The Demonic Price Dave Mustaine Paid for Using Witchcraft

The Demonic Price Dave Mustaine Paid for Using Witchcraft

The studio was swallowed by a heavy, deliberate silence, the kind that only descends when a man stops filtering his past. The cameras, sleek and silent on their tracking mounts, crept closer, capturing every deep-set wrinkle around Dave’s eyes and the jagged, ancient scar slicing down his forearm.

Across from him, Shaun sat perfectly still. He didn’t blink. He didn’t reach for his coffee. He just leaned forward, his voice a low, gravelly rumble that barely carried across the microphones.

“So, do you think you were possessed?”

Dave didn’t hesitate. He didn’t look away. There was no shame in his eyes, only the stark, chilling certainty of a man who had stared into an abyss and felt it stare back.

“Oh, I know I was,” Dave said, his voice flat, devoid of theatricality. “Because the priest… he said that he laid hands on me, and the head of a bull came out of my chest. Out of my stomach. There was a lot of weird stuff going on in that room at the time. Like, chairs were moving around on their own, because there was a bunch of people in there that were getting baptized, and there was a lot of tongues being spoken. When you open up the doors to the dark, Shaun, they’re not going to wait to be invited in. They’re coming. If I believe in God, then I have to believe in the devil.”

Shaun let the words hang in the air, a palpable weight settling over the room. “What is it that got you sober, Dave? I mean… why did you change?”

Dave looked down at his boots, a faint, bittersweet smile playing at the corner of his mouth. “I was in Texas. I’d hurt my arm really bad—shredded the nerves, thought my playing days were over. I was in a dark place, just wandering around, and I ended up talking to this local pastor. He looks at me, sees right through the rock-star armor, and he goes, ‘Man, you… you need the Lord, Dave.’ And I just snapped. I went, ‘No, I don’t. I’ve had enough of God.’“

Dave paused, adjusting his position in the leather chair, the memory vividly painting itself in his mind. “So, the pastor doesn’t get mad. He just points up a trail and goes, ‘Why don’t you go up onto the hill?’ Now, up on that hill, there was a fire ring. And there were two massive sections of a building that came together like a V, and right down the middle, hanging by a thick iron chain, was a cross. Of course, you have to understand my background—I was brought up a Jehovah’s Witness. To them, the cross was a pagan torture device. They taught that Jesus wasn’t hung on a cross; he was hung on a torture stake, a tree. Blah, blah, blah. All this dogmatic stuff that they believe, but I don’t anymore.”

He leaned in, his eyes locking back onto Shaun’s. “So, I’m standing up there on that hill in the Texas wind, looking at this massive wooden cross swinging gently in the center of those buildings. And I’m just thinking to myself… Man, what have I got to lose?“

Dave exhaled a sharp breath. “And those six simple words set me on my road to a completely new lifestyle, a new existence. Because I walked back down that hill, found that little pastor, and I said, ‘Yeah, man. I think… I think I want to try this. I was just up there, and I said, what have I got to lose?’ And his face lit up. He goes, ‘Okay, well, let’s do the sinner’s prayer.’ Then he looks at the dirt and goes, ‘Get down on your knees.’“

Dave chuckled, a rare glimpse of his stubborn, old self breaking through. “And I said, ‘Nope. Do I need to get on my knees to do the sinner’s prayer?’ He said it was traditional. I said, ‘Nope. Not doing it. Not praying on my knees. I’ll say the words, but I’m not getting on my knees.’ And I did the prayer. Standing right there. I didn’t get down on my knees because I just couldn’t bring myself to that place of total surrender yet. I was not at that place. I mean, I prayed—I prayed all the time back then, because I thought that’s just what you were supposed to do. But the sinner’s prayer… I didn’t even know what that really meant. I remember thinking, I don’t know if I like the sound of that name. But we did it.”

“How did your inner circle take it?” Shaun asked.

“Well, we finished the prayer, and later I called my wife and told her. She just started laughing. She said all of her friends already knew it was going to happen, that it was just a matter of time. And, you know, from that point on, it was a long, slow series of learning stuff. Learning how to coexist with other people in the world who may or may not be enlightened, you know? Growing up, I heard so many clichés, like ‘walking a mile in another man’s shoes.’ You hear that as a kid and you think, What the hell does that even mean? And then something like this happens, where your entire life changes overnight, and suddenly the old words make sense. Something that’s been a destructive part of your existence every single day is just… gone.”

