Tag Archives: haunted piano

Ghost Stories in New Orleans

Age: 23
Occupation: Student

Text

When did you see a ghost?

Most unbelievable story that happened was in 2020, there were a couple other related encounters in the same time frame, 2016, 2018, in that range.

Briefly describe the experience?

Our house was built in 1865 in New Orleans, so it was very old and some interesting people had lived there. There was an author who wrote the book The Moviegoer, a troubled photographer as well. It had also been an old farm cottage, so we found cow teeth in the backyard.

This time in particular, the one in 2020, my mom and I were sitting in the front room on the couch, no one is sitting at the piano, and the piano plays two keys, boop boop. We looked at each other and made eye contact. I thought, “Maybe a lizard fell into the piano or something? Maybe something is in the box?” Then it happened again, and we could both see the keys be depressed. I looked at my mom after it and audibly gasped.

How did it make you feel?

Made me feel pretty euphoric, and we kept laughing and going what the hell. It was pretty cool. It’s cool to see something you can’t explain. Didn’t feel fearful. Felt like a nice presence. 

Why did it feel nice?

The piano keys that were played were in the higher register. If the piano keys were lower it may feel me worse, but the auditory element of it wasn’t ominous. Also the history of the house with those that lived there we’re proud of, so my mom would say, “Oh its Walker Percy saying hi.”

Do you believe in ghosts after this happened?

Agnostic toward ghosts. Don’t believe at all in the sense of spooky movie ghosts and looking like a white sheet, but maybe something is out there.

Do you think growing up in NOLA made it more likely for you have a supernatural encounter?

You hear a lot about supernatural experiences, like ghost stories are popular. I had friends who worked in old house restorations and they had a ton of stories about weird movement in light or seeing odd things there.

Tell me about the other related incidents you had discussed:

Children’s piano, little stool, put it in the attic and there were times where we’d hear the baby piano playing in the attic. Consecutive notes that sounded melodic together. It was an actual piano, so more odd than a machine of some kind.

Context

This girl is a friend of mine who grew up in New Orleans, and this is her story. I’d been told it once by her mom, but given this happened to both of them, it belongs to them both. She interprets the story well, which my question led her to analyze a little bit. The story took place in 2020, but she said there were multiple occurrences of strange piano stuff happening in her house.

My analysis

MG is not a very spiritual person, nor is she someone who I believe to be susceptible to psychosis, especially with this being something both her mother and her witnessed simultaneously. I think the odds are strong this both happened, and is unexplainable with the evidence we have from the story. There is value here in that it happened in a historical house, to two individuals at a time, and in a place we think of as being more likely to be haunted, that being New Orleans. I think the most interesting part of the interview is her positive experience with the ghost. I think most people experience the paranormal negatively because it’s something out of the realm of their understanding. She didn’t, and the explanation of the notes being more high pitched causing the experience to be less foreboding makes sense.

Memorate: A Coworker’s Ghostly Encounter

Context:

Informant N is the collector’s supervisor in the technology department of USC SCA. He is 27 years old and grew up in Denver, Colorado until age 7, when he moved to Sandpoint, Idaho. His father’s family is from the “deep south,” and his mother was “an army brat” who lived mostly near the east coast. N’s family has been in the US “since the mayflower,” and his ancestry is mostly German, Northern English, and Welsh. He now lives in Los Angeles, CA and is a singer/songwriter, as well as an employee of the film school’s technology services.

Text:

Informant: “Okay so when I was a kid, my mom – in the first floor, this was like a three story house, the house was like a hundred years old if not more. Um, classic brick style home, it was in Denver. And there was a doctor who lived in the house with his um… I think she was a distraught person, probably back then. Like she probably had some mental illness that was untreated and you know, back then they kind of skewed those people into obscure…”

Collector: “What year was this?”

Informant: “Oh this was like 30s (…). So she was a well-known pianist at the time and she eventually committed suicide in the house and the house was also a historical site. So the house is old, there have been people who lived there who had some musical connection and there was the suicide and you know… There was a couple times growing up where I would hear the piano play and my sister would hear the piano play while we were upstairs and my mom wasn’t home playing the piano nor was my dad or whatever, or we had a babysitter at the time. So there was just a couple weird moments in that house where the piano would be playing and we’d go downstairs and it would stop playing so whether that’s true or not I don’t know but I remember it and my sister clearly remembers it and to this day it’s very bizarre to me and it makes me feel a little… (*informant trails off*)”

Collector: “How did you find out about the woman who died?”

Informant: “My parents – my mom found out about it after they bought the house. The history of the house.”

Collector: “From who?”

Informant: “I think from a neighbor’s family or something. (…) It was like a local thing so it was kind of weird. (…) The piano that was in the house was over a hundred years old at the time.”

The informant also mentioned that his sister, who was 8 or 9 at the time of the piano incidents, is “still perturbed” by them to this day. He also mentioned that he experienced what he called “typical ghost stuff” – that he would hear dogs barking at nothing, and that one of the room’s in the house (his sister’s room) was specifically colder than others. His family checked and made sure that “the piano wasn’t a player” piano (a self-playing piano), and noted that the music he heard was notably classical, and that the woman who had died was a classical pianist.

Interpretation:

N’s ghost story seems pretty typical upon first glance, but I find it interesting because of both his personal context and folkloric trends in memorates. For one thing, the informant seems to truly believe that all of this happened and that something supernatural was going on because his sister also experienced it. He mentioned her multiple times throughout the story and when he was providing more context, and we’ve talked a number of times about how people tend to believe what their peers, family, friends, etc do. What’s more, his family heard about the woman who supposedly died in the house from a neighbor, making this particular figure almost a local legend. While I wouldn’t label her a full-on urban legend for lack of popularity or name, the story about her being mentally unstable and her death in the house is legend-like. She has the traits of one as a woman believed to be mentally unwell and responsible for a haunted area. The apparent ghost is not necessarily true, but there is a negotiation of sorts about whether to believe it for the informant, his family, and his neighbors. This woman’s story lines up with a lot of what we know about ghosts – having unfinished business of some sort (to play music for others), hauntings that happen when things don’t go as they should (her suicide), and the idea that ghosts’ have property even after death (the piano). This story is definitely a memorate for the informant, who seems unsure whether he believes in ghosts entirely, but is fairly convinced that something happened in this house, and still finds it inexplicable and bizarre 20 years later.