“Walli Elmlark knew David Bowie,” Tim writes. “He had been to her apartment. They were striking up a friendship, getting some sort of bond going. True, she wrote a very prestigious column for ‘Circus Magazine,’ but beyond the attention she could give the newly-arrived pop singer from Britain, whose career was just blossoming in the U.S., they seemed to have a lot in common on a personal level. Bowie was really interested in the same things Walli was. Witchcraft! Magick! UFOs!”
And Bowie was not an idle curiosity seeker. He had experiences of his own, had seen UFOs, believed in time travel and sought out other dimensions, all within a spiritual framework.
Walli introduced Tim to Bowie and the two gentlemen shook hands. But there was a large gathering of reporters there to question Bowie, so Tim wasn’t able to converse much with the rising superstar. Bowie later called Tim once while trying to track down Walli, who had the type of knowledge Bowie was looking to tap into.
Within a few years, Bowie had developed a cocaine habit that began to cause him serious psychological problems. He was living in Los Angeles (only a few houses from where the Charles Manson family had murdered Sharon Tate and her companions) and planning the follow-up to his “Young Americans” album, according to Marc Spitz, the author of “Bowie: A Biography.”
“Bowie would sit in the house with a pile of high-quality cocaine atop the glass table,” Spitz writes, “a sketch pad and a stack of books. ‘Psychic Self Defense,’ by Dion Fortune, was his favorite. Its author describes the book as a ‘safeguard for protecting yourself against paranormal malevolence.’ Using this and more arcane books on witchcraft, white magic and its malevolent counterpart, black magic, as rough guides to his own rapidly fragmenting psyche, Bowie began drawing protective pentagrams on every surface.”
Bowie would later say that he stayed up for weeks and was hallucinating 24 hours a day. An acquaintance of Bowie’s, the poet and songwriter Cherry Vanilla, hooked Bowie up with Walli in an effort to help the struggling pop star. Spitz describes Walli as a “Manhattan-based intellectual who taught classes at the New York School of Occult Arts and Sciences, then located on Fourteenth Street just north of Greenwich Village,” which, as we know, Tim owned and operated.
Meanwhile, Bowie and his then-wife Angie were living in their house in Los Angeles, which happened to have an indoor pool. In his drug-induced paranoia, Bowie felt Satan lived in the pool.
“With his own eyes,” Angie would later write, “David said he’d seen HIM rising up out of the water one night.”
Feeling demonic forces moving in, Bowie strongly believed that he needed an exorcism, and asked that his newfound friend, white witch Walli Elmlark, be called upon to lend her assistance to remove the evil from his home. A Greek Orthodox Church in Los Angeles said they would do the exorcism, and even had a priest available for such a service, but Bowie wanted no strangers involved.
“So there we stood,” Angie writes, “with just Walli’s instructions and a few hundred dollars’ worth of books, talismans and assorted items from Hollywood’s comprehensive selection of fine occult emporiums.”
Bowie began to recite an incantation surrounded by the items Walli had advised him to obtain.
“There’s no easy or elegant way to say this,” Angela writes, “so I’ll just say it straight. At a certain point in the ritual, the pool began to bubble. It bubbled vigorously (perhaps ‘thrashed’ is a better term) in a manner inconsistent with any explanation involving air filters or the like.”
The couple watched in amazement. Angie tried to joke about it, saying to Bowie, “Well, dear, aren’t you clever! It seems to be working. Something’s making a move, don’t you think?” But she couldn’t keep up the humorous brave front for long.
“I was having trouble accepting what my eyes were seeing,” she writes. “On the bottom of the pool was a large shadow, or stain, which had not been there before the ritual began. It was in the shape of a beast of the underworld; it reminded me of those twisted, tormented gargoyles screaming silently from the spires of medieval cathedrals. It was ugly, shocking, and malevolent; it frightened me.”
Bowie insisted that he and Angie relocate as soon as possible. Subsequent tenants, according to the real estate agent in charge of the property, haven’t been able to remove the stain. Even though the pool has been painted over a number of times, the shadow always comes back.
Along with the spiritual help given by Walli to Bowie in his battle against the evil forces in his swimming pool, her spellcasting and positive affirmations made it easier for Bowie to beat his cocaine addiction.