Dave’s eyes drifted to the corner of the studio, the timeline of his chaotic life unraveling. “I was telling somebody the other day about the old days. When we lived in Silver Lake, California, David Ellison would come into my bedroom every single morning. Well, maybe not every morning, but most. He would walk right into my bedroom, he’d have a mirror in his hand, he’d give it to me, and we were off to the races. That’s just how we lived. It was a vicious cycle, but I didn’t know any better at the time.”

“What brought you to that pastor specifically, though?” Shaun asked, steering the narrative. “Was it just the physical pain?”

“My arm injury,” Dave nodded. “I was physically broken, which broke my pride enough to let someone in.”

“Is this about the same time that you stopped practicing witchcraft?” Shaun asked, shifting a folder on his desk. “Because I read somewhere that you stopped doing witchcraft around age thirty, but it sounded like it had been going on for about fifteen years before that.”

Dave shook his head definitively. “No, it ended way before that. But I’m pretty sure… well, I think about it all the time. Even now, whenever something really pisses me off, a dark thought will flash in my mind: Man, I’ll just… and then I stop myself. No, I won’t. Back when my sister was still alive, I called her up a few times when I was completely at the end of my rope. I was furious, desperate, and I knew the occult stuff worked. I knew how to channel that malice. But she talked me out of it a few times. I held the line. I didn’t do it.”

Shaun studied Dave’s face. “It sounds like you were trapped in what some people might call a severe, almost satanic depression.”

“Uh, no,” Dave corrected gently but firmly. “Not depression. Oppression. There’s a distinct difference. It was like a spiritual oppression, a possession. It wasn’t a chemical sadness; it was having a literal entity, a dark spirit, sitting heavy on you. And like I said, when you open up those doors to the dark through rituals and anger, they’re not going to wait for a polite invitation. They’re coming right through.”

Dave leaned back, intertwining his fingers. “Look, if I believe in God, then logically I have to believe in the devil, right? And I do. I believe in God. I believe in Christ. I believe in the devil, and I believe there are real demons and real angels. I still don’t know what the exact real estate looks like up there in the heavens, but I’ve got a pretty damn good practical understanding of how that warfare plays out down here. The problem is, when you get really drugged out, a lot of times you start to do incredibly unnatural things because your perception is totally warped. And why wouldn’t you? You’re not yourself.”

Dave began ticking off points on his fingers, his voice carrying the weathered authority of a street philosopher. “Think about it. You either have liquor in you—which society literally calls spirits for a reason—or you’re on stuff like opiates, which completely artificializes reality and makes you think everybody in the room is your best friend. Or you smoke pot, and you become instantly paranoid of absolutely everybody. Or you take sedatives, which, to be fair, some people legitimately need just so they don’t wear out the people around them. And other people need stimulants, like kids who have been diagnosed with ADD or ADHD. But when a grown adult starts grinding up pharmaceutical speed just because they like the rush… I mean, that’s essentially what meth is. It strips away your spiritual armor.”

“So, going back to the possession,” Shaun said, keeping his gaze steady. “How did you know for sure it was real, and not just the drugs?”

“Oh, I know it was real because we tried to get my life in order, and bizarre, inexplicable stuff just kept happening,” Dave said, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. “Pam and I would go see people who were deeply spiritual in nature, and without any prompting, they would tell us they saw something dark attached to me. Before we went to San Francisco, we went to see this woman—I think her name was Caroline, her husband was a famous Green Bay Packers football player, so I knew she was elite, and she was a legitimate doctor. She did these spiritual clearing sessions, and she had this holy man from India, a Raja, come over. He was like a spiritual practitioner who did laying on of hands, cupping, and acupuncture.”

Dave leaned forward, his hands gesturing vividly. “So, this Raja is putting the acupuncture needles into my back, and he starts meditating deeply right behind me. All of a sudden, the guy just collapses—flies backward onto the floor. When he gets up, pale as a ghost, he says that while he was in the spirit, a man wearing a brilliant silver turban manifested, stood over me, and said, ‘I release him.’ And that’s the exact moment the Raja fell over.”

