Strange Cases of Haunted and Cursed Musical Instruments

Music has been with us since time unremembered. It is a phenomenon that transcends cultures and geographical boundaries, with every culture on earth having some form of music. Ever since our first ancestors banged sticks upon rocks, our instruments of expressing this musical desire have evolved, to the point that now we have a plethora of musical instruments covering all manner of sounds and rhythms. These instruments in a way hold power over us, able to change our mood, our way of thinking, and even touch our souls, and in some cases these instruments are even said to possess dark powers, being cursed, haunted, or both. 

One mysterious curse revolves around a bizarre instrument that you may not know of, and which nearly vanished from the earth, which is a glass instrument especially intriguing for the supposed curse it was said to have, with its sounds said to have rather mysterious and sinister effects on the listener. The practice of producing music through the rubbing of glass has been around since at least the Renaissance period and consists of filling glasses with water and rubbing one’s fingers around the rims to make varying notes and tones to make music, with the pitch dependent on the amount of water in the glass. This form of instrument is known as an idiophone, meaning that it creates sounds through its own vibrations, without the need for strings or membranes of any kind, and in the case of using glasses it is also often referred to as a crystallophone. This sort of music gained popularity in the 1740s when an Irish musician named Richard Pockrich toured London to much fanfare with his array of glass goblets, which he called his “glass harp” and which he played to curious audiences up until his death in a fire that destroyed the unique contraption. Other musicians who made the glass harp popular were Christoph Willibald Gluck and Edward Delaval, the latter who just happened to be a friend and colleague of Benjamin Franklin.

Intrigued with the use of vibrating glass to produce music after watching Delaval play in 1761, Franklin went about trying to create a version of the instrument that was more elaborate, yet easier to play. He enlisted the help of a glassblower named Charles James, and the two came up with a set of specially shaped glass vases that were arranged in a line similar to a piano keyboard, which was a radical change from the way the glasses had usually been played up until then. The 37 glass bowls were color-coded corresponding to the pitch of their tones and mounted on a spindle, which was spun through a foot peddle. The musician merely had to wet the fingers and touch the appropriate spinning vase to produce the desired sound, and it was all much easier and more precise than using the traditional upright glasses, allowing up to 10 notes to be played simultaneously.

Franklin called his new invention the “glassychord,” after which he changed the name to the “glass armonica,” which was derived from the Italian word armonia, which means "harmony.” It would also variously be known of as the glass harmonica, glass harmonium, bowl organ, hydrocrystalophone, harmonica de verre, harmonica de Franklin, and armonica de verre, among others. Franklin would write of his invention thusly:

“The advantages of this instrument are, that its tones are incomparably sweet beyond those of any other; that they may be swelled and softened at pleasure by stronger or weaker pressures of the finger, and continued to any length; and that the instrument, being well tuned, never again wants tuning.”

After the glass harmonica made its debut in 1762, its unique design and distinct, rather haunting and ethereal sound quickly made it popular, and for a time it was all the rage. Various musicians took up playing it, and there were efforts to further refine and evolve the design of the instrument, such as adding actual keyboards, utilizing absorbent pads to absorb excess vibrations for a clearer sound, or using violin strings instead of the fingers. During this period of extreme popularity for the bizarre instrument many famous composers created music for the glass armonica, including Baldassare Galuppi, Niccolò Jommelli, and such all-time greats as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in 1791 and Ludwig van Beethoven in 1814, among numerous others, and such shows were often played to sold-out halls. Other famous figures known to have taken to playing the instrument during this boom were George Washington and Marie Antoinette.

Yet for all of this popularity, there was a rumored dark side to the glass harmonica as well. Rumors began to spread that the surreal, haunting tones put forth from the instrument caused a variety of problems in some listeners after prolonged exposure, including dizziness, headaches, fainting, nose bleeds, nausea, or in worse cases permanent nerve damage, and that the music could induce deep depression, melancholy, suicidal thoughts, psychosis, and even stark raving insanity. Numerous harmonica players were also said to have been negatively impacted by the music, such as Marianne Davies, a relative of Franklin’s who purportedly spiraled into depression shortly after learning how to play it and touring with her singer sister. The German musicologist Friedrich Rochlitz once recommended that the instrument not be played excessively, and never by those with mental illness or any hint of depression, and wrote of the glass armonica’s supposed sinister effects*

“[The armonica] excessively stimulates the nerves, plunges the player into a nagging depression and hence into a dark and melancholy mood, that is an apt method for slow self-annihilation.”

