Horror Show: Friend of a Friend Made Their New Record at the Site of America’s First Documented Exorcism

Horror Show is a new series uncovering the stories of artists’ experiences with the supernatural, paranormal, and unexplained—and how surviving it provided new appreciation for creating in the here and now.

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There’s always been something a bit peculiar and inexplicable about the journey of Friend of a Friend. For a long time, bandmates Claire Molek and Jason Savsani were passing ships in the Chicago arts scene—she an Episcopalian choir singer turned arts dealer, he a dabbling guitarist and the tech wizard behind travel startup MealSharing.com. And while they had seen each other routinely at parties and events, it was only when a mutual acquaintance (the actual “friend of a friend”) suggested the two link up and jam together during COVID did it become what some might call fate.

The duo soon discovered weird coincidences, like how the first piece of music they each bought was exactly the same: The Cranberries’ Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We? On a grander scale, both would soon believe they finally found their musical soulmate after years of toiling in projects that never took off. “I’ve never felt that connected with anyone in this capacity,” says Savsani. “From that first day forward, we’ve jammed every day since.” The outcome has been three solid albums in three years, all astutely combining the moodiness of Beach House with the vocal eeriness of PJ Harvey and the sonic experimentalism of Radiohead.

“I feel like it was sort of a supernatural experience. I really, truly feel like we’re cosmically so connected and aligned,” adds Molek. Yet, as we continue our conversation, moving into the band’s unbelievable experience of recording their latest album Desire! in one of the most haunted houses in America, Savsani wants to get one thing perfectly straight: “For the record, we 110,000,000% did not seek this out … we were catfished into this fucked up place.”

The three of us are meeting for coffee in our shared hometown of Chicago, settling on a witchy spot called Hexe Coffee Co. where Friend of a Friend likes to pregame before local shows. The black walls are adorned with framed insect taxidermy and skull paintings, which perfectly set the mood as the duo details what went on for two weeks in the summer of 2024 while holing up at the site of the so-called “Watseka Wonder,” an old Victorian mansion located 90 miles outside Chicago where spiritualists performed the first documented exorcism in the United States on a 14-year-old named Lurancy Vennum who was purportedly possessed by another young girl, Mary Roff. The subject has been ghost lore for decades, investigated on shows like Ghost Brothers and the inspiration behind the 2009 film The Possessed.

Yet, the band knew none of this when they found the option for rent on Airbnb. After recording previous efforts, 2022’s In Arms and 2024’s FACILITIES in Nashville and Joshua Tree, respectively, Savsani and Molek were simply looking for something a little closer to home, a quaint spot in the countryside that was drivable and would allow them to enjoy a Midwest summer after seasons of constant touring.

“We were thinking about really mundane things: Is there a farmers market? Is there enough space around us that the neighbors won’t be bothered? Is it cheap? Are there enough rooms [for us and our producer and drummer]? Does it have a decent kitchen? Does it have a nice outdoor space? … It seemed like it had character,” Molek recalls, finding the irony in the word choice as we migrate to the café’s patio and she takes a drag from a rolled cigarette while pulling on her sunglasses. She’s wearing a pink head scarf tied around her neck that gives off vibes of a Hitchcockian starlet.

In hindsight, Molek admits that she remembers seeing some reviews on the Airbnb page that maybe tipped things off. “Stuff like ‘I really wish I would have known about this because I wouldn’t have brought my children,’” she says, adding, “but it was like yeah I wouldn’t bring my children to a restored house from 1890 either. … Never did I think it was because there’s ghosts or something.”

“We just thought there would be cool acoustics … or that that reverb would be sick,” Savsani shares. “And then we got there, and right when we walk in, we’re like ‘hell to the no.’” He’s still clearly shook up about the whole thing and looks like he wants to burrow in his denim jacket any time we start talking about the house. “We’ve never felt that way about any place. We’ve stayed at some random places on the band journey. But this was just … off,” he adds.

