Led Zeppelin Pt. 2: The Haunting at Headley Grange

a drummer too frightened to sleep at night. It's about the biggest rock and roll group in the world whose members went into something supposedly haunted and emerged with multiple masterpieces. And since this story is about led Zeppelin, and this is also a story about great music, unlike that music I played for you at the top of the show that wasn't great music. That was a preset loop for my melotron called Big Snakes in Big Lakes MK. Two. I played you that loop because I can't afford the

rights to Maggie May by Rod Stewart. And why would I play you that specific slice of May December Cheese? Could I afford it? Because that was the number one song in America on November eighth, nineteen seventy one, and that was the day that led Zeppelin released their fourth and biggest album to date, an album that may have cast its own spell on the surroundings in which it was made. On this episode, pentagrams chalk circles, strange noises, a gray man on the stairs an old house called

Headley Grange. And this our part two episode on led Zeppelin.

from nearby lockness. Malcolm was here on behalf of led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page, who had hired him as caretaker upon his purchase of what was known as Bolskinhouse, formerly owned by one of the Scottish Highland's most notorious residents, the famed occultist Aleister Crowley. It was Jimmy's growing fascination

some would say obsession with Crowley that led to this purchase. Sure, the Beatles had included Crowley's face on the collage cover art of Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club band, but Jimmy Page went one step further. As Jimmy did when it came to his obsessions. He bought the creepy dude's thirty

five acre estate. And now Malcolm here didn't share Jimmy's belief in the power of Alistair Crowley or it is so called magic, and that's magic with a K understand, and so none of that David Copperfield bullshit again magic K. I'm talking about the real stuff, the dark stuff, the stuff that can change your life if you harness it correctly, or so the thinking one. And at first when Malcolm walked inside, he wasn't stealing himself for things that went

bump in the night. He was six foot something, a rough hewn London boy. He could hold his own. A no bald bow tide long dead boogeyman was going to rattle him. Malcolm was just a skeptic fumbling his way through the dark. And I mean that literally, because there was no working electricity at Bolskine House. In fact, the whole place was dilapidated and looked like he could fall down at any moment. Malcolm pointed his flashlight to the

right as another gust rattled the windows. A long, empty hallway waited his footsteps, and so he walked until he came upon a large dining room, and as he used his flashlight to look around, he saw something he'd never seen before, at least not in the flesh. There on the floor was a large pentagram, hand drawn or maybe even carved into the hardwood and enclosed inside a circle with a makeshift altar at the center. Malcolm suddenly get a feeling he never experienced before. He was confused and

ill at the same time. It was a feeling of dread. His hands began to shake, and then suddenly his flashlight went dead. Fucking hell, he muttered, slapping the side of the metal casing with the palm of his hand. The

flashlight sputtered back to life. As it did, Malcolm could hear something coming from elsewhere in the house, heavy belabored breathing, panting almost and then the panting turned into something else, grawl, a snarl, low, and a horse, and then came a scratching sound, long nails like talons running up and down the length of a wall. Malcolm scanned the room and there was nothing else, no one, no one that he could see. That is, something was lingering here and he

certainly couldn't ask Jimmy Page where it was. The city of Inverness was over five hundred miles from London, so it's not like the guitarist just popped in whenever he felt like it. Jimmy bought this place to buy the place to feed his obsession, not to live there. And again no electricity. There wasn't even a telephone. Damn man.