This reputation soon had people whispering that the glass armonica was cursed, and it was often blamed for any misfortune or death of a player or person listening to it, no matter how tenuous the connection. Although it is not clear to just what extent any of these purported effects were real, there have been theories that could substantiate the claims somewhat. One lies in the nature of the instrument’s sound pitch and its effect on human hearing. The glass armonica typically produces tones in a range of 1–4 kHz, which is a weird range for our ears and brains as it is the specific frequency at which the brain has difficulty triangulating the spatial source of a sound. This has a confusing, disorienting effect, and might contribute to some of the symptoms reported.

There has also been the theory that the glass used in the manufacture of the instruments contained lead, which could have led to lead poisoning in those who handled the glass armonica. Lead poisoning was sadly rather common in the 18th and 19th centuries, and it has a whole range of unpleasant symptoms, including headaches, irritability, memory problems, anemia, seizures, coma, or even death. Many of the effects the glass armonica allegedly had could perhaps be the symptoms of lead poisoning, but at this point, there is little evidence to suggest the glass used had anything more than trace amounts of lead in it, and it is uncertain if just touching lead-tainted glass would have been enough to cause lead poisoning in the first place.

Whatever the reasons for these rumors, it is thought that the talk of the “curse” was one of the reasons for the rapid decline in the popularity of the glass armonica during the early 1800s. Other reasons included the fragile nature of the glass components and the fact that the instrument simply could not produce loud or bombastic enough sounds to fill the vast concert halls that were becoming en vogue at the time. The glass armonica with its ghostly, willowy sounds simply could not compete with other more powerful instruments such as stringed instruments, brass, woodwinds, and percussion, and this was all made even worse by the evolving tastes in music going on in the day. All of these factors conspired to make sure that by 1830 almost no one was playing the glass armonica anymore, there were no more concerts, no new compositions, and the unusual instrument practically became extinct.

In more recent times the glass harmonica has experienced a slight resurrection, although there are only a handful of players and very few original specimens of the 18th and 19th-century armonica remain, mostly in museums or private collections. Most of the instruments used now are imitations and recreations, so it is hard to say if their tones and frequencies are the same. Whether Franklin’s glass harmonica truly had ominous effects or not is unclear, but it is nevertheless an intriguing tale of a mysterious instrument that nearly went extinct and a bit of odd history.

A curious story of a haunted piano comes to us from back in the 1800s, when Cornelius Butterfield and his wife Alice moved from England to Thistledown, Pennsylvania for the husband’s business. By all accounts the young wife was not happy in her new life, and grew more and more homesick and unhappy by the day, and sought to find solace in playing the piano, as she had used to in London, but her husband refused to buy her an instrument. The husband was apparently a cruel man in many respects, denying her wishes for a creative outlet, constantly verbally berating her for her poor cooking skills, and even by some accounts routinely beating her. She ended up going to a neighbor’s house to play the piano, and she was described as playing beautifully, with her touch and voice "both the finest and sweetest I have ever heard,” according to the friend. Her selections of music were also pieces that no one had ever heard before and that no one else could play, giving Alice a most mysterious ambiance.

Sadly, Alice would die in childbirth of her daughter Pansy, although wicked rumors were circulating that the husband had had a hand in the death. This suspicion was only propelled when he promptly purchased a much larger residence, as well as a luxurious grand piano, the very sort that he had long denied his dead wife. The estate was so large that Mr. Butterfield hired a cook and nurserymaid, and called upon his sister Elizabeth to come help him preside over the establishment. It was not long after this that ghostly phenomena started to orbit the new piano. The entire household would hear the piano playing at all hours, only to come down and find that the keys were being pressed by invisible fingers, and not only this, but the style of the nocturnal visitor was not only brilliant but was unmistakably like that of the late Mrs. Alice Butterfield. A report on the phenomena from Modern Ghost Stories, by Emma May Buckingham, 1905, says of it:

