All pianos are haunted. And the only way to hear them playing is to not listen.

I found this out by accident. When my mother died, she left me her house and everything in it. On the one hand, this meant my nomadic apartment to apartment wandering days were over. On the other hand, it meant months of cleaning out the house, which made for numerous adventures.

You see, my mother wasn’t just a packrat. She didn’t just save things because she could or because she was simply compelled to. She saved things because she had an emotional attachment to them. And because my mother was an emotional person, she had an emotional attachment to everything. So she saved…everything.

An entire box was filled with theatre programs from the community theatre where Broadway shows would tour. She didn’t know a single person in the cast personally, but she saved them. Decades worth. Every Mother’s Day card I had ever sent her, every postcard anyone had ever sent her. An entire shoebox of napkins, no doubt from special occasions. She had meticulously printed the date for each dinner on them…but with my mother gone, I could not tell you the significance of them.

And so on. Broken china plate pieces. Picture frames that were empty, not to mention pictures in which I could recognize not a single face.

I suspect you think that the point to all of this is that without my mother to hold this all together, to link these objects with memories, these objects remain simply the detritus of a life.

But no, the sad fact is that they were debris long before my mother passed. Hand her a napkin which says “6/12/63″ printed on it in her own writing, and it would jog no memory for her. I think she kept these things because she knew she would not remember. That these would have to serve in lieu of memories.

And here I was, having to cull them. Having to excavate the basement den, which had been piled high with these replacement memories.

It was when I lifted up the box–which contained an almost random sampling of clippings from the local paper…1975-2005 was the date range on the cardboard–that I realized it had been sitting on a piano
bench.

More boxes moved, along with three long empty plant pots, and I uncovered my mother’s piano.

I had forgotten it existed. I remember my mother telling me that her mother, who had died when I was an infant, had bought it. She told my mother that a lady should know a musical instrument. If my mother had ever learned the piano, that knowledge had left her completely by the time I was old enough to ask her about it. As far as I could tell, it sat in the basement from the time it had been purchased until now, serving merely as something to stack boxes on.

And I honestly didn’t think of it anymore after that. It was probably going to wind up being sold. It was in good shape despite being ignored for decades, so I figured I would get a good price for it from one of the music shops in town.

Then there was the day that I had some people working on the front walk. It had been deteriorating for some time, so I was having the concrete broken up. A brick walkway could take its place…that seemed to me nicer looking and easier to maintain.

I stepped to the window from time to time to look at their progress. The racket they were making busting up the walk was driving me up the wall. I looked out the front window with my fingers in my ears, thinking that I should spend the afternoon at the movies when…faintly, just able to be heard under the pounding from outside, I heard someone in my basement, playing the piano.

I pulled my fingers out of my ears, and listened. Nothing. Nothing but the deafening assault from outside. I went slowly downstairs but, of course, there was no one there.

I’m not one to hear things. My hearing is actually very sharp, and I’ve taken care not to injure my eardrums with too much loud music over the years. So this bothered me. I had heard the piano.

I know it sounds ridiculous, but I backtracked to the front door. As I was putting my fingers back into my ears to try to recreate the situation, I felt like those pigeons that, if you reward them with food while they’re doing a specific action, they can quickly learn to do that action in order to eat. Superstitious pigeons, is what I had thought at the time while watching the program on the Discovery Channel. And here I was, just another pigeon, following suit.

And it worked. With my fingers in my ears, I could hear the piano again. I walked downstairs and stopped right outside the doorway. I pulled my fingers out…nothing. Back in, and it was there again. Some classical piece…couldn’t tell you the name of it to save my life.

I stepped in sight of the piano and the music faltered and stopped within two seconds. I tried the in-out trick with my fingers and ears, but nothing. Then I stepped back out of the doorway. I waited, and after a minute or so, the music started again.

It was like the person seated at the piano had turned to look at me, as though saying, “Yes?” and awaiting a response. When I hadn’t given one, and left, the person had taken a moment to collect themselves and resumed.

Of course, the problem being that there was no person seated on the piano bench.

After a couple of minutes of listening like that, I stepped back into the room. Again, the player stopped. I did so fast enough to notice that this wasn’t like a player piano or something in Disney’s Haunted Mansion–the keys didn’t actually move at all.

“Mom?” I asked, but then realized that couldn’t be right. My mother couldn’t play piano, unless in dying she regained the knowledge somehow…assuming she ever had it to begin with.

But that just felt wrong. Somehow I knew whoever was doing this was a stranger to me. “Can you talk to me at all?” I asked next.

I could just imagine the player seated on the bench, turned to one side and trying desperately to communicate with me.

I also imagined, and this is probably closest to the truth, that he was looking over his should at me and thinking, “I’m dead, I’m lucky I can still play. What, you expect to have a conversation?” And it made sense to me.

They can’t do it while we’re watching and we can only hear it when we’re trying not to.

I don’t know how the latter works since, as most anyone human knows, fingers can only do so much to block sound from ears. But it was the act of doing it that allowed me to hear it.

I eventually brought home ear plugs. And I leave a chair outside the basement. Not that I listen all day everyday, but I have a feeling the concert keeps right on going, day or night. I sometimes like to grab a glass of wine after getting home from work, put my ear plugs in, and sit outside the doorway not-listening and relaxing.

I tried an experiment not soon after. I went downtown to the instrument store (the one who had been fated to receive the piano before I realized I couldn’t sell it) after they had closed, and put ear plugs in while standing outside their front door, out of view.

I could hear them. All of them, the five or so that they had in the store. It wasn’t exactly clear through a door and ear plugs both, but from what I could tell, all of them were going. They would jam together on something, then breakdown into five individual musical pieces. Even in the midst of that anarchy of sound, it was beautiful. And so, I knew. Pianos are haunted. For some reason, none of the other musical instruments joined in. Just the pianos.

I got my piano refinished, cleaned and tuned. Not that it really needed tuning. Whoever’s playing it isn’t even really using the keys or any of the strings, but I felt like I needed to do something.

It was when I was halfway through cleaning out the house–when I was sitting yet again with plugged ears and glass of wine and a box of odd letters to go through–that something struck me.

“Moonlight Sonata,” my invisible friend was playing. I had worked to try to identify certain songs…if only I could figure out how to record a performance, but how do you record something by not recording it?

I was looking over a piece of correspondence from Europe, an American G.I. writing home to his sweetheart. The sweetheart was not my mother–this was from World War I. Nor was the sweetheart my grandmother. So far as I could tell, neither the soldier nor the recipient of the letter was a member of even a remote branch of my family.

What struck me was the idea that maybe it’s not just pianos that are haunted. Maybe everything is haunted in its own way, but we can’t access or be made privy to what’s going on underneath. Maybe if I left this letter out on the table and went away, the woman it was sent to could get back to the business of reading it herself.

Maybe that napkin with the date printed on it…maybe my mother, or some piece of my mother, is looking it over. Touching it and reliving the date that she had forgotten in life.

I haven’t been able to shake that thought, no matter how hard I try. Nor have been able to remove a single box from this house since.