Malcolm thought, if only Jimmy were here, he'd be asking his boss a lot of questions, because as the scratching sound grew louder and closer, Malcolm was beginning to question everything he thought he knew. Forty miles south of London, in Hampshire, a big, boxy silver van rumbled slowly up a the colic country road before coming to a stop

in front of a large, three story stone building. The van housed the Rolling Stone's mobile recording studio, trailing behind a few more cars carrying Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones and John Bonham, collectively the group known as led Zeppelin. The members of the biggest band in the world, stepped from the vehicles, all four of them sporting newly grown beards, and gazed up at the impressive English manner

known as Headley Grange. The place was being swallowed by lush green vines, snaking and slithering like the rings of

a tree. The overgrowth told of Hedley's history, the backbreaking toil of the workers who built the house years ago in seventeen ninety five, the hordes of the sick and the old, for whom it was built, poppers and orphans, motherless bastards and other dickenzie and unfortunates who once came here seeking refuge, then died here, died as unknowns, as the forgotten, the ones who had been cast from society and life and now were cursed to hump. Or perhaps it was just Jimmy Page who is now thinking of

these things. Because Jimmy Page got good and giddy when he looked up at this place and all it's ruinous glory. He could think of nothing more exciting than unleashing his band inside such a historic structure, overrun with ghosts of centuries past, and that was exactly the plan. Here inside the walls of Headley Grange, Zeppelin would rehearse and possibly even record songs for their new album, led Zeppelin three. You Know, if the Walls could talk and all that.

Earlier in the year, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant had decamped to a place called Bronrh, a remote cottage outside a small market town in Wales where Robert used to vacation as a child with his family. Inspired by their surroundings and far away from the metallic grind of the city, this was where Jimmy and Robert first pivoted from the heaviness they trafficked in to a more pastoral acoustic sound.

This is where they wrote many of the songs that would make up led Zeppelin III, songs like Friends, Tangerine, That's the Way and Naturally veran Rastam. It's also where they began to work on songs that would come out on future albums, like Over the Hills and Far Away,

Down by the Seaside and the Rover. They enjoyed it so much that they wanted to actually record there with the band, but it was too small, So the goal became to find a place that could accommodate them all but still retain that very specific vibe, and thus, with the help of their manager, Peter Grant's secretary, it happened

upon Henley Grange. Now leaving the white walled, sterile environment of a professionals studio for a house in the countryside wasn't a new concept for rock bands ever since the band hit the scene two years earlier in nineteen sixty eight with music from Big Pink, the world of rock and roll had pivoted toward a more homegrown, earth bound model. But Jimmy Page and Robert Plant and led Zeppelin had

their own way of doing things. They weren't going on a pilgrimage to Woodstock, as George Harrison had, hunting down the Bam like a lost soul seeking the hermit's guidance on the mountaintop. Jimmy, for one, served as own master. Jimmy did what thou wilt. Besides, when it came to

George Harrison and the Beatles, they were yesterday's news. Led Zeppelin had just topped the reader's poll in the UK's very influential Melody Maker magazine, the first band in eight years to push the Fab four from the number one spot. Jimmy threw open Headley's front door almost instantly, he was hit with a potent stench, like something at the fermenting for decades, and theodor went to Jimmy's head. He was

drunk on it. Robert ambled in behind him, arching his neck and looking to the high ceiling that stretched all the way up the winding three floor staircase. With his raggedy beard and now this castle of a home to make music in, he felt like a character right out of Tolkien's Middle Earth. Robert was followed by a Zeppelin's rhythm section. Jonesy and Bonzo walked in with these puzzled looks on their faces, like here, this is where we're going to be hanging out for the next few weeks.

The place was damp, It was dank. It was lacking all the creature comforts that a band like led Zeppelin figured they should be indulging in. Bonso had twenty one cars for Christ's sakes. For him and for Jonesy, Headly looked like some dump you'd squat in when you were barely getting by on the come up. But Jimmy Page obviously saw something else in the place. He just smiled and said, let's get the work voice. Robert nodded, Jonesy

and Bonzo shrugged their shoulders. Little did any of them know that when Jimmy talked about work, he was talking about more than just making music. He was talking about reviving a spirit that laid dormant inside these walls. Jimmy Page was talking about waking something up. The notion of a stately house or sprawling manner in the English countryside which is very very old, and which also happens to

be very very haunted, is hardly a novel. One do a quick Google search and you'll find more samples of haunted houses in the UK. Then you'll know what to do with and better yette. I'll just give you a few examples. There's Blickling Hall in Norfolk, built in sixteen sixteen, where Anne Boleyn, one time Queen of England and the second wife of Henry the eighth, still walks around with