Dave took a breath, the intensity in the room spiking. “Then, later, we went to San Francisco to see a Filipino priest. He laid his hands on me, prayed over my core, and afterward, he told me that the spiritual head of a raging bull had torn its way out of my chest, out of my stomach. He looked at me and said, ‘That is holy shit.’ Yeah. And the thing is, Shaun, I didn’t see it happen. I didn’t even feel a physical rip. But in the spirit world, things operate differently. I don’t know if I would ever see it with my own eyes anyway, because I don’t think I have that specific spiritual gifting to see demons visually. But multiple spiritual people, who had absolutely nothing in common and lived thousands of miles apart, saw the exact same entity clawing at me. They all knew something ancient was going on.”

“Did it ever finally break?” Shaun asked.

“It broke,” Dave said softly. “Finally. I remember getting baptized at this church in Northridge, California. And this… this part is freaky. Someone who was standing in the back of the sanctuary told me later that there was a massive amount of weird, chaotic energy in that room during my baptism. They said chairs were violently vibrating and moving around on their own. There was a bunch of people getting baptized with me, and there was a sudden outbreak of people speaking in tongues, real intense stuff. Now, I didn’t see any of that myself because I was underwater and focused on what I was doing. Personally, I’m the type of guy who needs to see a chair fly with my own eyes to fully buy into it, but that’s what multiple witnesses told me happened. And honestly? I was sitting there thinking, Man, that’s pretty cool. Because if this whole God thing is real, and I choose to live my life like there is a God, then when it’s all over, I’m not going to regret a single thing.”

Shaun leaned back, adjusting his microphone line. “Have you ever actually seen anything supernatural with your own eyes? Like a physical demon standing in front of you?”

“Not in the physical realm,” Dave answered honestly. “Visions? Yeah. Internal images that felt entirely external? Absolutely. But never a solid, tangible demon standing in the flesh.”

The studio lights shifted slightly, a brief intermission in the heavy atmosphere as the production crew adjusted the audio levels. Shaun took a sip of water, looked directly into the primary camera, and smiled with a sudden, warm energy that broke the tension.

“Hey guys, before we continue with Dave’s story, I want to take a quick second to introduce you to the newest, most chaotic member of my family,” Shaun said, a genuine laugh breaking through his serious demeanor. “We call him Stanley. We got Stanley this past Christmas, and pretty quickly, my number one focus became making sure he was safe on our land while still giving him the actual freedom to just be a dog and run wild. I went looking for the absolute top-rated GPS fence on the market—the number one system out there—and that’s how I found SpotOn.”

Shaun held up his phone, showing an app interface. “Stanley wears their Nova collar. With SpotOn, I can set up a completely custom GPS fence for Stanley right on my phone. No digging up the yard for a physical wire, no heavy leashes. I just walk my property line once, or literally draw it right on the digital map, and that is the exact boundary the collar recognizes. I can create multiple fences, save them for when we travel, and adjust them whenever I need to. So whether we’re hanging out at home or out on the road, Stanley always knows exactly where his boundaries are.”

He leaned forward, clearly impressed by the tech. “Another thing that really stood out to me is that these collars are engineered right here in the USA and assembled up in New Hampshire by a tech team that’s been working with high-precision military GPS technology for years. You can tell a massive amount of attention went into making this thing reliable. The Nova Collar uses a dual-band GPS system connected to more than 150 satellites simultaneously, along with an internal antenna that’s over five times larger than typical GPS fence collars. That means the boundary stays pixel-accurate even around heavy trees, rough terrain, and changing weather conditions.”

Shaun tapped his desk for emphasis. “SpotOn’s True Location technology has been independently tested and delivers a 99.3% containment rate, which is the only stat that matters when you’re trusting a piece of tech with your dog’s safety. It’s incredibly durable, waterproof, and on top of that, I can check his live location in real-time, send voice commands directly through the collar, and track his daily activity. I use SpotOn so Stanley gets the freedom to explore, and I get the total peace of mind knowing he’s secure. Let your dog roam with SpotOn. Go to spot-onfence.com/srs and use the code SRS for $50 off the Nova Collar. That’s spoton.com/srs, code SRS for fifty bucks off.”

Shaun turned back to Dave, the warmth of the dog story fading back into the deep twilight of the supernatural. “You were saying you haven’t seen a demon in the physical, but you know people who have.”

“Oh, you do too, Shaun,” Dave said, pointing a finger at him. “You see things in your own way. I have intense dreams.”

