Ongoing History Daily: The haunted story of “The Black Parade”
One of the biggest emo songs from early this century is “Welcome to the Black Parade” by My Chemical Romance, a song from a 2006 concept record of the same name. The entire record deals with a patient—referred to simply as “The Patient”—who is dying from cancer at a young age.
The title comes from a memory singer Gerard Way has of attending a parade with his father. Its original title was “The Five of Us are Dying,” but that was too emo even for them. So they started taking the song apart and eventually added the piano intro, which is what saved it. It might have helped that they recorded the album in a haunted house in LA known as The Paramour Mansion.
It is said to be stalked by the ghost of an oil heiress who died on the way to a party back on February 23, 1933.
