As the 50th anniversary of Station to Station reignites fascination with one of the most mythologized periods in modern music history, one chilling story from David Bowie’s 1976 Los Angeles era has resurfaced—equal parts rock folklore, psychological collapse, and occult nightmare.
By the mid-1970s, Bowie was living in a Spanish-style house on Doheny Drive, physically in California but mentally unraveling. This was the height of his “Thin White Duke” persona, a period he later described as one of near-total dissociation. Sustained by an extreme diet of red peppers and milk and fueled by relentless cocaine use, Bowie slipped into a state of paranoia so severe that reality itself began to fracture.
He became convinced his home was under supernatural attack.
Bowie’s fascination with the occult had existed long before Los Angeles, but during this period it intensified into obsession. He reportedly drew pentagrams on walls, fixated on numerology and the Kabbalah, and believed dark forces were actively trying to harm him. The terror reached its peak when Bowie became convinced that a demonic entity had manifested itself at the bottom of his swimming pool—an unmoving, beast-like presence watching from below the waterline.
Instead of calling authorities or seeking medical help, Bowie reached out to a spiritual figure: Walli Elmlark, a so-called “White Witch” based in New York, whom he had encountered through musician Robert Fripp.
What followed has become one of the most unsettling episodes in rock history.
On a midnight in late 1975, Elmlark conducted a long-distance ritual known as a “Cone of Power” with a coven in New York, while Bowie simultaneously performed protective rites at his Los Angeles home—lighting blue and white candles and spreading salt to absorb negative energy. According to witnesses, including Bowie’s then-wife Angie, the swimming pool began to churn violently. The water, despite having no heating system engaged, thrashed and bubbled “like acid,” as if reacting to an unseen force.
When the water finally stilled, something horrifying remained.
A dark, permanent shadow—described as animalistic in shape—appeared burned into the bottom of the pool. Whether psychological projection, chemical reaction, or something more inexplicable, Bowie was convinced it was real.
He moved out the next day.
The incident marked the end of Bowie’s Los Angeles chapter and directly preceded his retreat to Europe, where he would reinvent himself yet again. In Berlin, alongside Brian Eno, Bowie recorded the now-legendary “Berlin Trilogy,” reclaiming clarity after what he later called a period of “singular darkness.”
That darkness, however, is permanently etched into Station to Station. Co-produced by Harry Maslin, the album is cold, elegant, and detached—its lyrics steeped in mysticism, spiritual dread, and fractured identity. Bowie later admitted he remembered almost nothing about recording it.
Half a century later, the legend of the “possessed pool” endures. Skeptics may attribute it to psychosis, but the story remains a haunting reminder that behind the myth of genius was a man barely surviving his own demons—and somehow, emerging on the other side.