My father was not an open book. Those that knew him would call him a reserved man, or a man of few words, but to me he was like a man who had retreated into his own universe. A world that seemed filled with shadows in every corner. A waking nightmare. I would catch him some times at night, just staring out the window, gripping the arms of his chair so tight I thought his hands would start bleeding. He would lean forward, almost falling out of his chair, as if expecting something terrible and incomprehensible to show up at our door at any moment. My father was a man clothed in dread. It’s only something I came to realize as I got older. He hid it well - especially from my mother.
But not well enough. Not nearly well enough.
Nothing terrified my father more than piano music. Whether it was heard in an elevator, or on the TV, or being played in a shopping mall by a hobby pianist who wanted to impress onlookers. Whether it was classical or jazz. Whether it was happy or sad. Simple or complex. When he heard the sound of a piano his eyes would bulge out of their sockets. His skin would go pale white. He would look around wildly, whipping his head back and forth like a dog wrangling with a bone. I never had the courage to ask him why he was so afraid of it. Why didn’t I just ask him? But it wasn’t a thing to be acknowledged in our home. Fear is contagious. And the easiest way to come down with, is it talk about it. So my father’s fear lingered through out our lives, untouched, like a piano that was never sold . It just hung in the air…playing it’s own silent music, for years.
My father passed away a year ago due to heart complications. I thought his secret died with him. But two weeks ago I was visiting my mom and decided to go through my father’s old belongings. I guess I was feeling nostalgic. After some time I was about to head out, when I saw it. At the bottom of a cardboard box that had been hidden in the corner of the attic. It was an unmarked envelope. Inside was a letter comprised of several sheets of paper. The writing on the letter was rushed and scratchy. But it was my father’s handwriting - there was no mistaking it.
What I read in that letter has haunted me for the past 14 days. I’ve decided to share that letter - right here and now - because I feel that in some way it may help me better understand it. Or maybe the truth is, I just want someone to share my father’s dread with. My mother would not listen to me when I told her about the letter. She told me to burn it. And to forget whatever it said. She scolded me, like I was still a child.
What you are about to read from this point on are my father’s words exactly. I have not changed nor altered any of it. I am transcribing it word for word.
This is my father’s story. In his own words:
I wonder how many times I’ve attempted to write this letter? How many pieces of paper have I torn up through out the years? How many pens have gone dry? How many pencils snapped? Too many. Far too many. If I do have the courage to finish it, I wonder who will even read it? Maybe it will be my dear Elizabeth. Maybe you’re even reading it right now. I’m sorry for keeping this from you. I haven’t been a good husband. You don’t know all of me. Not nearly all of me. That’s a horrible thing to do to your wife. I hope you can forgive me, Liz.
Or maybe it will be you Jack. My boy. You saw me better than I saw myself. How many times did catch me staring? I use to tell you I was day dreaming. If you are reading this, now you’ll know what I really saw those nights. What I heard.
Or maybe it’s neither Elizabeth or Jack. Maybe it’s you - Jonathan- or your mother. God help me if it is. Have you finally found me? I’ve seen you out of the corner of my eyes for the last 40 years.
Or maybe if you’re reading this, you’re a complete stranger to me. Regardless, it’s time I told this story once and for all. Even if the pen and paper I’m writing with end up being the only ones who ever know it.
In December of 1976, I was on my way home for the holidays. I was attending The University of Wisconsin - Madison. My parents lived in La Crosse. It’s only about a two and a half hour drive, but on my way I got caught in a snow storm. A storm that came out of nowhere. I mean really came out of nowhere. Somehow I got turned around. I have never been good at driving in the snow. If you’re reading this Liz you know how true that is. Remember the station wagon? God, I nearly crashed it 100 times. Those were good days. On days like those, I barely ever heard the piano. Or at least convinced myself I couldn’t hear it. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
This was a not a bad storm. It was one hell of a bad storm. I’ve rolled back the clock in my head numerous times, wondering if there was anything I could have done differently. What if I had driven slower? Or turned into the slide. But I think in some ways, no matter what I did, that car was destined to crash that day.
And crash it I did. Straight into a ditch. All my attempts to get the car out of the ditch were futile. Snow was coming down hard. This was no soft powder, but a cacophony of flakes and harsh sleet. Through the white storm I saw a house in the distance. It was the only building nearby and I hadn’t seen any cars on the road in what felt like forever.
I got out of my car and walked towards the home. I was shocked by how deep the snow had become already. How unrecognizable the landscape seemed. I took one last look at my car, already being devoured by the snow, turning it into a sad frozen white monolith in the middle of nowhere.