her severed head in her hands. And there's Temple Newsoman in West Yorkshire, where he can still hear the screams of a nursemaid who was suffocated to death by a fellow servant in seventeen oh four. And then there's Little Cot House in Berkshire, where a midwife witnessed the murder of a baby in fifteen seventy five, and where that same midwife can now be seen as a phantom who sits in the corner of one of the house's bedrooms,

rocking an infant against her breasts. This was the tradition Jimmy Page was buying into when he moved his band out to Headley Grange for sessions in the middle of nineteen seventy, and while Jonesy and Bonzo never really warmed up to the place, Headley's charms did factor into the early stages of great new songs like Immigrant Song, Gallows Pole and Out on the Tiles, just to name a

few of the things they started working on there. But before long the urban heads prevailed and the band quickly returned to London, where they finished making the album at

a studio on Basing Street owned by Island Records. When Led Zeppelin three was released in October of nineteen seventy, many Zeppelin fans focused on Jimmy Page's wizard like production techniques, which now included experimental bits of tape echo fly on the Wall segues between songs in a blend of electric and acoustic instrumentation that masterfully fused the darkness with the light.

But just as many complained that beyond Immigrant Song, the record was lacking in the kind of meat and potato rock and roll that their first two albums served up, that the boys had gone soft with all that bearded folky bullshit. Jimmy Page, on the other hand, saw Zeppelin three as a creative success. It proved that in the right environment, Led Zeppelin could pull powerful music out of

thin air. To his ears, the new song sounded better than anything they'd ever recorded in a London studio alone, and so just a few months later, Jimmy Page convinced the band to return to Headley Grange, where he was convinced they would make the biggest, most impactful musical statement of their career. January nineteen seventy one, at least a dozen cables streamed out of the Rolling Stones mobile recording van. They threaded across the ground and snaked through one of

Headley Grange's open windows. All the way into the lobby where John Bonham's drum kit was set up. Outside it was cold. Inside Headley it was cold, and inside the rolling Stones van was also cold. Audio engineer Andy john sat in the back of the van, shivering, trying in vain to stay warm, while listening on a pair of headphones to John Bonham laying down the drum track to

when the levee breaks. Beginning in Headley's lobby, a large staircase wrapped all the way up to the third floor, which meant that the ceiling of this particular part of the house was three stories high. When a musician says that a room has great acoustics, this is the kind of thing they're talking about. Two microphones hung from the railing on the second floor, dangling above Bonzo's kit. The sound of the drums was huge. Back in the van,

Andy Johns gave that sound a boost. He ran the signal through a Binson echo wreck, an old delay effects unit, and this is what gives Bonzos drums that slapback sound on when the levee breaks. But the fatality of this sound of one of the greatest drum tracks of all time the environment in which it was recorded, and how it was recorded. You couldn't replicate that in some antiseptic recording studio back in London. You had to create it here in a busted old building that was cold and

damp and creepy. And that night Andy John's got his first taste of creepy. The day's session had gone extremely well, and by the looks of the empty bottles littered all over the floor, the after party had gone well too. In just a few hours, the sun would be up. Andy, like everyone else, was dead asleep in one of the bedrooms until he was jolted awake by a loud dud. He propped himself up on his elbows, his hair a mess, his eyelids weighing a ton, and then he heard it.

