PEEKSKILL, N.Y. — A neglected acoustic guitar belonging to local man Phil Everett reportedly plays itself to sleep each night in an effort to escape the despair and loneliness of its forsaken existence, sources confirmed.
“I haven’t been able to get any sleep these last few weeks,” said Everett, his eyes wide and haunted. “It started late last month in the early morning. I was fast asleep when I heard a guitar playing faintly in the distance. At first, I thought it was one of my neighbors but I soon realized the music was coming from inside my apartment. It was ‘Hurt’ by Johnny Cash, played plaintively, almost pained. It didn’t take me long to realize that it was my long-abandoned Yamaha F335 acoustic guitar, the one my parents got me for Christmas in 2004, playing itself. I will never be the same after being confronted like this.”
Amelia Snyder, a customer service representative for the musical instrument retailer Sweetwater, says she fields calls about possessed instruments on a regular basis.
“We have an entire department dedicated to dealing with possessed instruments,” said Snyder. “Recently, I received a call from a frustrated man who didn’t know what to do with the harmonica he purchased (and then neglected) at the height of the indie folk bubble of the early 2010s. Apparently, the ignored instrument had begun playing the harmonica part of ‘Piano Man’ in the middle of the night. I told him the only way to return order to the instrument was to play it, which he did. Shortly thereafter, the ghostly playing stopped.”
Avery Hill, a medium and expert on possession, says this kind of phenomenon exists because each instrument contains the soul of a deceased child yearning to be loved and cared for once again, which is kind of a reach, to be honest.
“When untimely death visits a child, and that child casts away its corporeal form and passes on to the afterlife, its soul takes refuge in musical instruments. Music is deeply ingrained in humans and that is especially true for our littlest ones,” said Hill while counting a fat stack of cash she made at an occult fair this weekend. “By entering a musical instrument, the soul of the child seeks to exist in a state of freedom and play. But when the possessor of an instrument refuses to play music with it, the soul and thus the instrument grow restless. Eventually, this leads to the melancholic self-playing of the abandoned instrument.”
At press time, Everett’s childhood glockenspiel was playing a haunting rendition of “The Sound of Silence” by Simon and Garfunkel.