Alice Cooper and Joe Perry were once forced to flee a haunted house shortly after the rockers were released from rehab.
The School’s Out hitmaker met up with the Aerosmith guitarist in the early 1980s at an old home in Copake, New York to write songs for Perry’s 1984 movie Monster Dog, but the musicians weren’t prepared for the supernatural disturbances they experienced during the collaboration.
“Every time I would put something down – I’d go in the other room, I’d come back – it (the object) was in some other place,” Alice recalls to Rolling Stone of the creepy haunting. “It was more playful than scary. We were both just out of rehab so we figured we were just insane.
“But (we knew it was real) when the two road guys (with us) said, ‘Jeez, I know I put ’em there and they were on the other side of the room when I came back.'”
Although playful at first, the haunting quickly escalated in intensity: “That night at dinner, there’s a basement right under us and it sounds like somebody’s moving furniture down there. It’s not just a bump or a little thing: It sounds like 20 people are moving furniture,” Cooper remembered, noting the terrifying bangs prompted himself and Perry to jet out of the house immediately.
“And it’s not like the movies where you go, ‘Let’s go see what that is.’ It was more like, ‘Do you know where the car keys are?’ We got out of there that night,” he added.
Alice’s manager Shep Gordon later informed the star the Copake house was where author Jay Anson had written his famous 1977 book The Amityville Horror, a recounting of the alleged demon-inspired Lutz family slayings in 1974.
“I went, ‘And you were gonna tell me this when?'” Cooper laughed. “So yeah, that was paranormal. I can’t explain any of that.”