The sound of furniture moved around the room directly above him, heavy furniture, slow deliberate scrapes. Then the sound stopped. Andy sat up straight, and for a moment all he could hear was the ringing in his ears from that day's recording session. And suddenly the noise upstairs started again, and this time louder and faster than before. Andy shot out of bed, ran out of his room and bounded up the stairs, busting through the door of the room directly

above his hand. Nothing. The room was completely empty, no furniture, not even a single chair. The next morning, over cups of hot tea, Andy told the band about the strange sounds he'd heard in the middle of the night. Robert listened with great interest, and Jonesy was silent, taking it all in, and Jimmy just sat back, smiling and nodding his head. But John Bonham was aside himself because he'd

hurt things too. Someone breathing in the corner of his room, and no, it wasn't the creaking of an old house or the wind or whatever the fuck. Instead, all night long there was this deep inhale exhale of another person, but there was no one there, and it freaked Bonzo out. And Bonzo, being the hulking giant that he was, wasn't one to get freaked out easily. He was going to sleep downstairs from now on, even if that meant sleeping on the floor. Jimmy, on the other hand, wasn't interested

in sleeping. Hedley didn't make him uneasy, quite the opposite. Actually, the energy here got him high. He grabbed his harmony acoustic guitar and wandered off to the quiet parts of the house. He sat cross legged in cold, unlit rooms and messed around with different tunings. He paced hallways while strumming new cord patterns. Then he listened as the sound from his instrument bounced off the walls and returned to his ears. The sounds spoke to him, And then one

afternoon it happened. Jimmy was in Headley's sitting room, seated on a chair next to the fireplace. The boiler in the house no longer worked, so this was the only way to keep warm. When the fire crackled as Jimmy fingerpicked a new chord progression, it was a whining, hypnotic ladder of notes, and it inspired Robert, who was sitting

next to him and began scribbling lyrics in a notebook. Later, Robert would say that it was like he wasn't writing the words himself, he was the vessel someone or something was writing through him. Right then, the fire popped, the log shifted, collapsing inward, and set the spray of red sparks into the air. Jimmy didn't look up from his guitar, and Robert kept writing and by the time the fire

died down, the song Stairway to Heaven was readied. Weeks later, led Zeppelin was back at the studio in London recording some final overdubs for the album that fans would come to know as a led Zeppelin four. This included Jimmy's now iconic guitar solo for Stairway, which he played while leaning against a speaker, no headphones on, just playback at full blast, his body absorbing every sound while a cigarette

smoldered in the headstalk of his Dragon telecaster. I just winged that solo, really, Jimmy said, Only Jimmy Page could wing a solo like that, A solo that unfolded like a good book or a good movie, one that had a beginning, a middle, and an end, very definitive, super dramatic, far out and locked in at the same time, one that sounded like it had lived inside of him and then escaped and changed everything around him, just like he'd

lived inside Hedley Grange and changed it. And the next time Jimmy went back to that place, it was more than obvious that the old house had changed too. In fact, it had learned something new. We'll be right back after this,

We're We're Where. In November of nineteen seventy three, exactly two years after it was originally released, Led Zeppelin four, the album with Stairway to Heaven as its centerpiece, was still riding high on the charts, as was its successor, the most excellent Houses of the Holy, which had been

released just months earlier in seventy three. As usual, it didn't matter if a writer for Rolling Stone called Houses of the Holy quote one of the dullest and most confusing albums I've heard this year unquote, which they one did say, can you fucking believe that the song remains the same the rain song, over the freakin' hills and far away? Dull and confusing? None of it mattered because

Led Zeppelin were untouchable. Zeppelin where Reggie Jackson and Pete Rose combined, untouchable, and to continue with the sports metaphor, the same year, they played shows in ballparks and football

stadiums on a godlike scale. I'm talking about shows like the one in Tampa, Florida, where they played for over fifty six thousand people and raked in over three hundred grand, which at the time was the single most profitable performance in the history of show business, steamrolling a record previously held by the Beatles, and were rock and roll gods, and they were bringing the hammer down night after night.

