I’m a professional church organist. Something I can’t explain happened in the empty church a few weeks ago, and I don’t think I’ll be practicing after dark ever again…

I’ve been the organist for this Episcopal church for a few years now. It’s a large historic building in the middle of a fairly large city in the northeastern US. I don’t want to identify the church or myself for reasons you should understand after reading this — I don’t want to spook any parishioners, especially. In fact, I haven’t even told any of my co-workers about this because it’s just very strange and I can’t come up with any reasonable explanation for it.

To fully appreciate what happened, you’ll need to understand a few things about myself and the church building.

I’m a classically trained organist in my early thirties with degrees in music performance and sacred music. It’s somewhat of a dream come true to be able to call this my profession. It’s a wonderful creative outlet that pays fairly well, and people show a lot of appreciation for my work.

I’ve always been a bit of a shy recluse. I definitely suffer from stage fright if I’m in front of an audience to do anything other than play music. I spend my free time watching movies, playing video games, and practicing. I’m definitely a “night person,” and I feel most productive between 7:00 PM and 1:00 AM. Because of my career, I have very flexible hours (except on Sunday mornings and religious holidays, of course.) I’m not especially “religious” but I do believe in God and Jesus, and I respect and support the beliefs of any parish I work for, assuming they are reasonable.

My favorite way to practice is late at night when I’m alone. I can either get a lot of work done without interruptions from random parishioners or other staff members asking me questions, or I can just let loose and blow off steam knowing that no one is listening. Either way, it takes some pressure off knowing that I’m alone — especially when I’m in the early stages of learning a new piece. The process often involves repeating a lot of short phrases in the music, and no one needs to hear that.

The church building is well over 100 years old with beautiful stonework architecture, located near downtown. The sanctuary (or the nave) is quite large — maybe a little too large for the congregation, unfortunately. A single center aisle runs from the altar to the entrance, roughly 100 feet long, and the ceiling is about three stories high. It’s very spacious, able to easily hold over 400 people. There is no carpeting or cushioning on the floor or pews, so the acoustics are quite live, providing 7-8 seconds of reverb. You can absolutely hear a pin drop from across the nave, and you can imagine the noise that coughing and candy wrappers make during worship.

Anyone who’s been in any church at night knows that they can all be pretty creepy in the dark. In this particular church, there’s all sorts of awful noises. The worst noise, if you’re not expecting it, is the heat coming on. It sounds like someone banging on pipes with a sledge hammer accompanied by creaking and cracking as the building adjusts to the temperature change. The heat causes other noises too. Sometimes it sounds like footsteps above you or a door creaking open, but it’s definitely just the heat or regular “building noises.” I’ve also heard and seen all sorts of critters, from rodents in the wall or under the floor, to the occasional bat — or even a bird flying around the sanctuary. The worst is when they leave poop on the pews or organ bench. Our sexton and his team really do keep the building spotless, but this is just something that happens sometimes in old buildings like this. There have also been some break-ins, but those have stopped since a new security system was installed a few years ago. The creepiness of an unfamiliar church after dark always gets to me at first, but then I grow accustomed to it after I know what to expect and feel more comfortable with the neighborhood, as I have here.

The organ console where I sit is positioned at the front of the church near the altar. The only way to get to the console is to walk between the horizontal pews where the choir sits. When I’m on the bench, I am facing the center aisle. To my left is the altar, and to my right is a small wall. When I peak around the wall, I can see the nave where the congregation sits, and the sacristy in the rear. In front of me is the aisle, and across the aisle are more pews for the choir to sit facing me.

The pipe chambers for the organ are located both behind the console and behind the choir on the opposite of the aisle. The instrument is huge and features some en chamade trumpets (high-pressure reed pipes that face the nave for extra volume.) At full organ (pulling out all the stops), you could probably drown out an entire marching band.

