4 different people, all hearing the same creepy thing.

[applemousey]

Sorry, I did post this in health but got very little response. I'm wondering if anyone has experienced this, or has any idea what it could be? (Spoken to neighbours, no church/shops close by)

My grandmother has been declining with what seems the beginning of dementia for a couple of years. She's now in palliative at home, (cancer) with my DF staying there.

She complained of 'church music' a few years ago every night, keeping her awake. Also the neighbours were 'having parties' playing 1920s music. It was assumed by family (and drs) it was the onset of dementia.

A year ago my aunt and uncle stayed there (they live overseas) and my uncle complained of the music keeping him awake.

My DF stayed a few months back and heard it himself. He looked everywhere and couldn't find it, it had woken him up.

The care nurse who has been staying overnight, unprompted said she had heard the music, she said it's quite common, she's heard it before in other dying patients homes as well as other nurses reporting similar experiences. Just wondering if anyone has had this before? All I can find online is audible hallucinations, but surely this can't happen with 4 separate people? And is there a logical explanation?

Personally I would side with your husband. I'd check all electrical devices are unplugged. That there aren't any neglected toys (sounds unlikely but I found a toy in the loft when investigating a noise in my own life), then focus on recording the sound. Get someone prepared to be awake and maybe reconsider the neighbours. How is their memory/ awareness? Are they awake or a sleepwalker?

I think the care worker is camping it up a bit - your DGran heard this years ago, not use niw at end of life.

So four people hearing music at night in the same place means a source of music near-ish to the place, but not actually in it (or it would be heard other than in thee supilent hours of the night)

How far away are the next neighbours (on the other side, perhaps)?

Thank you to all it's been a tough time, especially for my DF and his siblings.

No doorbell, just a knocker. I'm really confused by the care nurse, I would probably have written it off as hearing music or finding rhythm in a regular sound, like pipes or the fridge. I lived by a busy road years ago, and the tyres on wet tarmac often sounded very rhythmic.
It's just what she said was completely unprompted (I wasn't there though) and how these are four separate experiences.
I would like to hear for myself, as I think I could work out what it was if I heard it, or at least record it to work it out in daylight hours.

I've had auditory hallucinations in the past due to severe anxiety from a stressful period of time, and it seems very different to this.

It doesn’t surprise me that the nurses discuss this kind of thing. I’ve worked in a care home - it was a holiday job so I wasn’t there for long but the staff talked about how they often knew when someone was about to die, and that it was usually up to a fortnight beforehand. The person would complain of being cold a lot and sometimes see and hear things.

But this sounds different as several people have heard the same thing over a number of years at one location. So it could be something functioning as a radio receiver (like a doorbell as a pp suggested) or something more “woo”, like music from the past that can be heard there. I’m not saying I believe that but I am open-minded about it as there are so many reports of “recording” type ghosts and sounds. I wonder if there is a mechanism that can do that that we’ll discover one day.

So has EVERYONE who has stayed overnight in the house reported music, or have some people not? Are those who have not reported hearing anything at night (when it's very quiet, so background noises more audible) deep sleepers, hard of hearing or on any tablets?

Because if everyone who sleeps there hears it (or most people, others may sleep more deeply), then it's a real noise. It may not be music, it may be something that the brain interprets as music in the absence of other stimuli.

Down the road from me is a farm with the name picked out in old horse-shoes on the gate. When the wind blows from a certain direction, the horse-shoes whistle in a very eldritch way. If you didn't know what it was, you'd swear The X Files was on its way...

There will be a real world explanation. These people are not all dying and hallucinating. Stay there yourself (with a friend), listen and follow?

People often don't look hard enough for mundane explanations, because they're keen or happy to believe in woo.

I heard a fascinating tale once about people in a particular hospital ward experiencing fundamental feelings of dread (there may have been more to the experience but it was consistent). Turned out it was caused by low frequency inaudible sound waves, emmitted by a big piece of hospital equipment in a room below or adjacent.

I'd wonder about things like baby monitors or old-fashioned radios picking up unintended frequencies (like when we could tune our baby monitor into taxi-drivers' radio calls).

Also neighbours working shifts and having music on at odd times.

A church organist practising at odd hours.

Our builders once left their radio on quietly overnight. I was convinced the songs were coming from a nearby bar, with its doors open. Until I walked methodically around the house, to find out where it was loudest - and even then, I had to really listen, move carefully, listen some more.

My point is, it is very, very easy to make assumptions and believe them, so fail to persue your investigation further. When actually the real, unexpected answer is there to be discovered, if you keep looking and listening (and not thinking, not trying to explain, too much).

Not everyone has heard it. My uncle heard it (DGs son in law) my aunt didn't. My mother who is spiritual did not hear it. She was there last week, my DF had heard it a month or so prior to her visit.

Also, the nurse will have her own motivation. She may be a big fan of woo, or she may think she's offering reassurance, or gently preparing your family for loss.

I had this a few months ago, I was staying at my mums house and kept waking up convinced that I could hear the church bells ringing (my childhood bedroom so a sound I was familiar with). After the first night, it was like I was expecting to hear it again so like a muscle memory, and I did for a few nights. Once I checked the local fb and saw no-one complaining I knew it was in my head ha and after a heavy sleep when I didn't wake up and so didn't listen for it I stopped hearing it.

