(Credits: Far Out / Billy Corgan)
Sat 3 January 2026 21:30, UK
Rock stars tend to witness things that we mere mortals can scarcely imagine, largely resulting from their tendency to be awake all hours of the night, fuelled by a diet of cigarettes, drugs, and a cocktail of mind-altering substances. Billy Corgan, for example, once claimed – with conviction – that he has gone to bed with a shapeshifter.
Back in the heady days of the 1990s, Corgan was among the defining faces of American alternative rock. Riding the ways between grunge, stone rock, shoegaze, and his undying love of classic rock, his songwriting stylings soon back The Smashing Pumpkins one of the greatest outfits of the era, amassing a truly incredible discography of still beloved tracks, more than a few of which were spurred on by an expected amount of youthful rock and roll hedonism.
Even in more recent years, having largely turned his back on drugs and alcohol, Corgan has never stopped making the kinds of wild claims or spinning the kinds of bizarre yarns that would once have been fitting for a decent Smashing Pumpkins track.
From the claim that Bill Burr is his long-lost brother to his undying dedication to the National Wrestling Alliance, which he has owned since 2017, it is fair to say that Billy Corgan is a pretty strange dude. Even still, his claim of having slept with a shapeshifter is particularly odd.
A fixture of mythology and folklore going back centuries, shapeshifters are by no means a modern invention, but, in this age of science and technology, most rational people have agreed upon the fact that shapeshifting – in any capacity – is no more realistic than Terence Fisher’s The Curse of the Werewolf.
Most people, that is, apart from the Smashing Pumpkins songwriter, who claimed in a 2017 appearance on The Howard Stern Show, “I was with somebody once, and I saw a transformation that I can’t explain.” Before – understandably – adding, “I was totally sober.“ Bizarrely, after throwing that detail out there, Corgan refused to expand upon his supernatural claims.
A regular feature of Stern’s show, it wasn’t long before Corgan reappeared to answer the many questions that the veteran radio presenter had failed to ask him the first time he introduced the realm of shapeshifting into conversation. Appearing on the show the following year, the songwriter doubled down on his claims, though he did add the caveat, “Maybe I had a hallucination, but I saw what I saw. To question someone’s reality is a strange thing.”
What’s more, Corgan claimed that he had encountered this shapeshifter on multiple occasions. “This happened with the same person twice. The person was naked, I will tell you in confidence,” he shared. Again, the musician failed to provide an abundance of details to his claims, but it seems evident that he is convinced that he once slept with a shapeshifter.
For the time being, at least, that is where the story ends. There has been a wealth of discourse online over who exactly this shapeshifter was, pouring over Corgan’s dating records, but he did explain on Stern’s show that the person in question was not famous in any capacity (although he refused to give the exact identity).
So, it seems as though this John Carpenter-esque character is still living among us. Either that or they are living exclusively in Corgan’s mind, resulting from some bizarre hallucination or lapse of memory that culminated in a conviction about shapeshifting femme fatales.
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