Not sure if there is a rational explanation for what I will term a 'happening' at my old house in north London. I had been living there with my wife for about three years and had never experienced anything. It is significant, as you will later discover, that we were an end of terrace located near a piano factory.
On the night in question, I was sleeping in the office because I was in the middle of a week off and wanted a lie-in not, wanting to be awoken by my wife's morning alarm. I awoke sometime whilst it was still dark, and about fifteen minutes later heard what I assumed was my wife's alarm go off. Sometimes she sets her alarm to simply play the radio and I assumed the music I could hear was the alarm radio, which was obscured by the fact that I had gotten accustomed to wearing earplugs because of my wife's snoring. I became puzzled as to why she was allowing the alarm to continue and had not switched it off. It was then that I reached over to my iPhone to look at the time and was shocked to see that it was only 3:15 in the morning! Realising that the music was not coming from my wife's alarm, I removed my earplugs to hear a piano playing music hall numbers from the old piano factory.
The piano notes seemed to pierce the night air particularly because at night it is so eerily quiet in what was effectively a cul-de-sac. I craned my neck out of the office window to look across at the factory and was surprised to see that no lights were on. The tune ended to be followed by single keys being played out of tune sporadically and then suddenly stopped. I felt spooked, naturally, but had rationalised that it was either:
* A pianoforte that had malfunctioned
* The factory, that no longer manufactures pianos but imports and exports them, had a delivery for abroad that needed to go out early and was being tested.
* Some loon was playing the piano in the factory at 3:15 in the morning with the lights off.
I decided to go and speak to the factory owner the next day to discuss the issue, not least because it woke me up. Feeling slightly sheepish on entering the factory, I tried to find the owner. He wasn't there so I spoke to the foreman and asked if anyone was in the factory that night which he denied, adding that it would be very unusual for anyone to be in the factory at that time of night and it had never happened since he could remember. I asked if they had imported exported pianofortes, to which he replied that they only dealt with ordinary pianos.
His 'helpful' suggestion was that it was a fox, the guard dog or the ghost of Margaret Thatcher, who had recently died. All of which seemed pretty implausible not merely as explanations but as jokes. I still can't work out the relationship between Thatcher and pianos; however, the surreal image of seeing the guard dog surreptitiously playing the piano still amuses me.
To summarise: no one was in the factory at that time, yet I did hear a piano playing from there.
Additionally the thing that still sends a chill down my spine and the thing that unsettles most people I tell this story to is that the next morning I was more than fairly alarmed to see that lines had been deeply scratched into my desk apparently using the edge of my watch. Subsequently we moved out which we had been planning for sometime and was in no way a consequence of this event, although I'm pretty glad that we are no longer there.
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