CASE #15 |STAIRWAY TO HELL: Jimmy Page and the Devil
The Curse of Led Zeppelin
The following is the transcript of this episode:
The house was quiet, save for the muffled shuffling of boxes and the occasional voice calling from downstairs.
Jimmy Page, twelve years old and restless, wandered through the unfamiliar corridors of his family’s new home in Epsom, Surrey. The place smelled of dust and old wood, the air thick with the presence of past lives.
It wasn’t haunted, not exactly… but it felt like something had been left behind.
Upstairs, at the end of a dimly lit hall, he found it.
A Spanish guitar.
It sat in the corner—untouched, forgotten—seemingly waiting. No one in his family played. No one had carried it in. And yet, there it was, as if it had always been there. As if it had been expecting him.
Jimmy stepped closer, drawn by something he couldn’t name. The instrument was an old Spanish-style acoustic, its strings loose but intact, its wooden body humming with an energy that made the fine hairs on his arms stand on end. He knelt down, hesitant, then ran his fingers over the fretboard. The wood was warm beneath his touch, almost alive.
He picked it up. He cradled it. And then, he strummed.
A single chord rang out—clear, resonant—filling the empty room like an invocation.
He felt it then—that first spark. That first taste of something beyond himself. It was more than curiosity. It was a calling.
Years later, Jimmy Page would feel it again.
Now, he sat in an old country house with his bandmate, Robert Plant, the fire flickering low. A storm rolled in outside, rattling the windows, shifting the shadows in the corners. The two musicians had been writing, playing, waiting for something to emerge. And then—without warning—it came.
Robert Plant, in a trance-like state, picked up a pencil and began to write. Words spilled onto the page as if whispered into his ear. He barely remembered thinking them, barely recognized his own hand as it moved.
He pushed the paper toward Jimmy.
Page leaned forward, the firelight flickering across his face. He read the words aloud.
There’s a lady who’s sure all that glitters is gold…
Later, the two would struggle to explain how the song that poured forth—"Stairway to Heaven"—was not composed in the usual way.
It was not labored over.
It was not refined.
It was received.
Led Zeppelin was never just a band.
Their music was an alchemy of sacred and profane—intoxicating, damning. They reached into the abyss and pulled forth something raw, something ancient, something that did not belong to them alone.
They were conjurers, playing with forces they barely understood.
But power always comes with a price.
Pride.
Gluttony.
Lust.
Curiosity.
The very temptations warned of by ancient faiths became their currency. And through it all, Jimmy Page remained at the center—the quiet architect of it all.
The man who had once found a guitar in an empty room.
In 1970, Page purchased Boleskine House—a remote, decaying mansion on the shores of Loch Ness.
The land beneath Boleskine House was never meant to be settled.
It was wild country—untamed, shrouded in mist, and older than any written record.
But sometime in the late 17th century, a Scottish nobleman laid claim to the land. From the moment the first stones were placed, the land rejected him.
The troubles began with the graveyard.
A small burial ground lay near the estate, a place where the dead had rested undisturbed for generations.
But then—something changed.
The bodies would not stay buried.
The nobleman and his servants woke to find graves torn open, the earth clawed apart from within.
Some spoke of figures moving through the trees at night—not the living, but something else.
A priest was summoned.
An exorcism was performed.
The restless dead were sealed away. The shadow figure disappeared.
The land fell silent.
But only for a while.
The silence of Boleskine House remained unbroken until 1899.
That was the year Aleister Crowley—the infamous occultist, self-proclaimed Great Beast 666—bought the estate.
But he did not choose it at random.
Crowley, already steeped in esoteric magic and Thelema, believed that Boleskine House was the perfect location for one of the most dangerous rituals in Western occultism.
A ritual so powerful, so perilous, that few had ever dared to attempt it.
Crowley sought to perform The Abramelin Ritual, a six-month-long ceremonial operation meant to summon and command demons.
But why?
Because, according to Crowley, this ritual was the only way to make contact with one’s Holy Guardian Angel—a spiritual being of immense power that could grant wisdom, knowledge… and influence.
But to summon an angel, one must first call forth and subjugate the demons of Hell.
And that’s exactly what Crowley set out to do.
For months, Crowley sealed himself inside Boleskine House.
He followed the ritual’s instructions with obsessive precision.
The windows were covered. The doors were locked. Sacred symbols were painted on the floors and walls. Incense burned day and night, thick as fog.
And in the dead of night, Crowley whispered the barbarous names of power.
Each step was meticulous. Each invocation measured.
