Musicians Who Claimed Spine-Chilling Paranormal Encounters

Musical stars may seem to be different from the rest of us, but they too put their pants on one leg at a time. And some even claim to have had paranormal experiences like the rest of the nearly 67% of Americans who believe they've witnessed something from beyond the grave. Musicians who've spoken about their strange experiences include pop stars like Adele and Miley Cyrus, shock-rocker Alice Cooper, hip-hop star Kendrick Lamar, and Las Vegas crooner Wayne Newton. And that's just a few of the bevy of musicians who swear they've experienced unexplained phenomena.

Adele, Cyrus, and Cooper have had creepy encounters in supposedly haunted homes — the first two in England and the third in Upstate New York. Lamar and Newton, meanwhile, allegedly had ghostly meetings with other famous — and very dead — stars. So apparently the paranormal isn't limited to a single genre, but can manifest around artists of all stripes, whether it's pop, rock, or hip-hop. 

Miley Cyrus, the daughter of country singer Billy Ray Cyrus, went from a child star to Grammy-winning pop diva. But neither awards nor stardom insulated her from some very creepy experiences at a London apartment near the famous Harrods department store during a European tour in 2009. Cyrus, her (now husband) Liam Hemsworth, and her family were renting the apartment that had once been an old bakery for use as a home base.

They soon began experiencing a series of terrifying incidents, from windows and doors that opened on their own to hot water faucets turning on to a ghostly presence. "Before I felt this, I thought I had seen a little boy sitting on the sink watching me take a shower so I felt really freaked out," She told Elle UK in 2013. Cyrus may have wanted to use a wrecking ball on the flat, but instead, she and her family moved to the Soho hotel. Cyrus was just one of several celebrities who have claimed to have experienced chilling paranormal activity.

Acclaimed hip-hop artist Kendrick Lamar has a Pulitzer Prize and nearly two-dozen Grammys to his name, and he may have had a ghostly experience from another rap legend to thank in part for some of his success. Besides being deeply inspired by Tupac Shakur, who died from gunshot wounds sustained in a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas in September 1996, there may have been a supernatural element to Lamar's relationship to Tupac.

In a 2011 interview on Home Grown Radio, Lamar recounted a strange experience he had one night while asleep. He said he saw "a blur, like a silhouette" and heard the dead rapper's voice. "Keep doing what you doing, don't let my music die," Lamar recalled the presence telling him. Lamar later included part of a 1994 interview with Shakur in his song "Mortal Man" from the 2015 album "To Pimp a Butterfly." Lamar wasn't the only artist to supposedly experience a supernatural meeting with a legendary performer.

Wayne Newton, known as "Mr. Las Vegas," is a singer and actor who's been a staple in Sin City's entertainment scene for decades. He met Elvis Presley on the set of Bonanza in the mid-1960s, and the two hit it off. Not long after Presley died in 1977, Newton began performing at the Hilton in Las Vegas, where Elvis had also had a residency. To honor his friend, Newton decided to perform a medley of Elvis tunes. But on the night Newton debuted his tribute, the singer said he had an extremely weird and unsettling experience.

Just as his conductor began the medley, the lights in the venue suddenly went out along with the sound system. Only a single spotlight remained trained on the singer. Newton looked up towards the closed-off balcony and saw someone there. "It was kind of backlit, and I realized the image I was looking at was Elvis standing in the balcony," Newton recounted in an episode of the TV program "Celebrity Ghost Stories. "There was no mistaking it." 

Newton believed his dead friend had come to let him know he was at peace and happy with what he was seeing and hearing. As suddenly as the lights had gone out, they came back on and everything continued as normal. Newton thought he was losing his mind until his drummer mentioned how weird it was that the lights had gone out and someone was in the balcony.

In 2012, the Grammy-winning pop superstar Adele was riding high with the chart-smashing success of her album "21" which included hits like "Rolling in the Deep," but she was also being hounded by paparazzi. She ended up renting an 85-acre estate in West Sussex, England, for two years to get a little privacy. Perhaps she should have reconsidered renting Lock House, a century-old former convent, when she began to hear strange noises there at night.

In an interview with Anderson Cooper for the CBS news show 60 Minutes, Adele admitted the seemingly haunted place creeped her out. "This bit's all quite scary, really," she told Cooper as they walked down a long, dark hall. Adele ended up hiring an around-the-clock security guard, among other precautions. "I'm not rattling around here on my own," she told a friend (via Page Six). "It gives me the creeps." She vacated the property a few months later. A previous owner who had the house for 20 years beginning in 1919 also had some unsettling experiences there and sold the property in 1939. Lock House came back to haunt Adele when its owner accused her of making the property unsellable because of her comments.

Shock-rocker Alice Cooper has been putting on blood-soaked and horror-tinged rock shows for more than 40 years, so his purported paranormal encounter is definitely on-brand. In the early 1980s, Cooper and Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry were working on songs for Perry's 1984 film "Monster Dog" at an old house in Copake, New York, when weird things started happening. "It was very paranormal," Cooper said in an interview for Radio.com. "You'd put something down and then go in the other room and come back and it wasn't there and then you'd go 'huh'."

Both Cooper and Perry had just gotten out of rehab at the time and chalked it up to being newly sober. At dinner in the house that was owned by Cooper's manager, everyone began comparing stories and realized they'd all had creepy experiences there. "And then we hear something in the basement that sounds like people moving furniture," Cooper recalled. They decided not to stay. So if you happen to experience something otherworldly, you'll be in good company with some of music's greatest performers.