I stopped believing in ghosts some time around my 8th birthday.
I still find ghost stories entertaining but give them no credence whatsoever. However, there is one ghost story that I do put faith in ... because it is my story; I experienced it first-hand.
Now, one thing that annoys me about ghost stories is the way the story teller will embed their own interpretations of what was behind the phenomenon. They try to lead you to agree with their opinion. I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to lose your impartiality. So I will tell you the simple facts of what happened and let you draw your own conclusions.
In late 2004 I moved in with my girlfriend. I had relocated to Birmingham but kept working for the same company, working from home in an office in the front bedroom.
It’s strange how quickly habits form. Within a week I had changed my lunch break from 12pm to 1pm to coincide with the lunchtime news. The daytime programmes either side of the news were too painful to watch while eating lunch.
One upshot of this was that I regularly had a tea break about 3pm, which was around the time the cat would wake up and demand some food.
It was a Monday in early January when I first noticed the phenomenon. I got up at 3pm to go for tea and could hear classical music coming through the window at the top of the stairs. It was Beethoven’s Fur Elise.
There was building work going on in the back garden next door. I nodded in appreciation, not of the music itself, but the calibre of Birmingham builders. No pop music on Radio One for them, oh no! It was Beethoven all the way.
I went downstairs, made my tea and fed the cat. I didn’t think about the incident any more.
That is, until the following day. At 3pm I found myself again at the top of the stairs, this time I could hear the overture to Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro.
Whilst my tea was brewing curiosity got the better of me and I went into the garden to take a peek at the builders. I don’t know what I expected to see: maybe two builders on their tea break, smoking Woodbines through silver cigarette holders whilst reading a George Bernard Shaw novel:
“Ah, Dave. There’s nothing like a bit of Mozart.”
“Quite, Tarquin. Although for me Bach is the zenith of classical composition.”
To my disappointment, I discovered the music had stopped by the time I got outside. I peered through a gap in the fence and could see building supplies stacked against the wall, no tools and nobody around. The builders must have sloped off early while I was boiling the kettle.
I made my tea and took it upstairs to my office. At the top of the stairs I found the music playing again.
And now I realised the music wasn’t coming from outside. It was coming from the spare bedroom.
When I moved in I had a lot of possessions, such as plates and linen, which were duplicates of things my girlfriend already owned. We had gone through a sorting process to distribute useful items around the house and what was left over was now in boxes stored (floor to ceiling) in the spare bedroom. We had stacked them in the room and closed the door. No one had been in the room for weeks.
It was a puzzle. I mentally trawled through those boxes to think of things that might play music. My radio alarm clock was one such item, but it was mains-powered and could not be plugged-in right now. Then my thoughts turned to the supernatural and the ghost stories my brother would tell me when I was younger.
I have an older brother who, whenever we moved house, would delight in telling his younger brother a ghost story that detailed the death of the previous owners. The previous owners were usually an elderly couple who died in the room where I was sleeping. Their ghosts not at rest due to fortuitous circumstances. I knew my girlfriend had bought this house from an elderly couple - she did not say whether it was through probate.
While I was considering this spiritual explanation I heard a loud thud.
The cat had jumped off the bed and was now meowing at my feet. In this moment, the music had stopped. Maybe the ghost had switched their radio off on hearing the cat move around on the landing.
Not accepting this nonsense I opened the door and went into the spare bedroom. There was nothing unusual. Boxes stacked in the middle of the room and an old leather armchair in the corner where my girlfriend’s cuddly toys were sitting. I looked inside some of the boxes, but found no radio or music player. I checked the wall sockets too - there was nothing in that room that was plugged in.
The following afternoon I was at work in my office and just happened to glance at the clock on the PC at 14:59. I stopped work and waited for 3pm. It was an intense moment. I was certain it couldn’t happen again - surely not while I was waiting for it to happen.
The music started up at 15:00 precisely: this time it was the aria from Madame Butterfly.
I stood outside the spare bedroom for a few minutes. Partially in disbelief but also trying to rack my brains for a better explanation. When one didn’t arrive I placed my hand softly on the door handle and, in one motion, I pushed the handle down at the door open.
There, sitting on the old leather armchair, staring back at me with these cold, lifeless eyes was Barney the dinosaur. Its purple fur glistening in the winter sunshine.
But the music was still playing. It was coming from the window … it was the builders after all. I clambered over some boxes to get to the window and look over next door’s garden.
That’s when I saw it - sitting on the window shelf, hiding behind the curtain: my girlfriend’s wind-up radio, which unbeknown to me has a solar panel on the back of it. And every day, at 3pm, when the sun swings round to the back of the house, the radio would power on briefly and play music from the radio station it was last tuned to.
To dispatch the ghost, I moved the power switch into the off position.
It occurs to me that if something so confounding as music that starts and stops from within a sealed room can be explained by a pure accident then much more bewildering phenomenon can be caused by deliberate deeds.
We know attention-seeking people have tried to fool their way to fame through contrived activities - with total disregard for the emotions of the people they ensnare. The important thing is to keep asking questions, because the maxim of “I don’t have an explanation, so it must be a ghost” is no better than “I don’t have an explanation, so it must be Father Christmas”. Neither offers any proof for itself.