Here's How A Haunting Almost Ruined The Foo Fighters' 10th Album

The Foo Fighters have made a serious name for themselves since Dave Grohl formed the band as a solo project following Kurt Cobain's death in 1994. They've released nine studio albums, with their 10th set to come out in 2021. They've won more Grammy awards than makes us comfortable to talk about (11 wins and 27 nominations), and gone platinum enough times to ensure lifelong wealth and fame. Grohl could retire tomorrow and no one would forget the Foo Fighters.

You'd think having that much industry experience would allow album production to go off without a hitch, but that's not the case for the newest addition to the Foo Fighters' discography. The band's upcoming album, Medicine at Midnight, is likely to make just as much noise as the ones before it, but, like with all albums, recording Medicine at Midnight wasn't without its own particular, if not peculiar, moments. Unlike the Foo Fighter's first nine albums, the challenges around the 10th album couldn't have been easy to predict, since they were supernatural and all. That's right: A haunting almost ruined the Foo Fighters' 10th album.

To record Medicine at Midnight, Dave Grohl and the Foo Fighters camped out in an 80-year-old house in Encino, California. The band was expecting to hole up and record in the house with seeming ease, but that's not what fate had in store. From what Grohl tells NME, immediately upon entering the house, he could tell the "vibes were definitely off," but the band pushed past it and stayed because the sound quality wasn't something to brush off.

Grohl claims that a lot of weird, inexplicable things happened in the Encino house. The guitars would go significantly out of tune overnight — detuned, really. The settings on their mixer would reset, and, probably the eeriest of all, recorded tracks would erase from Pro Tools, only to be replaced by blank open mic tracks.

"There were some tracks that were put on there that we didn't put on there. But just like weird open mic noises. Nobody playing an instrument or anything like that, just an open mic recording a room," Grohl said.

With a few possibly supernatural incidents in the books already, Grohl decided to set up baby monitors around the studio. At first, the band thought they were crazy. Nothing freaky was going on. Again, that was at first. The monitors did end up recording some sort of activity, but we may never know what it was because, upon bringing the supposed haunting to the attention of the landlord, Grohl was forced to sign a non-disclosure agreement. The landlord was trying to sell the house and, apparently, ghosts aren't helpful in today's real estate market.

The Foo Fighters frontman does admit that the band couldn't easily explain some of the things they saw, but he doesn't go into detail. "I can't give away what happened there in the past but these multiple occurrences over a short period of time made us finish the album as quickly as we could," Grohl told NME. As Rolling Stone put it last March, "Miraculously, they finished the recording and got out of there."

At least they didn't run away before the album was finished. Let's hope that someday they'll be able to tell us the full story. Until then, we'll settle for the new Foo Fighters album.