I drew closer and closer to the home, each step I took more tiresome than the last. Then I heard something that stopped me right in my tracks. It was the sound of music coming from the home. It was the delicate sound of a piano. The music cut right through the harsh cold winds of the storm and went straight to my ears. The music was coming from the upper part of the house. There was a window to a room on the upper floor, but a curtain obstructed the view. Still, there was no question that the piano music was coming from that room.
My eyes went from the top window, to a window on the first floor. There was a woman standing in the window. She was staring right at me with a bemused expression on her face. I waved to her nervously and then pointed back at my car. When I looked back, the woman was gone from the window. Moments later the front door to he house opened and I made my way up the porch steps.
“Can I help you?” The woman asked, standing in the doorway. She still had that bemused look on her face.
“It’s a little embarrassing,” I said. “But I crashed my car into that ditch down the road and I can’t get it out.”
“Oh my how awful,” the woman said. “Please come in and get yourself warm.”
I stepped inside and the woman shut the door behind me. All at once the noise from outside was cut off. The only noise now was the piano music coming from upstairs. That and my chilled breathing.
“That music,” I said, rubbing my arms to get warm. “It’s really lovely.”
“Oh, that’s my son Jonathan. He’s a wonderful pianist. Please, do make yourself comfortable. I’ll fix you some tea.
Absolutely dreadful whether. Simply dreadful.”
I sat down in the living room. It was a warm and cozy house, but there was something underneath that made me uncomfortable. I did not understand it fully at the time - but looking back on it, I believe some part of me noticed all the little things that were off about the home. For one there was no family photos anywhere to be seen. And despite the warmth of the home, it had a bizarre sterile smell. Like that of an appliance store. The house looked lived in, but didn’t feel lived in.
“Could I use your phone?” I asked.
“The phones are out,” the woman said bringing back two cups of tea. “They won’t be back up until morning most likely. Soon as they are I will phone Harvey, my neighbor, he lives the closest. I’ll have him bring his tractor and we’ll get your car out of the ditch.”
“Is there anyway to get hold of him now? I hate to be a bother, but I was on my way to La Crosse to see my folks for the holidays. I was hoping to get there by tonight.”
Upstairs the piano music stopped. The woman took a large sip of her tea, looking at me over the cup with her faded green eyes. Then putting the cup down gently, she said, “LaCrosse? Goodness gracious. How on earth did you end up here in Dutchville County?”
“I got turned around. Dutchville County? I’ve never been through here before.”
“Well there’s no helping it now. Harvey lives a spell away. Unfortunately you will have to wait until morning, dear. I’m terribly sorry.”
“Your son - Jonathan - how old is he?”
“Twenty next month,” she said fondly.
“Oh, well could he - and again I hate to be a bother - could he help me try to push my car out?”
“No,” she said flatly. And there was no kind bemusement in her voice now. Her eyes narrowed. “Jonathan cannot move all that well. Even if he could and even if you did get the car out, the roads are terrible. You’ll just be in another ditch in no time. You’re perfectly fine to sleep on the couch tonight. Come tomorrow Harvey will have you out and you’ll be on your way to see your parents.”
“I see. I guess it has to be that way then.” I realized I had not taken a drink of my tea, but looking at the cup, I lost all thirst. The tea looked like gross mud water that had been pulled from a gutter. For some time we just sat there in the quiet living room. With no music, a dreary silence took over the home.
“Where are you coming from anyhow?” the woman said putting down her empty tea cup. It felt as if an eternity had just passed.
“I go to school in Madison.”
“Oh, how lovely. What are you studying?”
“Engineering.”
“How wonderful. You know Jonathan use to love engineering as a boy. Even more than playing the piano. He would always build things. Little trinkets and gadgets and gizmos. But his condition made it impossible for him to pursue a higher education. He’s been a homebody for years now. All he does is play the piano day and night.”
“He’s really great at it.”
“Oh, where are my manners. I should introduce you both.”
At that she led me out of the living room. We began to climb the stairs. As we did, a horrible feeling came over me. The one you might have when you are walking by a dark alley at night. The kind of primitive instinct that screams in the back of your head. Screams: Run, you idiot, run.
We reached the top of the stairs. The hallway was dark and lit only by a small lamp. We passed several rooms, until we reached a door at the end of the hallway. The woman - and I realized at this point I didn’t even know her name - gently pushed the door open and said, “Jonathan, there’s someone here I’d like you to meet.”
The first thing I noticed when stepping into the room was the large piano that sat in the corner. It was a beautiful looking piano and it looked out of place in the small room. A piano like that should have been front and center at a concert hall. The fading light outside filtered through the bedroom curtain, giving the room a soft ethereal look. I felt I was stepping into some kind of dream world.
