char *(null)=" ten-little-indians

ten-little-indians

From netcom.com!csus.edu!csulb.edu!library.ucla.edu!psgrain!nntp.cs.ubc.ca!torn!uunet.ca!uunet.ca!ablelink!dan.cramer Sun May 29 09:56:37 1994
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Subject: The Ghost Who Played The Violin
From: dan.cramer@ablelink.org (Dan Cramer)
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Date: Sun, 29 May 94 11:27:00 -0500
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   Here is a spooky tale courtesy of Patricia Bracker


My mother still jokes about the stories we used to tell her when we were
growing up in our one-hundred-year-old house in Michigan. To us, as
children, the tales of footsteps with no one there, creaking floors,
people standing beside our beds who disappeared when the lights were
turned on, and something trying to pull our blankets off our beds were
all very real. But we could never prove to our parents that any of them
were true.
    One experience, however, I shared with my mother, and she doesn't
joke about that one.
    On a cold December night in 1961, I shivered in my unheated upstairs
bedroom, unable to sleep. In the distance, I kept hearing the faint,
screechy sounds of strange music. I thought it sounded like the song
"Ten Little Indians." Weird. The music seemed to be coming from inside
my bedroom. I turned on the light beside my bed and looked around the
room. No radio. No record player. I turned off the light. The music
started again. This time the stairway door opened, and my mother yelled
up to me.
    "Turn that screechy music off. it's keeping me awake."
    I waited until morning to question my mother about what she had
heard. She repeated that the music had a tinny sound, something like an
old windup record player would make. She said she had even caught
herself singing along to the tune of "One little, two little, three
little Indians...." She asked me why I was playing such silly music. I
replied that I had heard the same music, but since I had no radio or
record player, I could not have been playing the music. We decided that
we wouldn't tell anyone about our experience.
    Later I was curious about the history of the house and found a
living relative of the man who had built it in the mid-1800s and was one
of the first homes in the area. Originally, it had been a farm, which
explained the numerous fruit trees in our yard.
    But the big surprise came when I revealed my strange experience to
the granddaughter. She listened quietly and motioned for me to follow
her into the garage. She pulled out an old dusty box and produced a
faded photograph of a bearded man holding a violin.
    "This man was my grandfather." she said. "He built your house and
loved it dearly. Before he died, he lived in your bedroom and used to
tune his violin at night by playing 'Ten Little Indians.'"
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