I live in a 100+ year-old house that is very close to a busy street. There was no thought about cars when this house was built. Years ago the horse-drawn coaches stopped here, and there were rooms for “entertainment” upstairs. Across the street on ten acres of land is a large abandoned brick building that looks very much like an old castle. It was originally built by The Knights of Pythias as a retirement home for members of the lodge. However, in later years it was a nursing home, and, of course, many people breathed their last breathes in that building. For several years the local high school students have decorated the building at Haloween and have used it as a haunted mansion. In past years thousands of young people from miles around have been led through these creepy halls, and they tell of cold spots in the building and “sightings”.
However, this year the area is quieter. The health department said that there are too many bats in the building. They were worried about bird flu or bat flu, I don’t know. So it is again “somewhat” quieter in the old building that for many years has been a spooky Haloween haunt for many.
As I said before, I live across the street, so, naturally, I use the area near the haunted mansion to walk and exercise. I have to tell you, though, that I have been hearing some strange sounds. I can’t quite make it out, but the sounds very much sound like flute music, like someone is playing the flute in the old building. In the evening, when the blackbirds have all settled to roost in the large oak trees in the front yard, I can hear it. It sounds like “Whiskey before Breakfast”, if I am not mistaking. And the player has talent. I try to conjure up a persona for the ghostly player. I want to know who he/she was and something about their life. If they still play the flute as a ghost, then the flute must have been an important part of their life, like many others who are reading this and are all destined, sooner or later, to be like the ghostly player.
Often I think we are sensitive to what we are drawn, ie. a flute player hearing ghostly flute playing…when I took up the native american flute I was more than full aware that the land that I lived on was once on the shores of a vast shallow ricing lake. The wetland was drained and diked in the early part of the last century and forest have grown over the once vast field of shallow ponds. I live and a large sand dune that at one time would have been a point out into the lake, a high spot. Ideal for camping out, as I’m sure once the natives did. I have dug up old fire pits when I’ve plowed my garden.
I play my flute in the back yard, a three acre field surrounded by young pine about 30 feet tall and old forest growth behind. I can almost see where the dance circle would’ve been in this natural field. I swear I can still see and hear them dancing and singing, and playing the flute. I have a song I play I swear they taught me, even though I know I never actually saw them. It’s as if they wanted me to learn it.
Could be all in my mind though, one likes to think one is firmly rooted in reality.
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
My father-in-law grew up downstream from you, in the Terre Haute environs. And he says that when he was a small boy, the boys in the area played flutes the way kids today play guitars…he was born in 1924, and the family lost their farm during the Depression. I don’t know what kind of flute…transverse, fipple, homemade, storebought or whatever, and he doesn’t remember clearly. So it sounds like there’s a good tradition for your ghost to draw on. And according to my dulcimer playing friends, the temperance name for “Whiskey Before Breakfast” is “Spirits at Dawn”!
My father, who is still living by himself and driving a car (barely!!) at ninety, grew up in rural Indiana. He tells me that they played tin whistles at school. The music teacher called them fifes, but from what he describes, they were clearly tin whistles. That was the era before plastic recorders, I guess.
