On one occasion, the band brought along both a reporter and photographer from the Los Angeles Times. The photographer refused to stay in the room during the séance for more than 20 minutes at a time and kept her eyes closed throughout, including while taking photographs.

When other bands in the Los Angeles scene heard about Bloomgarden and Death Valley Girls’ paranormal exploits, they begged to ride along.

“I was like, ‘No, trust me, you don’t want to go,’ ” Bloomgarden said. Eventually she would relent, only to be proven right. “I would be like, ‘Alright, now we have to go and show you why you don’t have to go.’”

Sure enough, bands would leave with an acute understanding of why they should have listened in the first place.

The handful of séances they’ve done have lasted for six hours and typically involved “something beyond reality” happening each time. It took patience and occasionally proved worth the wait.

One night, mid-séance, a toy keyboard in the room plunked out a few notes without being touched. Bloomgarden and her bandmates went over to investigate, noticed the keyboard was turned off and lacked preset capabilities, and then did what any rock band would do in this situation: They sampled the ghostly bit.

“It’s the scariest little song. It’s really terrifying. We’ll use it for something for sure,” Bloomgarden said.

This story is somewhat atypical for Death Valley Girls, as in the band doesn’t typically have to go looking for the paranormal. Paranormal encounters are especially common when they’re on tour.

There was, for instance, the first band-wide haunting in Tucson, Arizona. The band played the (reportedly haunted) hotel-venue Club Congress, then split their sleeping arrangements between the band accommodations in the venue and a motel room. At 2 a.m., Bloomgarden woke suddenly and found a giant gray dog waiting outside her motel room door.