SPOOKIEST Studio Stories!!

I promised myself…
Not to do that again.
LOL!

Cool story.
Not a Studio but in Laguna…
The Driftwood Restaurant is haunted.

It was Slim Summerville’s home way back.
He was a famous character actor.
(Yes I experienced it too-In the Men’s Room-Yikes!)*
Chris
*When it was “The Beach House” around 2011.

Spookiest was probably the band that insisted on getting naked for a track.... : )

Noises outside the building project strangely, things directly outside aren't heard and things a block away are heard.

you own "cheese" now chess....😂 "cheeseparov"?

It not really spooky but it scared the crap out of me today… Finished a vocal take, artist came in and listened to the take and then walked out of the control room and through the live room to use the bathroom. Live room and control room doors were left open. I had his vocal mic fader up on the control as well as a stereo pair for his wet reverb return so I could mix a little reverb over it in the control room. I must have muted the vocal mic and forgot to mute the wet send. He came back into the live room and accidentally slammed the door, there was a bit of pre delay on the wet send so I heard the door slam from the other room, made me jump, half a second later I got the wet send of the door bleeding into the vocal mic, massive like a freaking gun shot in a grain silo so I got a second jump 😂.

Well you guys seemed to like my spooky studio story, so I have another one for you. It's not a studio story by it's still super creepy and even as an adult I don't know what to think about it.

When I was a child in the early 1980's, I lived in a small house on a dead-end street. The back yard was decent sized, but it had this rise through the middle and on the back side of that the ground was always somewhat moist. There was an empty lot next to our house that was about the same size as our whole lot. The empty lot had a HUGE white oak tree that was apparently about 300 years old. The lot also had some fig bushes that I'd eat figs from sometimes when the birds weren't getting them. The lot also had a huge cedar tree towards the back and under the cedar were two concrete slabs with a small crack between them. Through the crack you could hear water running very far away. I used to drop small rocks and stuff down the crack and count to about 2 or 3 before hearing a splash. It was clearly an old well that had been covered over but not filled in. There were also weird indentations in the ground around the lot and we'd play war or hide-and-seek and duck down into them to hide, etc.

My father was always keen on buying the lot from the old lady that lived on the other side of it, and he'd apparently talked to her about it a few times over the years but she always said "NO" and never really gave a reason why.

As a child I used to have nightmares about waking up and being "stuck" in the bed while a 3 people in the shadows would gather around me and watch me sleep. My mother even consulted the doctor once and he passed it off as "night terrors" and said that it's common in young kids. I think we call it "sleep paralysis" these days and it has a common theme of feeling awake and seeing some kind of entity watching you while you can't move.

These episodes happened every once in a while and I always saw 3 small human shapes standing in the darkness in the edge of the room, but the shapes were small, almost like children. I'd swear I could tell it was a girl and two boys even though it was just vague dark shapes in the shadows.

One time while playing in the back yard I felt like something was watching me. Literal hair standing up on my neck kind of feeling.. I looked up and towards the back of the house. We had a window in a room that allowed light from the front windows to pass directly through the house.

In that window I saw a silhouette of 3 human shapes looking out of the window at me. It was one the first times that I felt true dread and fear insomuch that it froze me where I stood and I could not move a muscle.

I don't know how long I stood there, but it couldn't have been more than a few seconds. It might as well have been eternity. I finally regained my movement and ran inside the house to tell my mother.

I must have looked like I had seen a literal ghost because when I started to ramble, she told me all about her beliefs in ghosts. My mother's side of the family is native american and they have varying beliefs on spirits and the afterlife and ghosts and all of that stuff. She and my grandmother were of the mind that it was some kind of spirit trying to communicate with me but my dad was very much of the mind that I had an overactive imagination, fueled by cartoons and sugar.

My mother calmed me down and honestly I don't remember much about the next few years and whether or not I saw the visitors anymore.

One day my dad was working in the yard and I was riding my bike and the old lady was outside on the porch. I didn't really care for her much because occasionally she yelled at me to stay out of the lot, which only led me to be more careful about being in sight of her windows..

My dad walked over to her and they started talking, so I rode my bike up to see what they were talking about.

Besides the quip about me "tearing up the yard" (which I didn't really do) she decided to tell my dad the whole story about why she wouldn't sell the lot to him.

The land had been in her family for about 200 years at this point. There had been a farmhouse about one street over up until the early 1900's and all the land was various use, but the oak tree had been there the whole time, but was much smaller back then.

The well was indeed their source of drinking water up until the late 1800's when it "went bad".

The bad water killed 3 of the family's children. A girl and two boys.

Those children were buried in that lot.

The indentations in the ground were their graves.

I never saw the apparitions again after that and we moved maybe a year later. If my mother and grandmother were right about spirits and the afterlife and they were trying to communicate, I have no idea what they wanted, which honestly made me a bit sad.

PS:  A tornado hit that area a few years ago and tore down the tree.  I hadn't been through there in maybe 25 years so I decided to drive by and see it.  The street and the tree were much smaller than I remember.  The tree had obviously been sick for a long time as it was mostly hollowed out.  I might have to drive through there again sometime soon to see what they did with the lot afterwards.  

Yikes! Sorry to hear that John.

One of (of quite a few over the years) my experiences was helping to tend the Front Yard, of my (first) Ex-Fiancé’s childhood home.
Felt a “Ghost Dog” brush up against me…

And move me a little!
Even creased that side of my pants.

Of course, no person or animal was there (well visibly br] on the front lawn when it happened.

That’s grounds for a Poochini Opera!

My studio has always been called Friendly Ghost because the original location was a semi-finished basement that was haunted by a lonely but harmless guy with a mustache. Three of us lived down there and had experiences with him.

But this thread also reminds me of recording to tape, and how there would occasionally be “ghost tracks” of faint singing or whatever that you’d have to hunt down. I’m sure I’m not alone in saying those sometimes inspired new melodies, etc. One of the things I miss sometimes

Same thing happened to me but with a GAP 73, a poof of white smoke shot out of it. Didn’t work after that haha

That's not spooky, that's downright unbelievable.



I once had a band agree to my price, which was actually a discount because I knew they didn't have a lot of money and perfection on my part wouldn't be necessary. 

They paid a down payment without issue.

When it came time to pay the rest, one of the band members pulled me aside and asked me if they could pay me in weed instead.  

They had bought a bunch of weed with the money they were supposed to pay me.  

It took them another month to come up with the money to get their mixes and then I never heard from them again and they never released the music either.  

So the grass isn’t always greener!