And a big part of this unprecedented success, as Jimmy Page saw it, was their unorthodox decision to continue to go back to the well at Headley Grange. But when they returned in the spring of nineteen seventy four to begin work on their sixth studio album, none of them knew it would be their final visit. Robert, Jonesy and Bonzo did know that this time would be different, and then all three of them refused to stay at Headley Grange anymore. The place was deteriorating worse than ever, and

the vines outside were thicker. The dampness was now wetness. It smelled of slimy stone and rotten and plus Bonzo

wasn't fucking around anymore with disembodied breathing. So while the three of them checked into the Posh Friends and Pond Hotel and spa three mile up the road, Jimmy held down the ford at Headley alone, and by day the quartet tracked the new record by tapping into that magic magic were the k the telepathic bond that made them who they were, that made them better and more successful than all the rest of the bands, a bond strengthened and driven by whatever spirit Jimmy Page had revived up

there at Headley Grange. The songs kept coming. Custard Pie in the Light, trampled under foot, Cashmere and by night Robert Plant, John Paul Jones and John Bonham. They packed up, leaving Jimmy Page to his own devices at Headley, and that's when the house really started to come alive. You hear it first on the wind, not unlike the wind that blows in off lockness at your placed in the Scottish Highlands, where Malcolm Dent is learning to live with

the things that the naked eye can't see. Long, low moans drift from the hall upstairs, and then you hear footsteps and they're slow, pacing back and forth, like someone is walking a guard shift. You grab not a flashlight but a candle, because it fits your mood, it fits Headly's mood. You light it and walk, guided by the flickering light, from the sitting room over to the lobby to that big winding staircase once you heard Bonzo playing the shit out of the drums right here, and now

you just hear the house. Then up ahead, look there, going up the stairs to the second floor, you see it, a tall, thin figure, a gray man, shimmering and translucent. You can feel it beckoning you, calling to you. If it's speaking, it's not a language that you can understand, but you can make out the intent. It's set telepathy magic with that big king. He pulls you and you follow, the flame on top of your candle, nearly extinguishing as

you hustle up the first flight of stairs. You get to the top and keep following the gray man ahead, coming in and out of focus, stucking into that room that Andy John's investigated years ago, the one from which loud noises arose in the middle of the night, but where there was nothing, well, one man's nothing being another man's everything. You follow in the gray man's footsteps, and the flame in your hand burning brighter and hotter now, and then as you pass through the threshold, the door

slams shut behind you. Audio engineer ron Nevison arrived at Headley Grange early the next morning outside the mobile recording van owned by Ronnie Lane, former bass player for the Small Faces, and then just the Faces was ready to roll tape. The rest of the band wasn't due in for a little longer, so Ron found Jimmy still alone,

moving microphones around in the dining room. Ron greeted Jimmy good morning, and then his attention was driven to the floor, where he could see the chalk markings geometric, deliberate circles and intersecting lines. What's that, Ron asked, pointing at the spot on the floor. Jimmy grinned Mike placement. He said, gotta it sound right, Mike placement. Ron thought patterns seemed too intricate for that sort of thing, too intentional. Weeks later,

Ron had forgotten all about it. Led Zeppelin packed up and left with eight songs in the can for what would become their fifteen track double album, Physical Graffiti. And as I said earlier, they never went to Headley Grange again. But the ghost stories didn't stop. In fact, they multiplied, and the question became not is Headley Grange haunted? The

question was Headley Grange was haunted by what? Before we get into the rest of this Headley Grange story earlier in this episode, you might have heard me talking about Malcolm Dent, the caretaker for Jimmy Page's Bolskinhouse in Scotland. We included that scene here to set up the general themes in our bigger story in this full episode that

you're listening to now about Headley Grange. However, if you want to hear more on this, if you want to hear the rest of the creepy story about what Malcolm Dent saw and heard during his time at Jimmy Page's Bolskinhouse, the place formerly owned by occultist Alistair Crawley, you can hear that entire story in a brand new mini episode of Disgraceland, which is easily available for our All Access members to go to disgrace sampod dot com slash membership

to sign up with Patreon or Apple Podcasts. That's to hear the rest of that led Zeppelin, Malcolm Dent, Alistair Crowley Bullskinhouse story. All right, however, this story about led Zeppelin and Headley Grange, let's get right back into it. I'm going to.

