I first met Phil Anselmo on the Sepultura/Pantera/Biohazard tour. He came in the dressing room while I was tattooing, threw some Carnivore in the player, and kinda started a moshpit right there! At first, we were scoping each other out. Each of us know who the other was, but we had never really met.
Somehow, we started talking about Norwegian black metal forefathers, Darkthrone. Despite their enormous influence, very few people in the States know who they are and the fact that we both liked them gave us an excuse to keep talking. We wound up in his dressing room talking about music. He played me an old side project of his called Christ Inversion. It was brutal stuff, and he also played me quite a few other projects he was working on. We started talking about Halloween and horror and hit it off pretty well, which was cool.
At the end of the night, he invited me down to New Orleans to work with him on his legendary haunted house called House of Shock. I remember that first time scaring people. I was on a tour, and I got the bus driver to drop me off in New Orleans so I could hook up with Phil for Halloween. That was my first year working with him at the House of Shock, and after that, it turned into a yearly vacation. I went down every October for about five or six years straight, putting on corpse paint, wearing dark hoods and cloaks and going into the haunted house to terrorize people. There’s nothing more fun than scaring the shit out of people and trying to make them piss themselves.
The area we worked in resembled a cemetery alleyway, and there was no getting through without passing us. We had a whole team going! I became tie guy who would keep people's attention as they walked through the alley, As they cautiously watched me to see what I was going to do, Phil and our clan would jump out and grab the s--t outta them, terrorizing them, and then they’d come running towards me and I’d jump on them too! We called it ping pong. They’d just be cornered and start screaming! Any time kids came through, we’d make sure that we’d separate them. One of us would get a hold of these children and just terrorize the living s--t out of them. I’m sure we put a few kids in therapy, and you can bet they wouldn’t set foot in a haunted house after that.
I don’t know what it is about that but goddamn, that was some fun. Poor lil’ guys. We were having fun for ourselves not for them, and that’s what made it so much better. We made a routine out of it. We’d wake up in the middle of the afternoon, eat dinner, go to the haunted house and work there for four or five hours. Then we'd go back to Phil’s house and watch horror movies until dawn. Now, I just go down there to watch horror movies; we don’t really do the House of Shock much anymore, but I do miss it. That’s for sure.
That was where Phil and I honed our skills in the art of fear and horror. One great part of the story is that while I was on the road before I got to New Orleans, I ended up having to bring my babies [aka fetuses in a jar - ed] with me to Phil’s house. The jars needed some cleaning up and resealing, so I brought them outside on his front porch. It was great because my daughter, who was about 11 at the time, her sister (around the same age), her mom and her mom’s boyfriend all stopped by. They were in the area, and they ended up helping me clean up the babies. So, one morning, I was on Phil's front porch cleaning up all the bottles, and there was a bit of formaldehyde leakage. I’m sitting there with my family at, like, 10 a.m., and Dez from Coal Chamber/DevilDriver wakes up, comes out, and sees me with my family taking babies out of jars and rinsing them out and putting them back in. So, Dez wakes up everyone and has them come see like it's Christmas morn. Phil busts out and shouts, “Paul, you get those damn babies in the house right this minute!” So, I wrapped them all up, put them back in their box and stashed them away.
It was just funny the way he said it — a typical Paul Booth/Phil moment I suppose! It must’ve been a really f---ed up thing to see, the kind of scene that you just don’t expect. I guess I sometimes forget how eccentric I can be. When you think about it later, it’s like, here’s Paul Booth showing up at your house, and the next morning he’s outside playing with dead babies in jars with his daughter. Think about that the next time you invite me over for tea.
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