WE’VE all experienced what is known as “ear worm” phenomenon where we hear a song with a tune that is so catchy, it somehow gets stuck in your head and plays over and over in your mind’s ear.
The irritating effect is caused by a combination of cognitive, neurological and psychological factors and you will find your mind is more susceptible to being “hijacked” by the catchy song as it is idle — in a supermarket for example as you wander the aisles, or, as in the following case, in a cosy pub environment.
The pub was the Cottage Loaf in Thurstaston one sultry summer evening in 1994. Three friends — Charlie, Sid and Brian — all in their fifties, were at the bar, chatting and arguing about the usual subjects they always covered in-between supping their pints: politics, sport, medical complaints and perhaps the opposite sex.
Brian suddenly interrupted Charlie, who was telling a long-winded (probably fictitious) story about the time he used karate to defend himself from two muggers, and an annoyed Charlie responded with “What?”
‘Listen’ said Brian, his spectacled eyes turning upwards to the left. “Can you hear that?”
‘Hear what?’ his friend Sid asked, pausing to drink his bitter.
‘That — listen; hear it?’ said Brian, angling his head.
‘Sounds like a flute; so what?’ Charlie interposed and tried to resume his story but then Sid said: ‘It’s somewhere close and it sounds weird.’
‘It’s coming from outside,’ Brian decided and he left the Cottage Loaf pub and went out into the car park where, on this humid hot evening, there were quite a few people sitting at tables, and one of them was Brian’s neighbour, a 22-year-old airline stewardess named Pauline.
She saw Brian come out of the pub and look about before proceeding to walk out of the pub car park and on to Telegraph Road, heading south with his friends Sid and Charlie.
At this point, Pauline also heard the flute music but could not tell where it was coming from and didn’t give it much more thought as her boyfriend came to her table from the pub with a tray of drinks.
Brian, Sid and Charlie, meanwhile, travelled a quarter of a mile, trying to trace the beguiling music played by the phantom flautist.
The three men felt utterly compelled to trace the origin of the lively flute music and then they saw him — the enchanting flautist — walking about thirty feet ahead of the mesmerised trio.
He was about six and a half feet in height and had on a long green robe of deep emerald green satin or silk, which caught the moonlight in its soft folds.
The flute-player walked down the narrow and dark Church Lane towards St Bartholomew’s Church, playing a long wooden flute of some archaic design held to his lips.
Brian saw three figures, dressed from head to toe in white garments, standing in a row against the low wall of the church cemetery, and he had the awful feeling these three men were dead people dressed in burial shrouds.
Charlie and Sid noticed the three figures in the moonlight shortly afterwards and Brian had the feeling that the man with the flute had led him and his two companions here like the Pied Piper leading the children out of Hamlyn against their will — but for what reason?
The flautist stopped playing, and there, in the middle of the road yawned three precise, rectangular openings, their edges sharp against the moonlit tarmac. Each was a mouth of shadow, and the mouth of a grave.
The man in green pointed to the three openings and said, ‘Get ye to those graves, all three of you!’
‘No,’ protested Brian, but his legs were walking to the first grave. It was impossible to resist the urge to walk. Charlie, in a trembling voice, said, ‘Mary, Mother of God!’ and Sid threw himself on the floor in a desperate effort to resist going into that grave.
He fell onto the road surface, skinning his palms but still found himself crawling on all fours towards the black ominous hole. Brian realised that he and his two friends were swapping places with the three men in shrouds; they were going into their resting places and the dead men were being resurrected somehow.
A bright light lit up Church Lane and Brian turned to see a car with dazzling headlamps coming his way. It turned out to be his neighbour Pauline and her boyfriend behind the wheel of a Corsa.
Curiosity had gotten the better of Pauline after seeing her neighbour and his friend leave the pub in what seemed to be a daze.
As soon as the car pulled up alongside Sid as he crawled on his red raw hands and knees, the green-robed flute player and the three unknown men vanished in an instant, and then the three graves slowly faded away.
Brian snapped out of a spell; that was the only way he could explain it; an awakening from some open-eye dream. He told Pauline and her boyfriend about the interminable but oh so catchy reedy tunes he and his friends had heard from that sinister flautist.
Many years after this case, I interviewed Brian on air on a BBC Radio Merseyside programme and he hummed the tune he’d heard that night; one listener well versed in classical music thought it was Badinerie, a piece written by Johann Sebastian Bach for solo flute and string orchestra with continuo.
Another listener who professed to be heavily into the occult said the music Brian had hummed on air had been The Silver Sparrow, a piece of medieval music that was said to bring forth the spirits of the dead.
That music haunted the minds of Brian, Charlie and Sid for weeks, forcing them to sleep at night with the radio playing to distract them.
An old man telephoned me on air shortly after the broadcast I made about the case and said that, in June 1933, a Manchester couple surnamed Lampwell had been injured on the road near the Cottage Loaf (then a café) when their car, for reasons unknown, flipped over in a complete somersault.
The male driver later said he had heard music that had taken over his mind and distracted him from driving. In March 1978, phantom music was heard in a sports car, and the driver became so distracted that he drove into a wall near the Cottage Loaf restaurant. Why flute music is heard in that part of the Wirral remains a mystery.
Phantom voices are another unexplained audio phenomenon I hear of from time to time, and one case that sticks out in my mind is the wedding of a Wirral businessman some years ago at a certain local church.
The wedding ceremony was frequently interrupted by the crying of a baby that could not be found.
The cries of the child sounded amplified, but no one in the church could work out where the baby was. The groom seemed very nervous of the phantom crier and it later transpired that upon the day he was being married, a woman the businessman had been having an affair with had given birth to her lover’s child.
The mother of the lady who had been having an affair with the businessman was said to be a hereditary witch…
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