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?

If it wasn't for the carer saying she hears it too I wonder if your grandmother has a hearing aid? My gran has one and can sometimes hear phantom sounds, she also says she hears church music sometimes and she is not religious at all!

i'm going with a big fat jar of woo. no other explanation. woo. definately woo.

Maybe someone died in the house in the 1920s?

My daughter use to describe a man she could see sitting on our stairs watching her play. She described my dad exactly as he was in a photo i use to see as a kid. She was 3 at the time - the same age i was when he died and she had never seen a picture of him as i dont have any!

Woo is out there we just dont understand it.

[quote starfishmummy]@1Morewineplease

1970s ghost/horror story en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stone_Tape[/quote]
Yes... I remember this.

Whether this was mentioned in the film or not but I do recall hearing that at moments of extreme fear eg execution, murder etc... bodies release a large amount of electrical activity that might be absorbed in stone which some folk might ‘pick up’ a long time afterwards.

Thank you for reminding me.

I believe that there is so much more to this world than we know!

@L8Bloomer

Sounds like an end of life thing to me. I don't find it so hard to believe that a person approaching death can ''hear'' music that isn't there. Whether it's one of their recognised senses or whether it's an internal ''palliative'' comfort when the body knows its time is nearly up, I just don'e find it that hard to get to grips with.

You're suggesting that all 4 of these people are at end of life then???

I live near a repair place for Fairground organs. The sound travels really far and through double glazing. I imagine the care homes nearby have similarly freaked out residents as you wouldn't know the repair place existed apart from the music.

My grandmother also heard music, signing it was.

In fact I think she specified that it was angel's signing. She was also dementing.

Signing and dementing?

*@applemousey my 85 year old father went through something similar earlier this year. We put it down to auditory hallucinations.

He had been suffering from headaches and was very stressed - I think he had convinced himself it might be a brain tumour. He experienced what he described as 'classical music' when he was either in bed before he went to sleep or woken up to it during the night. It must have happened 4-6 times in a 2-3 week period. My mother, who is the only other person in the house, didn't hear anything.

It seemed to subside on its own. I'm sure it was probably stress based, but he is due to have a brain scan (delayed because of lockdown) as he is still getting the headaches.

My Mum used to clean for an elderly Lady and about two weeks before she died she kept worrying over " A little Boy all in blue"
She insisted he had come into her house several times and she was worried about him, where was the parent etc???
Towards the end she seemed to take comfort in the little Boy no one else could see and was no longer worried about him.

I reckon there will be an explanation for what your DGM is hearing, but I love a good Woo story, do come back and let us know.

The dying often experience something called “delirium”. Although most experience at the very end of life perhaps for a couple of days or a few hours, my mother had it for months. It took the form of visual hallucinations, sounds, and conversations. To her it was completely real, and indeed it was mingled with intermittent bouts of complete lucidity. The other side of this is that science has postulated the theory that places can be “haunted” With sounds, or vision which are absorbed into the very fabric of buildings or things in an area. The science behind it is very complicated and my husband who is a scientist has tried to explain it to me, and I think I understand but my grasp on it is pretty loose - something to do with “quantum entanglement”. I actually believe in life after death and indeed in ghosts (I’ve seen one), but my theory is always look for the prosaic , and perfectly reasonable theory before declining to anything else . But look, it’s a theory....

The other side of this is that science has postulated the theory that places can be “haunted” With sounds, or vision which are absorbed into the very fabric of buildings or things in an area.

That doesn't sound much like science to me.

something to do with “quantum entanglement”

Oh, quantum. Right. Quantum explains everything.

(It doesn't really.)

Thanks for all the replies! I'm heading there this week, I'm unable to stay because of work, but I intend to have a good look around with DF to see if I can find the cause, I'll update!

On the topic of ghosts, I supposedly would see the 'grey lady' in our garage as a young child, she was in my fathers vintage car that was parked in there. No recollection now. DM said I was terrified and refused to go in there (to fetch the chicken dippers from the chest freezer 😂)

When my DD was going through a particularly terrible period of unstable mental illness she kept insisting that the church bells were ringing all night.
I wasn't aware of the acuteness of her mental illness at that time and believed her when she said it. I thought it was maybe bell ringing practice! I did think it was strange but so busy with everything at the time just accepted what she was saying. As time went on and her health deteriorated I wondered if the sound of bell ringing was in her head. Now I think it probably was as I can't see why the church bell was ringing all night. Maybe that's similar to what a person suffering from dementia might experience but doesn't explain why other people staying there have heard it.