“I’ve had several occurrences,” Shaun admitted, his voice dropping into a reflective tone. “Where I’ve experienced things… not necessarily visually, but things I’ve heard or felt. Like walking into a room that’s suddenly bone-chillingly cold for no reason.”

“Yeah,” Dave nodded knowingly. “Yeah, exactly. There’s a lot of real stuff like that out there. Megadeth actually wrote a song about a young girl named Mary Jane Twilliger. She was a young witch back in the day, and her dad found out about her rituals and buried her alive in a box. The graveyard was in a town right north of where David Ellison used to live. We actually went out there once to visit the site, and man, it was creepy. It was just profoundly creepy, but that was it. No owls hooting, the wind didn’t suddenly blow on cue, nothing cinematic.”

Dave grinned, a mischievous glint in his eye. “But I did hear a piece of local folklore about it. Supposedly, some teenagers went out there and pushed her headstone over. When they ran back to their car in a panic, they found their car keys sitting perfectly in the center of the hood. That’s wild, man.”

“Yeah, that’s crazy,” Shaun agreed, a genuine chill passing over him. “That’s completely wild. I’ve had a bunch of these bizarre experiences myself on this show. One time, I was interviewing a close friend of mine, Father Dan Rehill. He’s an official Catholic exorcist. I remember when he walked into this exact studio, he looked around and said, ‘Look, weird stuff always happens when I start talking about this open source.’ He warned me the cameras might fail, the power might cut, who knows. We started deep-diving into the mechanics of exorcisms, and the second he brought up the name of Christ, that AC unit right there…” Shaun pointed to a vent on the wall. “…just went on absolute full blast. Immediately. Just started whooshing cold air out of nowhere. I’ve had a ton of those moments, but honestly? It’s awesome. It’s completely made me realize how real the spiritual realm actually is.”

“It’s real,” Dave said solemnly. “It’s entirely real.”

“And, you know, to move on a little further,” Shaun said, looking at his notes. “After you found Christ again, you made a radical decision. You completely quit singing and performing certain songs in your catalog. What songs were those, and what drove that decision?”

Dave took a slow, deliberate breath. “It was only because I didn’t really know… I mean, I knew what I was singing about when I wrote them, but from a renewed spiritual point of view, I didn’t know if I wanted to put that energy out into the world anymore. One of our tracks had almost an entire real hex embedded in the lyrics—a curse that I had personally used in the past. I absolutely didn’t want to sing that anymore because… well, what happens if a kid listens to it, figures out the rest of the pieces that are missing from the puzzle, and unleashes something they can’t control?”

Dave’s expression turned grim. “I haven’t seen things materialize in front of me, but I know dark stuff happens to me. I know for a fact that people have put literal curses on me over the years. I know they’ve even cursed our dogs. We had a dog who suddenly dropped dead in the yard. Pam was completely hysterical, crying her eyes out, and I just felt this surge of faith. I said, ‘Let me pray over her.’ I laid my hands on that dog, prayed with everything I had, and she came back to life. She stayed alive just long enough for us to get her to the veterinarian’s office, where she got to look at us, say goodbye to us all, and then she peacefully passed away. But before that prayer? She was dead. Dead, dead.”

Shaun’s eyes narrowed. “Who… who is putting curses on you, Dave?”

“People that don’t like what I sing about now,” Dave said simply. “People that don’t like Megadeth’s message, or people who favor other, darker bands. There was a guy in the past… he fronted a band called Dissection. We were booked to play a major festival together in Israel, and I was incredibly excited about playing there. I wanted to see what the name ‘Megadeth’ looked like printed in Israeli font on the official posters. So, I go to the festival website to check out the lineup, and I see the name of the event, I see our name at the top, and then right below us, I see this band, Dissection. I went, What the hell is that?“

Dave leaned forward, his voice dropping into a chillingly calm register. “So, I looked the band up. I read an interview where the frontman openly stated that he was a devout Satanist and that I, Dave Mustaine, was his mortal enemy.”

Shaun stared at him, stunned. “Are you serious?”

“Dead serious,” Dave said, the studio lights catching the hard lines of his face. “And the terrifying thing was, he’d already killed two people.”

Shaun took a breath, letting the gravity of Dave’s reality sink in before looking directly back into the lens, his voice ringing with conviction.

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