But the Abramelin Ritual is not meant to be interrupted.
It must be completed. The spirits must be dismissed.
Crowley never finished the operation.
He was called away before it was complete—leaving the spirits unbound.
The locals immediately noticed the change.
Servants fled the house, claiming that invisible hands had tried to strangle them in their sleep.
Visitors arrived at Boleskine, only to be found days later, wandering the moors in a daze, unable to explain where they had been.
A local man—a well-respected farmer—went mad overnight. He threw himself into the loch and drowned.
Worst of all, something returned that the local people thought was gone forever.
The beast beneath the waves.
For over a thousand years, the waters of Loch Ness were believed to be cursed.
In 565 AD, the Irish monk Saint Columba journeyed to Scotland. There, he encountered a terrifying creature rising from the water—a monstrous beast, black and massive, with eyes like burning coals.
He raised his hand and commanded it, in the name of God, to return to the depths.
And it did.
For over a thousand years, the beast was silent.
Until Crowley arrived at Boleskine House.
Page, for his part, knew exactly what he had purchased. At the age of fifteen, he had become enchanted by Crowley and his thought—his hedonistic religion known as Thelema. He had spent years collecting Crowley’s books, letters, and ritual tools. Now, he had attained the greatest prize of all: Crowley’s most notorious ritual chambers.
He admitted in interviews that Boleskine House was haunted. He spoke of the eerie presence, the feeling of being watched, the strange occurrences. Friends who stayed there reported shadowy figures in the hallways, objects moving on their own, and an overwhelming sense of something waiting in the dark.
Even Page himself spent little time there. He left it in the hands of a caretaker—who later suffered a complete mental breakdown.
In 2015, years after Page had sold it, Boleskine House mysteriously burned to the ground.
Was it the final revenge of whatever force resided there? Or had the locals, tired of its dark history, finally destroyed it themselves?
Jimmy Page’s fascination with the occult had become far from secret. It wasn’t something he kept locked away in a library of forbidden texts or hidden behind the walls of Boleskine House. He wore it, he played it, and he performed it.
His stage presence was more than rock and roll bravado—it was ritual.
Under the dim stage lights of the 1970s, he would emerge, dressed in a black silk dragon suit—a robe-like garment embroidered with esoteric symbols. A red dragon slithered down one leg, its form curling in a serpentine coil, a symbol of wisdom, power, and transformation. An astrological sign—his own sigil—rested on his chest.
During performances, Page was often seen wielding a violin bow against his guitar strings—not just as a gimmick, but as an act of transformation. The sound was unnatural, distorted, eerie. He would move in slow, measured movements, dragging the bow as if summoning something from the depths. The guitar wailed—a human-like scream, a sound not entirely of this world.
He would raise the bow above his head, turning slowly, methodically, as if performing a spell before a congregation of thousands. As if performing the ancient ritual to the four directions.
Led Zeppelin concerts were not just music.
They were alchemy.
Music, magic, power—indistinguishable from one another.
And yet, Page’s belief in occult forces went far beyond the stage.
It lived in everything he did. Everything he sought.
In the early 1970s, Jimmy Page and Kenneth Anger—the avant-garde filmmaker, magician, and disciple of Aleister Crowley—were drawn to one another like two forces orbiting the same dark sun.
Page, with his vast collection of occult books and relics, had spent years absorbing the esoteric, poring over Crowley’s writings, and walking the haunted halls of Boleskine House—the very place where Crowley had attempted to summon angels and demons alike.
Anger, meanwhile, had long sought a musician capable of channeling something raw, something otherworldly, for his magnum opus: Lucifer Rising.
Page agreed to compose the score.
But like all pacts made in the shadows, this one would not end well.
The collaboration turned toxic, fractious.
Anger grew impatient with Page’s drug-fueled delays, convinced that the guitarist had betrayed him, broken a sacred agreement.
And when magicians are betrayed, they do not forget.
Kenneth Anger, furious and seething with magical vengeance, cast a public curse on Jimmy Page.
He spoke it aloud, he wrote it into the air, he let it fester.
And after that moment—Led Zeppelin was never the same.
It started small.
A series of bad omens, little signs that something had shifted.
Page’s once unshakable dominance on stage began to wither.
His playing—once surgically precise, effortless—became sloppy, erratic.
His energy, once electric, waned. He became detached, withdrawn, lost in a fog of heroin and occult study.
The band felt it.
Plant later said that during their final years, Page was not himself.
Something was off.
And then, the shadows began to take their toll.