And then I saw Jonathan sitting on his bed. I froze. I wouldn’t call Jonathan a doll exactly. He was too big to be a doll. But he was like a rag doll in a way. A human sized rag doll. Jonathan was not a living, breathing person. He was just an inanimate object, dressed up to look human. He wore sky blue pajamas and had a mop of red hair. His cloth skin, looked like it had been white once, but had now faded to a sickly beige color. He had two black buttons for eyes - though they were different sizes. The right eye being much smaller than the left. It gave him the appearance that he was always winking.
I did what I could only do in that moment. I laughed. It was a hoarse, nervous laugh.
“Don’t you dare laugh,” the woman said sharpy. She wasn’t looking at me now. She was staring out the window, one hand rubbing Jonathan’s inanimate leg in a soothing gesture. “Oh, how they love to laugh. Once Jonathan was sitting on the porch, just minding his own business, when these horrible boys from town came in and began to harass him. I’ll never forget the sound of their laughter as I chased them off on their bikes. Oh, but I got the last laugh. Those boys loved to bike around a certain part of town, and one day one of them went over some nasty gravel and hit his head. He’s still in the hospital. Oh yes, I got the last laugh.”
“I’m sorry,” I said in a dry panicked voice.
“Apology accepted,” the woman said turning to me. She had a shocked look on her face. Then she gave me a shark’s grin. A thought then hit me like an arrow striking the center of a target. So chilling was the thought that I felt I might faint at any moment. My body felt 10 times heavier. When the woman and I had been downstairs, someone had been playing piano music. Someone else had to be up here. Obviously, Jonathan playing was out of the question. Had to be out of the question. The thought of this grotesque rag doll being alive went against every thing I believed in.
I looked around the room, for a radio or a record player, anything that might have been playing the music earlier. But there was nothing of the sort. There was only the piano.
“Is there…is there anyone else in the house?” I asked.
The woman gave me a knowing smile, and said, “Of course not. It’s just Jonathan and I.”
Jonathan continued to stare into the distance with his misshapen button eyes. For a split second - maybe even less than that - I thought I saw his head move ever slightly. I blinked and rubbed my eyes. When I opened Jonathan was as still as he had been and the woman was walking past me.
“I’ll go fix your bed downstairs,” she said walking out of the room. “You’ll need your rest for tomorrow.”
Then she was gone. Only Jonathan and I were left in the room that began to fill with an awful silence. So pervasive and relentless was the silence that it felt as if it seeped into every pore on my body. None of this could be real, I told myself. The woman was playing a trick on me. Had to be playing a nasty trick on me. I once again looked over the room hoping, nearly begging God to show me a radio or a record player. But there was nothing.
I thought of approaching Jonathan - give him a real look over- but one look at that horrible winking eye was enough to convince me other wise. I quickly turned and began to walk out the room. Then I heard what sounded like something shifting in the bed behind me and I ran.
Within seconds I was down the stairs and out the front door. I knew it was suicide running out into that storm, but I couldn’t stay in that house a second longer. The snow was so deep now, it slowed my running and for a horrible moment I imagined Jonathan chasing after me, gaining on me with terrible inhuman speed, his rag doll limbs moving in strange unnatural motions. I heard the woman yelling after me. Yelling for me to come back. Then I heard two horrible sounds. The first was that the woman was laughing. Even in the roar of the winds, her laugh was unmistakable. Piercing even. I turned and saw her on the front porch. She did in fact have a horrible grin on her face, which now looked so much longer and paler than it had before. Her laugh was an awful cackle, like thin ice breaking.
The second horrible thing I heard, was the sound of a piano being played. It was coming from Jonathan’s room.
My car was nowhere in sight, but it was no use to me now anyways. I ran down the road, and eventually the woman’s laugh faded, but not the piano music. No matter how far I went, I could still hear it. It followed me the way a bad memory follows you. I don’t know how long I waded through the snow, but at some point I collapsed and thought for sure I was going to die. Then I saw a light coming towards me. That light eventually turned into a tractor with a plow. There was a man driving it. He got out and began to say something, but I couldn’t hear him. I was fading in and out of consciousness. The last thing I saw before I blacked out was the man standing over me, a horrible concerned look on his face. The last thing I heard was piano music.
I woke up the next morning in an unfamiliar bed. For a horrifying second, I thought I was back in the woman’s house, maybe sleeping in the very same bed as Jonathan. But that wasn’t the case. I was in an unfamiliar room, alone. Sunlight was shining through the window and I could see that the storm had stopped. I heard the floorboards creaking outside the room and again for a horrifying second I thought the woman would appear in the doorway. Smiling. Cackling.
Instead, it was the man I had seen driving the tractor.
