Beheadings and “bad vibes”: When Jimmy Page purchased an occultist’s mansion in 1971
Three days into 2026, and it seemed like there was nothing much to celebrate.
The Christmas chocolate was well and truly gone, each New Year’s resolution felt more demanding than the last when put into action, and the endlessly chilly weather felt less magical and more a pain in the ass. There was, however, one thing to celebrate: the mansion once owned by Jimmy Page and occultist Aleister Crowley was set to officially open to the public for the first time in 260 years.
Boleskine House was purchased in 1899 by a man called Aleister Crowley, who was drawn to the remote location for the purpose of black magic and other terrifying rituals that might not have landed so well if a family of four lived next door – more specifically, Crowley deemed it the perfect location to perform the Abramelin Operation, a six-month occult ritual designed to summon the 12 Kings and Dukes and invoke his Guardian Angel.
Crowley might not have had the chance to watch any modern-day horror movies, but you and I both know that the most important rule of dark arts is to never leave anything unfinished. But, after spending just enough time in the region to earn the epithet “wickedest man in the world” from the local community, he fled to Paris for separate occult business, allegedly failing to banish the spirits he summoned.
“The bad vibes were already there,” Page told Rolling Stone in 1975, before adding squeamishly, “A man was beheaded there, and sometimes you can hear his head rolling down.”
Sure enough, in the notes kept by the occulist, he explained that the origins of the decapitation came from a prior Laird who had been beheaded following the 1745 Jacobite rising. When Page bought the house in 1971, the head was still thudding from room to room.
Crowley and Page shared a fascination with the shadow realm, but didn’t quite have the same success reaching through the veil; the guitarist admitted that, unlike the former resident, he hadn’t “actually heard it, but a friend of mine, who is extremely straight and doesn’t know anything about anything like that at all, heard it.”
Page’s friend was alone with the help at the property, and was awoken by the sound of what he thought to be “cats bungling about”. A lesser man might’ve been pushed into some dark, sinister wormhole of the mind from such eerie supernatural forces at play; in fact, some were, with Page also sharing with reporters, “Of course, after Crowley, there have been suicides, people carted off to mental hospitals.”
Though the house was in Page’s ownership for nearly two decades, he didn’t frequent it often. Rather, his decision spoke more to the economic success of Led Zeppelin and his fascination with Crowley as a hypnotising force in his creative world: Why not own a haunted house?
On early pressings of the 1970 album, Led Zeppelin III, quotes attributed to the occultist, “Do What Thou Wilt” and “So Mote It Be”, were etched into the run-in grooves. But a cheeky production wink to his historical interest was easier to get away with than contending with the darker forces of nature, and most of the time he got his friend, Malcolm Dent, to look after the house.
Page sold Boleskine House to Ronald and Annette MacGillivray in 1992; in 2015 and 2019, it sustained major fire damage. The spirits getting their revenge, perhaps?
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