Fear
People started to feel there was something surrounding the members of Led Zeppelin. Particularly Page and Plant.
A presence. Or maybe presences.
Something seen out of the corner of the eye. A figure in the corner… a shadow on the wall.
One friend claimed that, on one occasion, Robert Plant visited his home. After the musician left his house, he said, it was haunted. Plagued by unexplained noises and the movement of objects. Dark forms that seemed to follow.
Some began to avoid the members of the band, some began to fear them.
But no one feared them more than a fellow occultist and Crowleyan: the groundbreaking artist David Bowie had become terrified of Jimmy Page.
The two had known each other since the 1960s, but by 1975, Bowie became convinced that Page was trying to use dark magic against him.
In a particularly unsettling encounter at Bowie’s Manhattan townhouse, Page spoke cryptically about esoteric forces.
The atmosphere shifted.
Something unnerved Bowie.
Shortly after, he began storing his own urine in the refrigerator—believing that Page and his satanic circle sought to steal it for dark rituals.
It sounds absurd.
But to Bowie, it was deadly serious.
Something about Led Zeppelin had shifted.
The band members knew it as well as anyone who now shied away.
Something had to be done.
The year was 1975.
Led Zeppelin had conquered the world.
But something was slipping.
Their music still thundered through stadiums like a sonic invocation, their records spun on turntables like spells cast upon the masses.
They had everything—money, power, women, fame.
And yet… there was something wrong.
The music was faltering. The skill failing. Chaos was creeping into their performances, the mystic beauty spiraling into ancient animalism and insanity.
And there was one among the four who knew that power can change things and, at least he thought, make them right again.
One who had studied the old books. One who had walked the corridors of Boleskine House, where Crowley’s ghosts still whispered.
He knew that power could be taken. And that it could be taken back.
And so, as the legend goes, Page proposed a ritual.
One that would ensure Led Zeppelin’s dominance over the world of music forever.
A pact.
A contract written in something older than ink.
And that night, they say, the four gathered.
Some say it happened at Boleskine House, where Crowley had once summoned demons and abandoned them to the dark.
Some say it happened in a candlelit room, deep within the English countryside.
Wherever it was, the four men stood together.
Page.
Plant.
Bonham.
Jones.
Jones, they say, was reluctant.
Jones, they say, refused and left the room.
Undaunted, Page rolled up the rug and drew a circle on the floor in pale chalk.
Then he drew four sigils—ancient signs of summoning and strength.
Then he spoke.
His voice was low, steady, and certain.
He had read the texts. He had studied the rites. He knew what must be done.
The terms were simple.
Fame beyond imagination.
Music that would live forever.
Glory that no mortal could take away.
But all power comes with a cost.
And when you deal with the unseen, the price is never stated upfront.
Each of the three that remained, in turn, spoke their name into the void.
Each of them offered themselves to the unknown.
And then, the air shifted.
Something was there.
The room grew colder.
The candle flames did not flicker—but burned, tall and unnaturally still.
Something was listening.
Page instinctively picked up his guitar. He knew something wanted to speak.
And he knew this was the channel of communication.
He played the first note.
A single, perfect chord.
One that rang out, clear and resonant, filling the space like an invocation.
The deal was sealed.
The pact was made.
August 1975.
Led Zeppelin was at their peak, riding the success of Physical Graffiti, preparing for their biggest tour yet.
Then, Robert Plant’s car went off the road.
Plant, along with his wife and children, were on vacation in Greece, driving along the twisting, sun-drenched cliffs when the accident happened.
It should have been fatal.
Plant was seriously injured—his ankle shattered, his leg torn apart.
For months, he was bedridden, unable to walk.
The band was forced into a hiatus, unable to tour.
Some say this was the first blow of the curse.
A forced pause—a delay—just as Zeppelin was set to dominate the world once again.
And yet, that was only the beginning.
A slow, ominous drum beat. The distant sound of a car skidding—then silence.
Two years later.
Robert Plant had recovered from his injuries.
Led Zeppelin was back on the road.
They were touring America, selling out stadiums, playing to hundreds of thousands of fans.
Then, the phone call came.
Karac Plant, Robert’s five-year-old son, was dead.
A sudden, unexplained stomach infection. No warning. No chance to say goodbye.
One day, he was a vibrant child. The next, gone.
Plant was devastated.
He left the tour immediately.
Somewhere, deep inside, he must have wondered.
Was this part of the curse that Anger had cast?
Or was it another payment for the deal they had struck?
By 1979, Led Zeppelin was breaking apart.
