THE GREAT GHOSTS OF ROCK’N’ROLL 

Part 1

I'm going down to the ground

to see my funeral and watch my casket be buried

I wanna hide behind a gravestone and watch them cry over me.

Jim Morrison, The End (Live) 

On this, a new all hallows’ eve, we can rest assured the spirits of rock and roll no longer hide behind their gravestones. 

Today the King of Pop himself, Michael Jackson, is said to haunt the halls of Neverland. CNN cameras captured his moonwalking shadow there before the live Larry King Show last July.

Even in life, that other irrepressible pop star, Jim Morrison, was amused when his managers showed him the latest UPI headline, JIM MORRISON DIES – MORE LATER! 

“How did I go this time?” the Lizard King, in the habit of going dark for weeks, would ask. 

In fact, Jim looked forward to the real event. “I don’t want to die of old age or OD or drift off in my sleep,” he once said. “I want to feel what it’s like. I want to taste it, hear it, smell it. Death is only going to happen once. I don’t want to miss it.”  

In the meantime, he’d visited his predecessors. He’d danced around Valentino’s crypt in Hollywood. He drank six-packs outside Sheilah Graham’s L.A. apartment where F. Scott Fitzgerald had his last heart attack while listening to Beethoven’s Eroica. He drove Cholame Road where James Dean met his end in his silver Porsche Spyder. 

The Doors singer called his own car The Blue Lady, after the legendary ghost of young lover who drove off a California cliffside into Half Moon Bay.

On the night Jim at last joined her and the others, his manager’s wife -- five-thousand miles away -- suddenly awakened and cried out, “Jim’s dead!” His second wife, Patricia, a Celtic witch, woke up to find her wedding ring on her other hand. After burying him in Paris, his first wife, Pamela, spoke to him through their German shepherd, Sage: “Yes, Jim. What are you trying to tell me?” she would ask the dog when he whined.

Like Pamela Morrison, Yoko Ono was a firm believer in the afterlife too. But she had no interest in speaking to her husband through intermediaries. After conjuring Princess Diana on live. channelers Craig and Jane Hamilton-Parker, offered to contact John Lennon for Yoko. She declined their services, confident her husband was still on hand. On the cover of her 1982 album, It's Alright (I See Rainbows), John’s ghost benignly watches over her and Sean.

The Beatles’ eldest son, Julian, felt his presence too when an Australian aborigine gave him a white feather which his father had said would be his sign from the other side. Paul McCartney, who wrote Hey, Jude for Julian, knew the feeling as well. When in 1995 he was recording his writing partner’s Free as a Bird, “There were a lot of strange goings on in the studio,” he said, “… an overall feeling that John was around.”