From the outside, the house doesn’t look haunted. Robert Lang’s
whitewashed, concrete and brick villa seems more suited for the Spanish
coast than the Seattle suburb of Richmond Beach. Lang’s home is also
one of the Northwest’s premier recording studios, and inside is the
proof of a successful music career: walls hung with framed gold records
by Nirvana, Dave Matthews Band, Death Cab for Cutie, Damian Marley, and
Candlebox.
It isn’t on public display, but Lang has evidence of less corporeal
visitations as well: a photo of a ghostlike apparition, stories of
inexplicable gear failure, and colleagues willing to offer testimony.
The legend of Robert Lang Studio goes beyond the historic recording
sessions that have happened here (the last for Nirvana, the first for
the Foo Fighters) and into the realm of the supernatural.
Lang is a smallish, excitable man with a spray of gray stubble on
his chin, intense eyes, and a wry smile. On a glaring autumn day, he
and engineer Justin Armstrong are hosting Hills of Elysium, a gothy
Seattle rock band recording their debut album. The band exit the “live
room”—the studio on the bottom floor—so Lang can point out
exactly where he dug up a mysterious bag of money 30 years ago and, two
years ago, where a photographer snapped a shot of the ghost that haunts
the place.
The live room is the only place in the labyrinthine, four-story
building with a palpably mysterious air. It’s an oddly angled chamber
built of slabs of marble and granite, with a
20-foot-tall ceiling.
Lang, an able craftsman and electrician, cut and laid the stone himself
and installed the electric candelabras that flicker a dim orange.
Except for the drum kit in the corner and the electric guitars leaning
against the wall, the room could pass for a well-decorated mausoleum.
The heavy stone construction—softened by rugs on the floor and
baffles on the ceiling—offers terrifically resounding acoustics;
it’s a drummer’s dream, an asset that makes Robert Lang Studio
so
desirable.
We’re standing in the middle of the room, in the exact spot where
the ghost hovers in the infamous photo. Asked if he has an idea of the
possible identity of the spook in the photo, Lang answers quickly.
“There’s no doubt about it,” he says. “It’s Dubby.”
In 1975, this place was just a grassy suburban hillside and Lang was
a Seattle native in his mid-20s. He owned the hillside and a home and
more modest studio across the street, but dreamed of building a
high-end studio in this sleepy bedroom neighborhood with a long, wide
view of Puget Sound.
It was a freewheeling time. Lang says he was at a house party on
Capitol Hill where he met Walter Westley Leonard—everyone called
him Dubby—and the two bonded over their love of music and
Harley-Davidsons. They hung out together at Lang’s house and recorded
whatever bands came their way. Dubby was a drifter who spent time in
Hawaii and skippered yachts around Seattle, including, for a while,
Bill McCormick’s of McCormick & Schmick’s.
In September of 1979, Lang says, Dubby told him about a stash of
money he buried, cash squirreled away to move the current studio into
bigger digs and establish a second studio on Orcas Island. “I knew
there was money,” Lang says. “He had already bought this house on 10
acres on the north side of Orcas Island. This was money to buy the MCI
consoles that we were going to install in the studios.” The money
might’ve been illicit; Dubby’s father, according to Lang, ran
bootlegged liquor across the border during Prohibition, and Dubby
received an allowance check from his mother at the beginning of every
year.
At this point in their friendship, Dubby was staying with some
mutual friends in the rural town of Twisp. He was unfocused, Lang
recalls—”going through emotional problems—he was just
somebody else”—and Lang wanted to help get him back on track.
After a particularly hungover morning, he took Dubby out to
breakfast at the bowling alley in Richmond Beach. “We came back and he
got in his RX-7 and I remember he put one of those aquarium
thermometers on his forehead,” Lang says. “He goes, ‘Bobby, what am I
reading?’ and I say, ‘You’re reading fucked up, dude. Don’t go.’ He
says, ‘I gotta go; I’ll see you later,’ and he took off.”
Two days later, on September 20, Dubby was dead. His was the
quintessential rock-star departure: After too much to drink, he passed
out and choked on his own vomit. Parts of Lang’s story are vague and
improbable, but it’s his gospel, and he sticks to it.
Lang had lost a dear friend, someone he loved like a brother. But he
couldn’t help thinking about the stash of money. “In the back of my
mind I knew there was something buried in the ground,” he says. A few
weeks after the funeral, he bought a metal detector. He searched in the
lot across the street for a month, looking for Dubby’s loot. He found
nothing. Then he realized that his intent was wrong.
“I was like, the only thing that makes perfect sense is if I’m
digging for this recording studio, if I’m sweating and I’m digging and
I’m sweating and I’m dirty,” Lang says. So he started digging the
foundation for his studio. Weeks passed, then months. He hadn’t
uncovered Dubby’s stash, but at least he was getting somewhere with the
construction. Then came the fateful night.