“Good, you’re awake,” the man said warmly. “How are you feeling?”
“Where am I?” I asked ignoring his question.
“You’re in my house. I found running down the road last night. What were you thinking?”
“My car broke down. Are you with that woman?”
“What woman?”
“That one that lives down the road from where you found me.”
The man said nothing at first. He just stared at me. Then he said, in a pensive voice, “The woman that lives down the road from where I found you?”
“Are you with her?” I said. I gripped the bed sheets as if my life depended on it.
“No, I’m not with anyone,” the man said putting up his hands. “I live here on my own.”
I relaxed my hands. “I need to call my parents. I was on my way to visit them when my car broke down.”
“Phone’s in the kitchen. You’re welcome to use it. When you were out, I was plowing the roads. I saw a car - your car I gather - we can go there when your ready and get it out. I already got most of it plowed out truthfully.”
“If you saw my car then you must have seen the house nearby. That’s the house where the woman lives. With her son Jonathan. Only he’s not…he’s not…”
“The house where the woman lives?” The man said again in that deep pensive voice.
“Yes, you must have seen it if you saw my car.”
“Why don’t you call your parents. Then if you’re up for it, I’ll take you to your car.”
He gave me a reassuring smile then got up to leave.
“Is your name Harvey?” I asked him. He turned around and the smile on his face dipped into a questioning frown.
“It is,” he said. “How did you know that?”
“The woman. She told me about you and your tractor.”
“Is that right?” For a moment Harvey said nothing. His frown deepened. “Call your parents. And then we’ll get going.”
He left me in the room, with the sunlight as my only company.
My parents were relieved to hear my voice. I didn’t tell them about what I saw in the woman’s house, that already was starting to feel like a bad nightmare. I told them that my car went into a ditch and that I spent that night at a kind stranger’s house and that I would be in Madison later that day - hopefully.
I got into the tractor with Harvey and as we drove down the road I was shocked to see how much of the road had already been cleared. The storm had been so awful the night before and the snow had been so deep. Now, it barely looked as if it had snowed.
Eventually we came upon my car. Harvey had told the truth. He had gotten most of it out of snow already. He killed the engine to his tractor. And both our eyes went in the same direction. We were looking at where the house was….or where it should have been. There was no house there now. At least not what I had seen last night. Instead there were the remains of a house. The roof was gone and part of the top floor was completely caved in. Bits and pieces of the home jutted out like the jagged teeth of some ancient monster.
“Is this…the house you were speaking of?” Harvey asked. His voice was soft and empathetic.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “I was here last night. I was in there. It wasn’t like this.”
“Son that house has been abandoned for years now. There was a woman who lived there, but that was a long time ago.”
“What happened to her?”
“It was a long time ago, you couldn’t have met-“
“What happened?”
“She took her own life,” Harvey said. As he spoke we both stared at the wreckage of the home. “After her son died. It was a terrible accident, involving some of the boys from town. I don’t know too much of the details, I was young myself back then. I just know that it was ugly business and that she blamed one of the boys for her son’s death. That boy ended up in the hospital sometime later. I don’t know much else. Like I said, it was ugly business. But that house has been abandoned for years. No one lives there. No one could live there. Just look at the state of it. So you were just pulling my leg right? You couldn’t have been in there last night. Tell me you were just pulling my leg.”
I stared into the Harvey’s eyes, which were now threatening to spill over with tears, and saw that the old man was in fact terrified.
“Yeah, I was just pulling your leg,” I sad flatly.
“Someone from town told you my name?” His voice thin. Pleading. “Someone from town put you up to it?”
“Someone from town told me your name. Someone from town put me up to it.”
Harvey let out a sigh. “Well, you got me good, son. Hoo boy. Yes you did. Now, lets get your car out.”
It did not take long for Harvey and I to get my car out and running. We shook hands and I thanked him for his help. As I was getting in my car and Harvey was getting in his tractor, we both stopped at the sound of something horrifying. It was coming from the abandoned home.
It was piano music. Delicate, melancholic, piano music. We stood there and just listened. Neither of us said anything. Neither of us acknowledged it. Then after a moment we got in our vehicles and went our separate ways.
I never saw or spoke with Harvey again. But I’ve heard that piano music every night since that night. I’m hearing it now, as I write this letter. God help me. I’m hearing it now.
That’s the end of my father’s letter. I still can’t quite believe what I’ve read. That my father really wrote these words. At least now I understand why my father spent his life looking over his shoulder. What he saw in the shadows. Since reading his letter I’ve had this idea in my head of driving up to Dutchville County and trying to find house that haunted my father every step of his life.
But I’m terrified of what I’ll see.
And what I’ll hear.