Are your uncle and your df your gran's children? Could there be memories stirring from earlier years and they're subconsciously looking for it? Similar with the nurse, if she says it's well heard of among nurses maybe she goes into houses also subconsciously listening out for music. They could all be having musical hallucinations for different reasons.

Maybe I'm unusual or maybe it's a thing but If i 'listen' hard enough i can often find music within the noises of my environment, even in the dead of night when all I can really hear is the white noise in my ears.

This happened to me! I thought I was going crazy I could hear a cockerel at random times of the night. My gran had given me one of those talking watches and I’d flung it in the bottom of my wardrobe, I was so relived when I found it I thought I was going crazy.

I've experienced auditory hallucinations when very tired. I'm sure worry could do the same thing. For example, interpreting wind blowing through leaves and branches as people whispering.

I'd like to add I'm not a 'woo' kind of person. I'm open to all interpretations of this, but I think I could find the explanation if I heard it myself.

I worked and lived in a 15th century hotel, it had a lot of very sad history. Guests constantly complained of ghost sightings, things moving etc. I never saw a thing, or anything I did 'see' had a reason.

I once used to hear music intermittently in the background when the house was quiet. Drove me crazy for months. That was until we cleared out the loft and found one one the kids old 'musical' toddler toys which had short-circuited and just used to randomly play music sometimes, and was the exact music I had been hearing. Turns out when it was in the loft it was just about loud enough for me to hear it when the house was quiet, hence why it had been torturing me for months!

Just to say, it may be something pretty mundane rather than anything 'woo'.

I wonder what happens to a dying brain and body. My best friend’s dad was very near the end of his life. She told me he gasped one day and said “ Mum you’re here!” He apparently became much calmer after this episode and died soon afterward.

On threads like these it always baffles me why people are so damn insistent that there has to be a ‘scientific’ reason.

Is the thought of there being things beyond your knowledge that terrifying to you ? Really?

I can’t offer you any explanation OP but the universe is vast and wonderful and we know so little about it.

I think you should go and stay there see what if anything you can here. ( and report back obviously)
for your nan.

In my old house I used to be woken during the night by a low humming noise which sounded like some kind of motor and could be heard in my bedroom but now downstairs. After years and years of this we eventually found out it was the rising water main in the next estate which would pump water into the village during the night and the noise was the motors from that. Interestingly I now live closer to the rising main and I never hear it, must have been the way the houses were built around it and the direction of the breeze on certain nights.

Sound doesn't just more via airwaves, it can conduct along hard surfaces, if you tap your head with your finger you will hear it, due to bone conduction, someone sat next to you won't hear it.

Radio waves are even weirder, people have heard radio stations from irons and fans, unplugged fans.

not downstairs sorry typo

When it’s very quiet at night I occasionally fancy I can hear music, but when I “tune in” to the sound it’ll be something like a rhythmic tree swaying/pipe knocking quietly that the brain fills out into a music sound, if that makes sense. You’re actually only hearing the very bare bones of something but the human mind is very good at adding what it thinks should be there to turn that into a church sound/classical music etc. A low bass humming would easily translate into organ music, a faster tapping into the drum beat of a dance band and so on. So no wonder that different people would all “hear” the same thing.

I used to sometimes hear whispering in my grandparents' kitchen and heavy breathing upstairs when I was completely alone in the house. They lived in the countryside in the middle of nowhere, no one else was there, and there was no earthly explanation I could find apart from I was imagining it, which I wasn't because it happened on multiple occasions but has never happened to me since, although other family members later told me about hearing strange things in that house.

@ChristmasKitties

On threads like these it always baffles me why people are so damn insistent that there has to be a ‘scientific’ reason.

Is the thought of there being things beyond your knowledge that terrifying to you ? Really?

I can’t offer you any explanation OP but the universe is vast and wonderful and we know so little about it.

I agree. I actually think it can be intellectually arrogant to think you already know everything there is to know about the world we live in.

Maybe these things are paranormal, maybe they're not, but I think it's important to keep an open mind.

@sashh

Sound doesn't just more via airwaves, it can conduct along hard surfaces, if you tap your head with your finger you will hear it, due to bone conduction, someone sat next to you won't hear it.

Radio waves are even weirder, people have heard radio stations from irons and fans, unplugged fans.

You’ve just reminded me of something. When I was a young child my mum had a car that had the exposed metal wheel arches next to the back seat. I used to put my ear against them as we were driving and could hear what sounded like speech and music all jumbled up.

I live about 200m from a Church. I can hear their organ in certain rooms in my house, but not in the garden. Over lockdown while it was very quiet, I enjoyed listening regular practise from the organist quite clearly while working away in the back bedroom, but again, I couldn’t hear it in the garden.

You shouldn't have been able to @cheesecurdsandgravy! Organ practice was explicitly banned in churches during lockdown and only restarted at the beginning of July. Perhaps yours was a hallucination too!

When we first moved in to our current house, at one end of our house upstairs many people heard chattering voices - the sound of people chatting away in a different room, like you could hear the intonation of chat between many people but not the actual words, as though it was downstairs in the lounge say, and you were upstairs. Many people heard it, commented on it totally independently from each other. It stopped when we got wifi!