“It was pouring down rain and I had this little orange trouble light
hanging on the sewer line,” Lang recalls. “I’m digging on the north
side of the plot, and the sand sloughs. All of a sudden appears this
big plastic canister, just the edge of it. I’ll never forget this: I
looked at it and time just stopped.”
The canister was filled with $100 bills. Lang refuses to divulge the
grand total, but he says “it was a lot of money.” Adhering to what he
believes would’ve been Dubby’s wishes, Lang sunk the cash back into the
studio. “I prayed up to Dubby: ‘Dubby, I will fulfill your dreams,'” he
says, “because I knew that’s what this was for.”
In the intervening years, there have been numerous “occurrences,”
according to Lang and his associates. They attribute them to Dubby,
visiting the studio from beyond the grave. Musicians and technicians
have reported weird chills, strange noises, open doors that were closed
before. “Everybody,” Lang says, “every engineer that has worked
here—every one of ’em—has come in contact with a
supernatural phenomenon. Probably the coolest thing that
happened—which I was really kind of happy about—was with
the band Afghan Whigs.”
The one-time Sub Pop signees were overdubbing songs for their
Black Love album at Robert Lang Studio in the fall of 1995.
The band had been hearing strange noises and a tape machine had broken
down without warning—the explanation is complex, but repeated
calls to the manufacturer stumped technicians. Two nights in a row,
engineer Steve Culp woke up Lang with phone calls, asking him to come
to the studio and assuage the band. The second time, Lang says, he
arrived to find singer Greg Dulli with a fearful look on his face. A
friend of Dulli’s—a medium—had been in the house and
declared supernatural forces at work.
Whigs bassist John Curley says his memory of the sessions have
dulled with time, but he does recall strange goings-on, enough to
convince the band a medium was a good idea. “Greg’s friend came over
and did her thing,” which included burning sage to cleanse the space,
Curley says. “After that, there were no more occurrences that I was
aware of. She told us that spirits can sometimes manifest through
electrical systems, which is why lights will flicker and tape machines
go crazy.” Curley remains uncertain about the tape machine and the
medium’s intervention. “What happened there was odd, but I wouldn’t go
as far as to say it proves anything. Certainly the place has that kind
of vibe, even for someone who’d consider himself a skeptic.”
For the skeptics, Lang offers the photo, taken by the drummer for
the band Drown Mary in 2005. It depicts the band’s bassist playing in
the live room. His expression is intent; he’s oblivious to the blurry
visage that hovers above him. It’s similar to the figure in the Edvard
Munch painting The Scream.
The photo was taken through the glass door to the live room. “The
face” could be a coincidence, a smudge or reflection on the glass. Lang
insists otherwise.
“The vocalist was, you know how metal is,
yarling—rararara—that kind of thing,” he says.
“Dubby—I don’t think he approved of what was going on. In the
picture, you can
see his mouth like this [Lang widens his
mouth into a silent scream], almost like he’s going, ‘No!'”
Lang seems comfortable inside his haunted house—almost proud.
Despite his familiarity with the ghost, he’s still spooked on occasion.
“You could not pay me to walk through that studio when it was dark,” he
says.
The coda to Lang’s story is even more bizarre: Lang has a slab of
Italian marble that contains the image of Jesus Christ standing on the
Mount.
He was cutting the marble to lay in one of the rooms of the house
when he saw a flash of white light and the image made itself clear to
him. Like recognizing shapes in passing clouds, seeing the image of
Christ in the stone’s green and white whorls requires some imagination.
Lang has shown the marble to several ministers around the Midwest and
Seattle; some are impressed by what they see. In a letter dated March
15, 1994, Reverend Roger O’Brien of St. Luke’s Parish wrote, “For a
Christian, it is hard not to see here a radiant figure of the risen
Lord.”
For the past several years, Lang has brought the slab with him to
Mexico, where he resides most of the year. During Easter celebrations,
he loans it to the Catholic church of Puerto Vallarta, Our Lady of
Guadalupe, where pilgrims view it as a religious icon. “I don’t make a
habit out of going to church,” Lang says, “but yeah, I believe in
Christ.”
John Curley of the Afghan Whigs has a measured perspective on Lang:
“He seems like an enthusiastic guy about everything he’s involved in. I
don’t think it’s shtick. He is sincere.” And on the supernatural:
“Knowledge at its fringes is weird, whether it’s science or philosophy
or whatever. My worldview includes room for superstition. It’s hard to
not try to think of a real-world explanation for stuff, and many times
there turns out to be one. But in case you’re wrong, you have to be
respectful. If there is a ghost there, you don’t wanna make it mad.”
