12/28/2025
An Exorcism in Wyoming
John Perry Barlow
[JOHN PERRY BARLOW was the cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and executive vice president of Algae Systems. He is a fellow of Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society and a retired Wyoming cattle rancher and political activist. He is a childhood friend of Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead, and wrote lyrics for the band for several years. In 2014, he and Stanley Krippner spoke at San Jose University as part of a program sponsored by the Grateful Dead Scholars. This encounter led him to reminiscence about his contact with RT. ]
Whenever I found myself near Carlin, Nevada, I would drop by Rolling Thunder’s home and pay him and his family a visit. He never greeted me with a great deal of enthusiasm, but that was not his style. His way of greeting guests was more muted and he did not make a big fuss about visitors. However, I knew I was welcome because he treated me just as if I had been there all along and had never left.
I had first met RT through Bobby Weir and the Grateful Dead. In January 1972, Bobby and I were spending the night in a homestead cabin in rural Nevada, a structure that had seen better days and was just barely livable. It was part of a cattle ranch that had long since been deserted. This cabin had a reputation for being haunted but we paid little attention to that because it was hotter than hell that night and we just hoped we could get some sleep.
ROLLING THUNDER AS GHOSTBUSTER
About three o’clock in the morning I heard some commotion upstairs. The cause of it, apparently, was a ghost that Bobby was convinced he’d seen. Worse yet, the ghost would not let him get to sleep. Bobby insisted on phoning RT, even though it was the middle of the night. When he told RT about the ghost, RT did not seem upset about being awakened because he took things like ghosts very seriously. He told Bobby that Bobby needed to exorcise the ghost. He gave Bobby specific directions, sort of a do-it-yourself exorcism.
RT said the first thing to do was to take an old coffee can and punch holes in the side. This would be the container for some substances that would need to be burned. Second, RT said that Bobby should find a cedar tree and take several strips of bark from it because they would be needed for the exorcism. But Bobby never allowed RT to go on to the next step because Bobby wanted instantaneous results. RT was uncommonly patient with Bobby and gave him another set of instructions. RT asked Bobby if he had a set of Strike Anywhere matches, the type that work regardless of the temperature or the weather. Bobby replied that he usually carried a box of those same matches with him. RT was happy to hear that news. RT told Bobby to light every match in the box. Then he would need to take a knife handle and grind the burned match heads into a powder. Finally, he needed to cover his face with the ashes. The ghost would take one look at the results and would disappear.
This must have worked because Bobby was able to get back to sleep.
The next morning I woke up at about six and walked upstairs to where Bobby was sleeping. I knocked on the door. When there was no response, I let myself in. I saw Bobby asleep in bed, but he was unrecognizable. His face was completely black, just as if he were a character in an old-fashioned minstrel show, or he was Al Jolson singing in blackface in his movie The Jazz Singer.
I hollered, “What the hell is going on?”
This woke up Bobby and he told me the whole story.
So now we both knew how to scare away ghosts. And we realized that RT had a remedy for just about everything.
