In the mid-1970s, David Bowie became convinced something was living in his swimming pool – and instead of a priest, he called a witch. A few years later and a few hundred miles north, a married couple set out to rid America of witches one body at a time. EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/davidbowie READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/y5w8223h FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: David Bowie was no stranger to the occult – he even went so far as to have his swimming pool, which he believed to be possessed, exorcised not by a priest – but by a woman named Walli Elmlark who claimed to be a witch. (David Bowie’s White Witch) *** The gruesome true story of two people whose love caused their insanity to grow darker with each passing day, eventually sending them on a crusade to kill anything they deemed evil or immoral – but resulting in the murders of innocent people. (The San Francisco Witch Killers) CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)… 00:00.00.000 = The Foreboding 00:01:08.103 = Show Open 00:02:31.005 = The 1980s Witch Killers 00:11:32.949 = David Bowie’s White Witch (Part 1) *** 00:26:01.424 = David Bowie’s White Witch (Part 2) *** 00:33:26.720 = Show Close *** = Begins immediately after inserted ad break LISTEN ON PODCAST APPS: Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.com/wdapps *No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast* SOURCES and RESOURCES: “The San Francisco Witch Killers” by Alyse Wax from The13thFloor.tv: https://tinyurl.com/ycyurbey “Murderous Minds: Vol 4: 1980’s Witch Killers”: https://amzn.to/3J68cel BOOK: "David Bowie - UFOs - Witchcraft - Cocaine - and Paranoia”: https://amzn.to/45ZucBu “David Bowie’s White Witch” by Sean Casteel from the Conspiracy Journal: https://tinyurl.com/y2ht47pt (Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.) WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness. Originally aired: June 2021 LIKE WHAT YOU’RE HEARING? WEIRD DARKNESS posts episodes 7 DAYS A WEEK! Listen FREE wherever you get podcasts or visit https://weirddarkness.com/listen. • Paranormal • True Crime • Ghosts • UFOs • Cryptids • Unexplained • Want even more? Become an OFFICIAL WEIRDO for commercial-free episodes, bonus episodes, weeknight live chats, audiobooks & more at https://WeirdDarkness.com/OFFICIAL On this episode of Weird Darkness, a married couple who believed they were hunting witches leave a trail of bodies across California, and David Bowie hires a real one to drive the devil out of his swimming pool.It opens in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, where a former Phoenix family man named James Carson reinvents himself as Michael Bear, marries a self-described mystic named Suzan, and adopts a belief system the pair call "vegetarian Muslim warriors" – one that treats witchcraft, homosexuality, and abortion as capital offenses. Their first confirmed victim, in March 1981, is their own roommate, aspiring actress Keryn Barnes, stabbed thirteen times and beaten with a frying pan after Suzan decides she's a witch stealing her "yogic powers." From there the couple drifts to a Northern California marijuana farm, where Michael shoots fellow farmhand Clark Stephens in the head and tries to burn the body, and then to the shoulder of Highway 101 in 1983, where hitchhiking ends with driver Jon Charles Hellyar stabbed and shot in front of passing traffic. A televised press conference, a recanted confession, and two 75-years-to-life sentences follow, and Michael's own daughter Jenn later describes visiting him in prison as looking into the eyes of someone with no soul.The episode closes in the mid-1970s with rock journalist and Wiccan practitioner Walli Elmlark, the Circus Magazine columnist New York knew as the White Witch, whose story is told through the memoir of her friend Timothy Green Beckley, founder of the New York School of Occult Arts and Sciences on 14th Street. Elmlark's most famous client is David Bowie, who at the height of a cocaine addiction is drawing protective pentagrams on every surface of his Los Angeles home and reading Dion Fortune's "Psychic Self Defense" as a survival manual. When Bowie becomes convinced Satan is living in his indoor pool, he turns down a Greek Orthodox priest and instead performs an exorcism from Elmlark's written instructions, with a few hundred dollars of talismans bought from Hollywood occult shops. According to his then-wife Angie, the water begins to thrash, a gargoyle-shaped stain appears on the bottom of the pool, and later tenants can't paint it away. Elmlark herself dies around 1980 of a barbiturate overdose, a death her friends learned of only through her family and which at least one of them still finds suspicious.