The logical explanation is that there is actual music, and the carer is superstitious.

it must be an acoustic trick of some kind, maybe due to the layout of the land/buildings you can sometimes hear church music?

This was my first thought. In two different houses I've lived in, some trick of acoustics to do with the topography has meant that distant sounds from specific places sounded very close from parts of the house, though the neighbours couldn't hear them at all and had no idea what I was talking about. In one house, it was actually quite eerie, until I realised it was some peacocks wailing at a house a good half mile away across the valley that we could hear, but for some reason no one in the houses around us could.

It’s hard to tell, it could be pipes vibrating that seem to make a musical noise and the power of DGs original suggestion has made people’s brains organise those sounds into church music, potentially depending on how each individual hears sounds.

Alternatively your DGs energy, as it changes might upset the vibrations round her and create a noise

The property might be haunted or hold memories of church music

Radio waves could be picked up by something else.

I always love it when people are so certain that nothing spiritual could be happening, all those opportunities in universities and conferences to stand up and explain how they know everything about the universe that has been, or ever will be discovered and they choose Mumsnet to make their declaration 😂.

“There are move things in heaven and earth ... than are dreamed of in your philosophy”

I know a house of a friend where monks could be heard chanting. Turned out there was actually an old monastery there previously.

As pp said, it could be road noise. I live a couple of miles from a motorway and sometimes, depending on wind direction, it sounds very musical.
As for the brain misinterpreting sounds: I was woken in the middle of the night by a car alarm going off, looked outside and couldn't see any car lights flashing. Eventually I realised that it was seagulls. Strangely, I've heard them often enough before and never thought that they sounded like anything other than seagulls.

And there we go, someone has quoted the usual line from Hamlet without a basic grasp of the play, and with the inevitable air of ‘Ah, if Shakespeare said so! I’m entirely correct in my belief that feathers in the garden are evidence of supernatural communications from my guardian angel/ dead granny rather than a hawk’s dinner...’

Musical ear, common amongst the hard of hearing, dad got deafer as he got oldsr, and began to hear music, hymns, viennese music, operetta sort of stuff, apparently it is culturally specific, so an American might hear American songs, that sort of thing. Yes there was a church next door but mum never heard it despite having much better hearing, when we found out about it, we told him and he was a bit happier about it. , finding out what was happening. Now the really weird thing. I was staying with him towards the end if his life as mum was in hospital. I needed a drink so gI t up and went downstairs to get a drink of water, got down the stairs a d there was music coming out if the kitchen, from the direction he described it. , I legged it back to bed thirsty.
Next morning unplugged the radio just in case. Bu t it was a basic radio, not programmable and not in a timeswitch..
I have heard voices in the past when I was stressed and depressed. I knew they were not real

@ElizabethMainwaring
You're right, it isn't audible hallucinations.
I have them, and they are very sudden, quick sounds, think door banging, dog barking.

Science Daily:
"Musical hallucinations are a form of auditory hallucinations, in which patients hear songs, instrumental music or tunes, even though no such music is actually playing."

I hear entire movements of symphonies, Sinatra-type standards and a complete mixture of musical genres. One that I hear a lot is the Russian national anthem - god knows why, other than I've always liked it. It's like having a radio playing quietly in the back of my head. It started when over the space of 5 minutes I suddenly lost my perfect hearing and went completely and permanently deaf in my left ear (Sudden Sensorineural Hearing Loss).

@TibetanTerrier how scary, so sorry you've had that. That is just the sort if thing my Dad reported. He had no dementia but was concerned that he could hear it but no one else could, even offer thinking about it that mum explained it away by his hearing suddenly improving enough for him to apparently hearing choirs and musical groups in the church hall next door but she couldn't hear it, but he was a lot less worried about it when we told him what it probably was, as he was worrying about it

I remember I was watch video about people hearing strange music, voices and the reason was radio waves from strange places like bathroom pipes etc. I found something to read.

www.newscientist.com/article/mg16422067-300-the-last-word/

How fascinating! Go and hear for yourself.

gets popcorn 🍿