of tear gas into the elevator that we were standing in, and the door shut behind us. That’s the most frightened I’ve ever been. Sitting in an elevator filled with tear gas for two floors on the way up. You ever felt what tear gas feels like? I couldn’t see for like 36 hours. It was terrible. It was absolutely awful. That was on Halloween.