Page was deep in heroin addiction.
Jones was silent, exhausted.
Plant was still grieving his son, doubting everything.
And Bonham… was drinking himself into oblivion.
The band struggled through their final album, In Through the Out Door.
But the magic was fading.
And then, in 1980, Led Zeppelin prepared for a new tour—one that was supposed to be their comeback.
It never happened.
Because on September 24, 1980, John Bonham went on a bender.
He drank. As he always did.
That day, in one sitting, John Bonham drank forty shots of vodka.
He passed out at Page’s house.
In the morning, he was dead.
Led Zeppelin ended that day.
And the curse… was complete.
Or so they believed.
The tragedies that struck Led Zeppelin were undeniable—Robert Plant’s near-fatal car crash, the sudden death of his young son, John Bonham’s untimely end.
But was it only the band that suffered?
Or did something darker—something more insidious—stretch beyond them, pulling others into its web?
The Led Zeppelin Curse, as some call it, did not stop with Page, Plant, Bonham, and Jones.
It reached into the lives of those around them.
And some would say, it never truly ended.
Mal Evans was more than just a roadie—he was a key figure in The Beatles' empire.
By the mid-1970s, Evans was writing a book—a memoir that would reveal secrets from inside the music world.
One of his last planned chapters?
Led Zeppelin and their connection to the occult.
But before the book could be finished, in January 1976, Mal Evans was shot and killed by police in Los Angeles.
The official story?
Evans, allegedly suicidal and armed, was confronted by officers who opened fire.
But many questioned the strange circumstances of his death.
His book was never published.
The Led Zeppelin chapter?
Gone.
Before Led Zeppelin, Jimmy Page played in The Yardbirds.
Keith Relf, the band’s original singer, had seen the earliest days of Page’s occult leanings.
He had been there at the start.
But in 1976, Keith Relf was electrocuted in his own home.
The official cause?
He was playing an electric guitar while standing on a metal pipe.
It was called a freak accident.
But some whispered.
Had he known too much?
Had he been another price paid for Zeppelin’s power?
On Led Zeppelin IV, one of the most haunting moments comes in The Battle of Evermore—a duet between Robert Plant and British folk singer Sandy Denny.
Her voice—ethereal, otherworldly—added a layer of mysticism to the song, making it unlike anything Zeppelin had done before.
But just seven years later, Sandy Denny was dead.
She suffered a head injury from a fall but ignored the symptoms. She later collapsed into a coma… and never woke up.
She was only 31.
Benji LeFevre was Led Zeppelin’s tour manager.
He was the one who discovered John Bonham’s body on that tragic morning in 1980.
He never recovered from it.
In 1990, at the age of 38, LeFevre was found dead under mysterious circumstances.
The cause?
Never officially confirmed.
Some say he suffered a sudden, fatal accident.
Others believe the Zeppelin curse followed him.
Richard Cole was Zeppelin’s right-hand man.
He was there for the rituals, the chaos, the dark moments that the band never spoke of.
He had seen things the public never would.
But in later years, Cole spiraled.
He battled addiction, saw his life fall apart, and died in 2021—one of the last key members of Zeppelin’s circle to be taken.
We already know what happened at Boleskine House—Crowley’s unfinished ritual, the shadows that Page embraced.
But even after Page sold it, the house continued to suffer.
It burned down.
Twice.
Locals refused to go near it.
And even after the ruins were put up for sale, buyers backed out—too afraid of what still lurked inside.
Led Zeppelin officially ended in 1980—the day John Bonham died.
But did the curse die with the band?
Or has it simply laid dormant, waiting?
Page remains silent.
Plant still speaks of “a shadow” over Zeppelin’s later years.
He never again attained success in his projects.
And every now and then…
Another death. Another tragedy. Another strange accident.
Always linked to Zeppelin.
Always leaving one question.
Was there a real curse put on them by Kenneth Anger?
Or was it the pact, their eternal fame requiring payment after payment?
Or did the music itself carry the curse?
And if it did…
Are payments still outstanding?
No one can be certain.
But sometimes…
If you listen closely…
You can still hear it.
The single, clear chord that rang out the night those four gods of rock and roll met before the firelight.
The night Jimmy Page rolled back the rug.
The night they reached into the abyss.
The same chord that had rung out so many years before.
From a guitar
In an empty room.
Thanks for reading. If you’d like some commentary on this story from a Catholic perspective, check out my blog and Uncanny Catholic video link, where we recap and discuss this case. God bless you, and remember to #prayforghosts. -Ursula Bielski
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