During the making of Rainbow's Long Live Rock 'N' Roll album in 1977, frontman Ronnie James Dio claimed to have experienced some particularly intense paranormal interference from a "really evil spirit" that would not only try to sabotage their creative efforts, but pose a real danger to their lives.
In fact, the legendary late singer even accused the entity, known as 'Baal', of having pushed his wife Wendy down the stairs - a moment which would contribute to Dio's reluctance to "meddle" with the spirit world in the future.
Long Live Rock N' Roll, which includes mystically-laced tracks such Gates Of Babylon and Lady Of The Lake, was recorded in the Château d'Hérouville, an 18th century French manor house that has seen an impressive list of A-list musicians walk its halls including Pink Floyd, Elton John, Fleetwood Mac, Iggy Pop and David Bowie, many of whom had professed to having witnessed unexplainable happenings within the building.
According to Dio, the paranormal activity in the château was so prevalent that it would even stop them from recording. In hope of putting an end to the disturbances, the band decided to engage in a number of seances to confront whatever/whoever was trying to sabotage their work.
Recalling the moment in a 2001 interview with More Black Than Purple, the vocalist told journalist Mike Eriksson: "Well we had some séances because we had some problems in the studio. We were in France in a studio called Chateau, we would go into the studio and the tape machine would be running and no-one would be there. So we had one song – Gates of Babylon – and we couldn’t finish; we just couldn’t finish it no matter how we tried.
“The tape would break, the machine would stop, we’d get close to it but just couldn’t finish it. One day we had a séance in the studio and contacted the spirit who said he was Baal. His opening line was always, 'I am Baal, I create chaos. You will never leave here.' That was what he always said. So after a while you got kind of, 'Oh Baal again. Hey Baal, how you doing mate?'".
Dio explained that the band eventually got used to the phenomena. Unfortunately, however, he claimed the issue began to escalate and grew into something much more physical: "We weren’t afraid of him anymore until he started doing things like taking glasses and sending them all the way through the table and then making it come under the table all by itself and coming back up to the top, or flowing down the end of the table and smashing against the wall, or a piano playing when there was no one there playing it.”
Unable to put a stop to the spirit's mischievous and threatening ways, the band sought the help of a priest - only to be turned away, as the fella was too scared to enter the building himself. Dio recalled: “We eventually went to the local priest there and told him we wanted to have an exorcism. He threw us out! He said, ‘I won’t go to that place, that place is horrible.’ We said, ‘We know!’ He wouldn’t come. We found a big cross, we had a cross made and we put it up in the studio. The next time we had a séance Baal said, 'I am Baal, I create chaos. You will never leave here. What’s that stupid thing doing on the wall?'
“We said, 'Do you believe in Christ?' He said, 'Ha, Christ, he was only a man, I’m not afraid of anything.' So we knew we had some troubles here."
The activity reached its peak just as the band were leaving. In fact, Dio later claimed that the malignant spirit attacked his wife Wendy, pushing her down the stairs while she was holding a box of china.
"We finally were able to finish the song and as we were leaving, we were going down this winding stone stairway leading from the sleeping areas down to the cars to leave the Chateau and my wife was in front of me and we had just bought some antique china. Luckily she had the box in her hand," he said.
“I was perhaps five feet away from her. She was five feet in front of me. Cozy Powell was behind me. Suddenly she pitched right off the stairs and fell to the bottom of the stairs and fell on the china - luckily, because it broke her fall. She turned to me and said, 'You bastard! Why did you push me?' 'Cozy, did I push her?' He said, 'You weren’t even close to her.'
"Guess who did that one! So that was Baal’s final parting thrust for us. So yeah, that’s a strange thing that happened there. Since that time, only once have I been talked into doing that again in a haunted castle, just outside of Newcastle.”
Speaking of the experience in a 2008 interview with The Blaring Out Show, Dio described it as "the most scary thing any of us had ever been through". The band were allegedly so affected by it in fact, that the entity is even ironically credited on Long Live Rock N' Roll's 'special thanks' section on the album's back cover. It reads: "Special thanks to E.H Reid, Colin Pearson, Pierre Calamel, Michel Laurent, Jean Claude, no thanks to Baal".
Years after the encounter, in 1985, Dio issued sage advice to those interested in dabbling in the occult arts, stating in an Eye Of Newt interview: “I learned long ago that you don’t meddle with spirits. You don’t meddle with good ones, you don’t meddle with bad ones, because once you open the door and let them in they never go away. So you can’t say, 'Well your time’s up, bye!' You know, you’re opening up something horrible there when that happens, so my advice to anyone is just to stay away from any kind of black magic. White magic is fine, it’s for the good. And that’s the only thing I’ve ever been interested in.”
Watch Dio discuss his experience with the spirit Baal below.