I practice with minimal lighting, so only the choir loft/altar area is illuminated. The nave is dark, except for some street lights trickling in through the dark stained glass windows (they are really beautiful in daylight, but drab at night.) This gives just enough light to see the outlines of some pews, the ornate pillars that frame either side of the aisle, and the all-white statue of Jesus in the sacristy at the rear of the nave. It’s not a statue of Jesus dying on the cross, but of him ascending to heaven. I sometimes would joke with my friends that it was “ghost Jesus” because of the way he is holding his arms out to the sides, all white, with robes hanging from his wrists to his ankles. Don’t worry, this story is not about ghost Jesus.

So, the night this occurred, I arrived at the church around 11:00 PM. This was a “blow off some steam” practice session. I started by romping my way through Bach’s Fantasia and Fugue in G minor. That took maybe 10 or 12 minutes, and felt great. Next, I decided to just improvise on a hymn. Sometimes when I do this, I just blast through the hymn repeatedly, changing registrations randomly until I end up on full organ. I sort of turn my brain off and just “see what comes out” — it’s always good care-free fun, and sometimes I find a new idea that I can actually use for worship. This hymn was “old hundredth,” one of the tunes typically used for the doxology which is sung after the offertory, but it’s also used with other texts as well. You’ve probably heard it before, even if you don’t go to church.

Well, I’m romping through this hymn, verse after verse, until I finally decide I’ve had enough. So I bring it to a close with all the majesty, joy, fanfare, pomp, circumstance, etc. you’d expect after everyone throws money into the offering plates, plagal amen and all. I finally release the last chord and listen to the reverb ring down the nave and back, fading into nothing over several seconds. Nope — it’s not ‘nothing’ this time. As the sound of the organ fades into the sanctuary, the expected silence reveals a noise unlike anything I’ve heard before. It sounds like it’s coming from the opposite end of the nave. A human voice of some kind, low, croaking, mono-tone…

“Ehh-ahh ehh-ahh ehh-ahh…”

It was quiet, but relentless. “Ehh-ahh ehh-ahh…” It was persistent, with some clicks and hisses throughout, but absolutely no silence or pause for breath. It sounded like it was getting louder, but I know it actually wasn’t. It was the acoustics and lack of any other noise, along with my rising heart rate, that made it feel like it was getting louder as I focused on it more. The noise is so engrained in my mind that it sounded like it went on forever, but really it was just a few seconds before I called out,

“Hello?”

The noise did not stop or respond to my call in any way. It just continued “ehhs-ahh ehhs-ahh.” I realized it was coming from the back of the nave, and I called out again, this time louder,

“Hey!”

It continued… “Ehhs-kahh ehhs-kahh…”

I couldn’t see anything anywhere. My heart was pounding. I’ve never been in a situation like this. In a knee-jerk reaction, I slammed my forearm on the keyboard and stomped my feet on the pedals and released. With all the stops still drawn, the organ let out a thundering blast into the nave that faded over several seconds… I listened, and thank God it’s silence.

I decided to myself “Fuck this. Time to call it night.” It’s not like me to leave after practicing for only 20 minutes, but I hit the cancel piston to silence all the stops and hastily slide off the bench and go to change my shoes (yes, organists have special shoes.)

I was feeling very uneasy and very creeped out at that moment, but I knew there must be some reasonable explanation, and all of those possible explanations were racing through my mind. Sometimes the pipes will “cipher” causing a pipe to continue to speak even though no keys are being pressed. Maybe there was some sympathetic vibration in a window, or in some object on a table in the back of the sanctuary. I’ve heard those noises before, but never like that. I really don’t think it’s even possible for something to sound like this did. It really sounded like a human voice articulating vowels. I guess I could describe it like one of those artificial voice boxes that people use after a tracheotomy, but it didn’t have any “digital” aspect to it. I do have a pretty good ear, after all.

What happened next is what sent me over the edge. I’m bending down, about to slip my loafers on…

BOOM!!! It’s the organ pipes all around me. I jump out of my skin, goosebumps all over, heart racing. It made the exact same blast of noise I myself just made by itself — a mash of dissonant pitches. I instantly snapped my head around and there was nothing there. No movement, no person running off, no other noises that suggest anyone was there. Besides, the only way to get to the console would be to either walk around me in the tight space between the pews, or to climb over the console itself (about 5 feet high and 3 feet deep.)