even in reverse. But it's objectively laughable to think that led Zeppelin planned out all this subversive backwards speak on one of their biggest hits. However, I am also in no way saying that Jimmy Page was not creating music in the nineteen seventies while under the spell of some weird occult shit, because well, just ask Kenneth Anger and

he'll do the debunking for us now. Kenneth Anger, an alevant garde filmmaker and fellow Alistair Crowley Obsessive, a guy who had Lucifer tattooed across his chest, once said this about Jimmy Page and the occult, and I quote, Jimmy was just a dabbler, a rich kid who liked to play dress up, and hey, what do you know, Jimmy Page agreed. In twenty seventeen, during a live Q and A at the Oxford Union, a student asked Jimmy about his involvement in the occult, and Jimmy's response downplayed the

whole thing. He said he was merely interested in Eastern and Western mysticism as a young man and so he read a couple books about it, No big Deal, which is a slightly calmer reaction to that question. Then he gave to the writer Chuck Klosterman, who profiled Jimmy for GQ magazine three years earlier in twenty fourteen, clostera quote, was your interest in the occult authentic? Did you ever actually attempt magic? Jimmy, Well, we can finish the interview

with me saying I won't answer that question. So that brings me to another quote, this one by journalist Nick Kent, who once said Jimmy Page is very contained. He's always editing himself, and inevitably most of what comes out of his mouth is very guarded, like he's got something to hide. Back in nineteen seventy four, after Zeppelin vacated the premises

to Headley Grange, the band Genesis moved in. This was when Peter Gabriel was still the lead singer with the weird reverse mohawk, and Phil Collins was still only the drummer, and they were there to rehearse material for what would become their classic prog rock double album, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway at Headley Grange, Phil Collins couldn't sleep a wink all night long. He'd listened to the footsteps of people who weren't there, and he smoked so much

he refused to close his eyes. I don't know, Maybe drummers are easily freaked out or something. Anyway, Peter Gabriel heard those footsteps too, and whenever he'd leave a room and then return a short time later, he'd find that the furniture had all been rearranged. Now before arriving there, Peter Gabriel and Phil Collins and the Guys and Genesis had been told that the place was haunted after all.

This was part of its charm, so to speak. But Peter Gabriel, like Jimmy Page before him, was in a different state of mind from everyone else in his group.

At the time. He was in direct communication with the director William Friedkin, who was seriously pursuing Peter Gabriel to write the screenplay for his upcoming adaptation of the Exorcist novel, and through this lens of demonic possession in the occult, Peter Gabriel believed that the haunting of Hedley Grange had only begun a few years prior upon the arrival of

Led Zeppelin in nineteen seventy. According to Peter Gabriel, Headley Grange was quote partly haunted by Jimmy Page's black magic experiments. If correct, that would mean the Headley Grange wasn't haunted like all those other old English estates. That would mean Headley Grange wasn't haunted before led Zeppelin. Headley Grange was haunted by led Zepplins. I'm Jake Brennan and this Disgraceland. All right, thanks for hanging out with me, guys on

this special spooky edition of Disgraceland. Listen, question of the week for you here on led Zeppelin. I want to hear your haunted house stories, your spooky stories that time you were hanging out, whether it was in your house, someone else's house, recording studio, wherever, whatever the structure, when things got a little weird six one seven nine oh six six six three eight. You don't have to be

Jimmy Page to have experienced some sort of haunting. Get at us on voicemail and text and let us know, and you might hear your answer on the next after party coming up after this disgrace lampod on the Socials Disgrace lampod at gmail dot com to send me an email If you guys want to hear that mini episode. Become an All Access member today. Go to disgrace lampod dot com slash membership to sign up. You'll get a little more led Zeppelin this week in your feed. I

get to get out of here. Here comes some credits. Disgraceland was created by Yours Truly and is produced in partnership with Double Elvis. Credits for this episode can be found on the show notes page at disgracelampod dot com. If you're listening as a Disgraceland All Access member, thank

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