Who you gonna call? 'Conjuring Kesha' takes pop star and her friends on a 'spiritual journey'

SAN DIEGO – For pop star Kesha, being a paranormal investigator is less a side gig and more a fated destiny.

Before the singer-songwriter, 35, visited haunted mansions and supernatural locales with her celebrity friends on the docuseries “Conjuring Kesha” (streaming Fridays on Discovery+), Kesha visited Joshua Tree once – “totally sober,” she insists – and experienced a “formation of lights in the sky” that she understood to be spaceships. And during the pandemic, a “really intense” psychedelic experience led to a conversation with “a higher consciousness or God or whatever you want to call it.” (She thought she might be losing her mind, but her therapist called it a “spiritual awakening.”)

But actually, it all goes back to before Kesha Rose Sebert was born. Her mom studied astrology in college and timed her pregnancy specifically for Kesha to be a Pisces because they are “the oldest of souls in the Zodiac, supposedly. So it's really in my blood and part of my lineage to be obsessed with the supernatural,” says Kesha, whose first experience with the otherworldly was seeing, at age 4, the angel of her grandmother.

With her new show, “I decided to just really lean into it and instead of judging myself or labeling it as crazy, try to see what else the universe wanted to show me.”

Alongside two of her guest stars, rappers GaTa and Big Freedia, Kesha made her Comic-Con debut last weekend to promote the series. A new episode airing Friday finds her and supermodel Karen Elson looking into the Odd Fellows, a secret society known for its infamous rituals using skeletons.

One of the biggest highlights of the first season for Kesha was singing a Seminole song with Betty Who at Tennessee’s Antoinette Hall, a haunted opera house built on the Trail of Tears. “I didn't take that moment lightly,” Kesha says. “The history with that land is riddled with tragedy.”

That was a powerful moment, but there were plenty of scares, too. A spirit board jumped while Kesha and GaTa were using it in San Francisco’s Westerfeld House (where Harry Houdini once visited and Anton LaVey practiced demonic rituals). “That was creepy,” GaTa says. And when Kesha and Freedia went to the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in West Virginia for an episode airing Aug. 5, they put down a rectangle of baby powder, 2 feet by 6 inches. When they came back the next day, a 300-foot-long hallway was covered with the stuff – and nothing had activated the motion-activation cameras.

“Everybody was freaking out,” Freedia says.

Adds Kesha: “Because we're kind of new to it, we were like, ‘Well, that's crazy.’ But I don't think we understood the gravity of these really rare moments that we caught on camera.”

GaTa admits to initial skepticism about the supernatural elements. “When I left, I was like, ‘Man, I believe.’ ” And Freedia, who started in gospel music in the Black Baptist church community of her native New Orleans, says she went in thinking “it's gonna be all rigged up and producers are gonna be making traps and (stuff) happen, and that was not the case.”

"I did not want anything faked,” says Kesha, who's also an executive producer. “We're not pretending something scary happened.”

All three feel changed by the experience – and more inspired when it comes to their music. GaTa says he’s more open-minded and risk-taking now: “I’m used to doing music a certain way, but it definitely makes me want to just say, 'OK, let me step out on the ledge.'”

Kesha’s new songs have been “100 percent” influenced by the show. “This really spiritual journey is all I can write music about,” she says. “I feel like it's been a calling for me to really trust in the universe and believe in something bigger than myself. It's been a bit of an ego death.”

So where to next? Kesha would like to investigate The Rave, a spooky music venue in Milwaukee, and the hotel across the street “where Jeffrey Dahmer used to take people and eat them.”

Freedia is officially not volunteering for that episode. “Oh no, you're going there by yourself,” she says, laughing. “Don't call me forever, sister. I'm not gonna stay there.”

“See, I'm a freak,” Kesha says. “I’ve done so much crazy (stuff) in this lifetime that I feel like this is the next level. When I see or feel or hear something that is supernatural, paranormal, unexplainable, that makes me so excited. Yes, it's terrifying, but I'm addicted to it now.”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 'Conjuring Kesha': Pop star and friends go on a 'spiritual journey'