True Ghost Story
The end of life as a universal horror show
One night when I was in high school, maybe even middle school, I was working in the study when my mother came in and asked me whether I’d been playing the piano. Only the two of us were home; my father and sister were both out. I did often play the piano in the “music room” (really just a hallway) adjacent to the study, or listen to classical music while I worked, but I hadn’t been that night, and said so. Mom appeared to me to be weirded out. “I could’ve sworn I heard piano music,” she said, with that amused/embarrassed/wary affect people exhibit in the presence of the uncanny. Maybe a radio had been left on, we speculated, playing at near-subliminal volume. I helped her search the house, looking for the source of this alleged music, but we found nothing. Mom was so adamant about what she’d heard that it became a family story, one of our go-to anecdotes when we’d gang up on and make fun of each other — the night Mom thought she heard piano music.
Mom always told this as a ghost story. She believed the 200-year-old stone farmhouse where we grew up was haunted; Mom lived on there for decades after my sister and I had left home and our father had died, and she told us she heard strange things there sometimes. There are more obvious, less interesting explanations for noises in a 200-year-old farmhouse than a haunting, of…
