The Phantom Song

A message delivered via a Beatles song from a mysterious presence

I would not call this a ghost story. It’s not that simple.

During the 90s and early 2000s, my family lived in a modest yellow farmhouse set back from the road with a playground equipment business on one side, an event planning business on the other side, and nothing across the road but trees. There were two roads. The road on one side was a rural highway without much traffic except for a narrow window of time from 5 to 6 p.m. On the other side, the interstate was separated by a dedicated marshland reserve, protected by Washington state law to buffer against flooding.

This was a strange little house. The foundation had settled unevenly, tilting slightly toward the backyard. As soon as I walked into the house for the first time, there was a subtle sense of disorientation. My parents remodeled it on the inside to turn a sitting room/parlor into two bedrooms: one for me and one for my older brother. The front porch of the house faced the road, but the driveway went to the side entrance, not the front porch. For that reason, my parents had the front door taken out and replaced with more drywall, insulation, and outer siding. Where the door used to be was outlined by the new area of drywall on the inside. It ended up mostly in my bedroom but just barely cut off by the new wall that separated my room from my brother’s. My bedroom was on the side of the house with the gliding glass door that let out into the back yard: the quietest side of the house.

I was playing on the floor of the living room in front of my bedroom on the long, slightly matted brown carpet. It was a little itchy, but I was used to it. I was either playing with my Hot Wheels or folding paper airplanes. I did both with single-minded dedication at eight years old. This was probably during the summer, as it was very warm, although it could have been shortly after school started in early September. The sun slanting through the sliding glass window warmed the room, and I sat in the patch of sunlight. The air was slightly stale and slightly sweet, a musty combination that I liked. This smell was one of security for me, which was also why I periodically hid in my mother’s closet: for the warmth and the same kind of smell.

Right next to me on an end table was the wood-paneled speaker for the stereo system. It was one of the nicer things my family owned, even though my parents had gotten it used. The day Mom carried in the heavy main unit and set it down in an empty spot on the TV entertainment system was very exciting. She would play The Beatles on it.

So I thought nothing of it when The Beatles song “All You Need Is Love” started playing. My back was not precisely to the large black cube with all the knobs and sliders and the lit-up display showing the track number and timer. At the same time, I wasn’t paying attention. I had my head down playing.

I don’t know for sure what made me look up. The way I remember it, I glanced up at the main box because I hate it when songs end without me being prepared, and I was checking the run time. Mom had played this CD often enough for me to tell when to brace myself for the song ending. I was smiling; I’d always liked “All You Need Is Love.” I thought The Beatles were pretty great. Their sweet, sincere, British-accented voices comforted me.

The main box of the stereo was not on.

I felt all my facial muscles go slack as my gaze snapped to the speaker. I stared at the rectangular black fabric covering the place where the music couldn’t have been but was coming from.

A warmth in the room's energy cooled slightly, and the background instrumentation of the song dropped out, but the vocals lingered for another five or six seconds at full volume. They shifted away from what The Beatles sounded like to a different voice, one that was more androgynous. The singer was in no way unkind. Their voice faded out slowly. I felt as though someone was retreating from me. And I didn’t want them to go. I wanted to grab onto the music somehow physically. But the voice went silent.

I stared at the speaker for a long minute, but the music didn’t come back on.

During this encounter, I hadn’t been alone in the living room. I glanced across the room at my brothers, who were obliviously playing with Legos. They never heard the music.

Knowing I couldn’t tell them without being ridiculed, I didn’t even try. Instead, I got up and looked at the main box of the stereo system and all the knobs and buttons and sliders. Off. Cold. Dead. I turned around a few times slowly and sat back on the floor. I returned to what I’d been doing, but my mind wasn’t on it anymore. I was left with an ache in my chest that I knew someone had been there; someone had played the music somehow, but I didn’t know who. And I might never find out. I didn’t know where they had come from, and I didn’t know where they went.

At this time, the only way my family had to play music was the stereo sound system. None of us owned anything portable. This happened a whole year before I got a tape player for Christmas. Even so, I never owned any Beatles. All I had was The Beach Boys and Madonna. I couldn’t have heard music playing in another room.

And I was not a child who mistook one sound for another or who had auditory hallucinations, such as thinking I heard my name called in the dead of night in a dark bedroom. I never experienced anything like the stereotypical childhood fears at night. Plus, this was the middle of a sunny afternoon.

This is not a case of anyone dying in the house where my family and I lived. I had no relatives who passed on at the same time that I heard the music. I never had a second experience like this. It is entirely unexplained.

Now, as an adult, I know I really needed that message right then. I was living in an abusive household and was sometimes afraid for my life. The gentle presence and The Beatles song, as brief as it was, opened my mind to realities beyond the physical world. Sometimes, I worried that I was crazy. At other times, I bought adults’ vague explanations that children believed their imaginations were real.

But I knew the difference between my daydreams, being asleep, and being awake in the world, interacting with it using my senses. I heard The Beatles song with my ears. The sounds even emanated from the speaker despite no electricity running through the speaker and the sound system being off. It wasn’t just that I thought I heard the song come out of the speaker. Even after I knew it was impossible, the singer’s voice didn’t shift locations.

In all this time, I never forgot that this happened, and I never told anyone except my best friend as an adult. I knew they wouldn’t laugh at me or try to debunk it with Scooby-Doo-style solutions.

This is the earliest encounter I can think of when I knew for a fact that an impossible thing was happening. It blew apart adults’ constructions of the world that I had previously assumed to be 100% true and accurate. I didn’t dare contradict adults to their faces. But I quietly became fascinated by tales of the supernatural.

I’ve been looking for answers ever since and still haven’t encountered a story precisely like what I experienced. But I am comforted that other people believe that unexplained, perhaps permanently inexplicable, things have happened to them. I am not alone.

And I never believed that the presence I encountered that day meant me any harm. Besides the internal lurch of everything I thought I knew about reality being punctured, I didn’t feel threatened. I just wanted to know more. Who were they, and how did they play The Beatles without electricity?

Since that day, I’ve gone through life open to whatever presence might be around. I’ve had multiple encounters during my growing-up years and in adulthood. Rest assured, this does not always happen, and I am not some Ghost Whisperer. Sometimes, I was the only person to experience a presence, and sometimes, a person I was with at the time volunteered their perceptions of the presence even though I’d stayed silent. But whether someone else can sense the presence or not, I know what I know.

Nothing really showy ever happens. It’s not like a horror movie — or a Christian movie, for that matter. And it’s not Harry Potter, wherein see-through dead people fluently chat up the living. My experiences are something else: relatively subtle, brief, and always unexpected.

So, I’m really curious to know, now that I’m finally sharing what happened to me when I was eight years old: Has anyone else ever encountered a musical presence/ghost/spirit?

Beyond Religion: Soul’s Journey is honored to have Amanda Melheim share her story with us. She’s an amazing writer, and we trust you will follow her. Please also add this publication. We’re building a community of folks who have observed things we can’t explain, yet we know are very real. If you have a true story like this, please let us know, and we’ll add you as a writer.