When I look at the console and realize what just happened, I just took off running in my socks. I ran out the door behind the choir loft, hit the lights, and ran to the exit. I quickly armed the security system and bolted out the glass door. I was out of breath and feeling panicked, but I felt much safer outside with the bustling of traffic and a few pedestrians walking further down the street. It’s like I could breath again, and I could hear things other than that noise — normal things. I jump in my car, light a cigarette, and stop in the street near the door I just left from so I can watch the blinking the light to make sure the security system is armed. The alarm beeps for 60 seconds, then the light changes from flashing yellow to steady red. I sit there in my car for about 3 minutes or so, as long as I could stand it, to make sure the motion detectors didn’t set off the alarm, then I headed home.

When I got home, I probably chain smoked 5 or 6 cigarettes on my porch, recalling the events that just took place. After a while, I went inside and played some games to get myself into a good mood.

Around 1:30 AM when I was out on the porch again (2 hours after the experience) I got a phone call from the church sexton. He said the alarm was going off at church and wanted to know if I was there practicing. I told him I wasn’t, but I had been there earlier from 11:00-11:30 or so. He had instructed the security company to contact him before contacting the police, because there’s a service fee if the police come out for a false alarm. I didn’t mention anything that had happened, but I did tell him I thought I may have forgotten to turn off the organ console.

The next day, the sexton told me what happened that night. He met the police at the church, disarmed the system, and turned off the organ console. The phone was ringing, but he didn’t answer it in time, and whoever it was hung up when the voicemail message played. They assumed that because there were no signs of anyone being there or breaking in, that the alarm was set off by either a bat or a malfunction. He said the report from the security company said that motion sensors were triggered in the rector’s office, the rear nave, and the altar area throughout the night, but never at the same time, any nowhere else in the building. What’s odd is that if it were a bat, then it should have set off at least one of the two sensors in the center nave, or the hallway or foyer between the nave and the rector’s office. The office door was closed and locked anyway, so the only plausible explanation is that there were three different bats, or that the security system malfunctioned.

They left the alarm disabled for the rest of the night and locked the doors. Even when the alarm is disabled, the sensors still record movement. Apparently, after they left, the same three sensors kept triggering all night, but they were set off in increasingly faster succession from about 2:30 AM till 3:30 AM, then stopped. They’ve officially chalked it up to a malfunction, but it has not occurred since.

Our office administrator said they received four voicemails that night between 12:00 and 12:30 AM. They were residents in the apartment building across the street, asking the organist to “stop all that racket” because they were trying to sleep. One of them was really angry, but the others were very polite. Now, you can hear the organ from outside, but it’s pretty faint and not loud enough to wake up the neighborhood — unless maybe you were pressing 30+ keys at the same time…

Here’s another thing about the situation— right before I bolted out the door that night, I remember looking at the stop combination that is currently set (I did cancel it) and it is exactly what I had pulled by hand. The organ has a memory function to quickly recall different preset combinations of stops, but this particular registration wasn’t saved anywhere. There is no recall function on this particular organ, and there is no MIDI sequencer or anything that allows it to play by itself. Even there were a recall function, I would have heard the stops being pulled. They make a distinct sound when they all draw at the same time, like banging on a door once, but quieter. I wouldn’t have missed it, especially when I was so on edge at the time.

Also, the more I think about the vocal noise I heard, the more I think it may have sounded like “Praise God” being said over and over again. “Praise God” are the first two words of the doxology I was practicing at the time. I’m not sure, but the more I think about it, the more it sounds that way in my mind. But it could just be like I’m remembering a dream and reconstructing it into something that makes sense in my mind.

I don’t know what to think. It was probably just a fluke occurrence… several odd noises, all perfectly reasonable, happening at just the perfect time to scare the perfect shit out of me. If it was something supernatural, was it trying to sing? Does it like music? Was it mocking me? Was it angry that I was playing so loud?

Since then I’ve only been practicing during the day and when other people are in the church — mostly so I can blame any noises I hear on them. I’m sure I’ll eventually rationalize all this and return to playing at night again, but that won’t be any time soon. Nothing else has happened since then that I’m aware of.