Led Zeppelin are tethered to a haunted Scottish house.
In the 80s an American moral panic held that rock music was the work of the Devil – well, in the case of Led Zeppelin and Jimmy Page perhaps they were closer than they imagined.
The group pulled from all manner of influences, ranging from Chicago blues to acoustic folk via Celtic, North African music, and even reggae. Alongside this, their lyrics moved from Norse myth to Tolkien, via some real-life transgressive magic.
The initial pressing of ‘Led Zeppelin III’ holds the answer – an inscription in the vinyl run-out that reads, “Do what thou wilt…”
The quote is a favoured aphorism of Aleister Crowley, an English magician, philosopher, and master of the occult. Jimmy Page was immensely influenced by his world view, but remained taciturn on the specifics. “I don’t really want to go on about my personal beliefs or my involvement in magic,” he told Rolling Stone. “I’m not interested in turning anybody on to anybody that I’m turned on to. If people want to find things, they find them themselves.”
Jimmy Page did, in fact, purchase Boleskin House – a hunting lodge in the Scottish Highlands once occupied by Crowley himself. Indeed, all kinds of torrid tales abound of the magician’s rituals at the site, something that no doubt caught the guitarist’s imagination.
In actuality, Jimmy Page didn’t live at the site, and didn’t spend much time there. Close friend Malcolm Dent was recruited to look after the property, who recalled: “Jimmy Page caught me at a time in my life when I wasn’t doing a great deal and asked me to come up and run the place. I never did establish why he fixed on me.”
“It was a wreck … It had been more or less abandoned. There’d been at least one fire there, parts of the building were missing, and it had been badly patched up. The grounds, which at one time had been very nicely laid out were gone to hell”.
Something uncanny remained on site following the Crowley years, with a friend reporting a night of terror due to a visitation from “some kind of devil.”
For his part, Dent would endure the “most terrifying night of my life” when living at the property. Late one night, he was woken up by the sounds of what he thought was a wild animal snorting and banging on his bedroom door. Terrified, he hid from noise, desperately keeping out of site until the morning.
Chillingly, when looking back on the episode, he said: “Whatever was there was pure evil.”
Happy Hallowe’en everyone!
Related: Spotlight Special – ‘Led Zeppelin’