Their producer, Jordan Lawler of M83, was the first to spend the night in the house and agitatedly called Savsani and Molek as they headed out on the road the next day. “He said, ‘I will not be staying upstairs. I will be just camping out on the couch. This is my room now,” Molek shares. To this day, she and Savsani still don’t know what happened to Lawler as he was too spooked to share details, and no one really wanted to know any way. Collectively, they all felt strange creaks, heard unexplainable noises, and had an overwhelming feeling there was someone else in the house with them.

The band’s session drummer, Jessica Burdeaux, looked up “can spirits attach to your body before going into a house,” according to Savsani, and slept “like a mummy” with the lights on and doors open. Savsani wasn’t sleeping at all; he now believes his room was once the young girl’s bedroom and the energy was so intense he wasn’t able to relax. Instead, he continued to record after all the others went to sleep, particularly utilizing one room set off the house that was oddly covered in cork. “It felt like maybe it was to muffle screams or something,” Savsani says, recalling feeling brushes through the back of his hair when he set up in the space.

Three days into the stay, Savsani got a call from the house’s owner that amplified the creep factor. “He goes, ‘Look, you guys are gonna be here for two weeks. So I just wanted to let you know, people in the town are going to tell you that that house is really haunted, and they’re going to tell you to get out, like, right away. But it was just some 19th-century spiritualists doing seances, it’s no big deal,’” the guitarist recalls hearing from the other line. “He literally said ‘the townspeople.’ I was like, dude, that’s how you start a fucking horror movie.” 

Savsani kept the full extent of the information to himself for those two full weeks, knowing how spooked everyone else already was. Incredibly, the band did not abandon ship at any point. “The beautiful thing is that we all had to come together in this bonding moment… We decided we were going to power through and make this album and convert whatever it is into something beautiful, into something hopeful, despite what’s going on.” 

And through it, the house became its own sort of collaborator, says Molek. “All of this happening to us was very informative to the album in ways that we didn’t know.” Even some sketches she had early on drawn for the record cover were nearly exact carbon copies of the eventual album art created by an outside artist. “He made something almost exactly similar. He had never seen these same images,” says Molek, conceding. “The album came out the way it wanted to.”

You can hear it on songs like the gothic hymnal “Gloria” and the folk art stunner “FTV (For The Vein)” in which Molek’s distorted vocal effects and pained whispering feel like they come from outside her own body. “There are definitely sounds from the house baked into those songs,” says Savsani, which they achieved by just turning on the mic and letting it capture “organic noises” in the shadows, like EVP might do. “We weren’t trying to hide the sense of place,” adds Molek.

In fact, they were trying to mend it. “I remember really specifically feeling like we’re gonna make this house full of positivity and good vibes. I wanted to focus on that,” says Molek. So, she adjusted the furniture and feng shui’ed objects. The group baked bread and made home-cooked meals most nights. They adorned statues on the grounds. “They say that once you start to open the portals up, it’ll stay. So I felt like let’s create a place where [the spirits of these girls] can be loved and protected and feel safe,” says Molek.

It may have worked. When the band got back home to Chicago, Savsani started having dreams about the young Vennum girl. “I remember having to help her out of the room I had been staying in. … It was like everything was getting sucked back into the room and I had to physically help her out and to close the door. And in some way, it felt really cathartic, like a closing of a chapter,” he says. “I do think we helped in some way.”

While the experience still weighs heavy on the band, Savsani admits, “We’re super happy how it worked out. In some ways it allowed whatever was supposed to happen to happen, it made us come through stronger. … And that’s not even just the supernatural part. That’s life. There’s adversity and you have to power through. … The takeaway is always beauty and hope being larger than life and pushing that into that world.”

If you’re wondering about where they might record next, Savsani and Molek have it already figured out, setting their eyes on the Italian seaside where they’ll break for some time between festival dates this summer. Though Savsani cautions they’ve since updated one thing: “We’ve now put on our rider that wherever we stay, we don’t want to know if it’s haunted.”

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