“The sweet notes trembled all through the house, thrillingly clear and wonderfully pure, closing with Mendelssohn’s wedding march. Brother and sister and maids rushed downstairs, and stared at each other in alarm when they met at the door of the drawing-room. They looked into and under the piano, then in every room and closet in the house; examined the windows and outbuildings—but no one was to be found. They took off the lid of the piano to see if a mouse could have set it to playing, or to see if a music box could have been hidden within it; searched everywhere in vain for the performer. The following night it was the same, and so on for several nights in succession. Neighbors were called in, and declared that the parlor was haunted. The servants left the house in fear. Still the grand Steinway awoke the inmates of the house nightly with its dulcet tones. The keys could be seen moving up and down, while marches, quicksteps, bits of operas followed each other in rapid succession— now swelling like martial music, grand and glorious; again dying away to a whisper, then rising like the sound of a storm or furious battle.

The first intimation we had of their parlor being haunted was when its owner asked Mr. Doree if his piano ever got out of order and played right on, of its own accord, and, when answered in the negative, told us why he had asked the question. He acknowledged that he was greatly puzzled—said he could give no solution to the mystery. He remarked that the keys were certainly manipulated by ‘invisible fingers.’ Then, after a silence of a few minutes: ‘The strangest part of it is that neither my sister nor myself are able to play this class of music, which we recognize as the work of the old masters, and the servants cannot tell one note from another. Our neighbors are unable to whistle a single bar of it, let alone playing it. There is not another instrument of the kind on our street. My sister thought that some wag had hidden a music box inside of the piano, but we have had it taken all apart, had it tuned over anew and searched everywhere, but found nothing. It plays beautifully such music as I have heard my late wife play on her father’s piano.’”

Oddly, when Mr. Butterfield passed away the phenomenon stopped and the piano remained silent, almost as if Alice had been merely tormenting him from the grave. Moving on into later years we have the tale of the haunted violin of Joseph Hornsteiner, which was supposedly originally crafted in 1769 for a king. It was an exquisite work of art, composed of 365 separate, meticulously inlaid pieces forming its back, and it would go on to come into the possession of a collector of instruments named Harold Gordon Cudworth. In 1945, Cudworth began to learn that there was something more to this particular violin than met the eye, which he discovered while playing the tune The Broken Melody by Van Biene. Cudworth would say, “I was playing the instrument, which has a deep resonant tone, at my mother's home in Wareham when suddenly a rumbling noise occurred, seemingly coming from the area of the kitchen sink.”

He stopped playing and the droning stopped, but when he picked up again the rumbling began yet again, even louder and more persistent this time, reverberating throughout the entire home. On the next evening he played again, and this time the rumbling started up along with alleged poltergeist activity such as moving and flying objects thrown about the room. In the coming weeks he would resume his playing of the violin, the music divine but every time the rumbling springing up along with it all manner of unexplainable events, always only while playing “The Broken Melody,” with the strange noise emanating from all around him and even heard by his mother. At one point Cudsworth was playing the tune when the latch on his door shook with great might, and when he went downstairs the door to his room was slammed shut. Cudsworth opted to play the piano instead and found the sheet music for “The Broken Melody” sitting there upon it, placed there by hands unknown as if urging him to keep playing it.

In the ensuing days, Cudworth went to give a violin lesson to a young girl and opted to play The Broken Melody, with that bizarre, otherworldly rumbling acting up right there in front of everyone, getting even louder and more intense than ever before, to the point that it drowned out the music. On other occasions, he was known to play the same song and every time there was that rumbling and various moved objects about the room and swaying pictures upon the wall. It was enough to make him finally put the violin away and give up playing that cursed song, and it was never discerned just what the deal was with that tune and the instrument. Cudworth would die in 1989 and the violin would be lost to history, with no one sure where it got off to.

Another old ghost story also involving violins is the so-called legend of Violin Annie. The tale goes that in the 1860s a young girl named Harriet Annie lived in the town of Centralia, Illinois, in the United States, and she was an avid, gifted player of the violin. The girl died at age 11, either from diphtheria or by being beaten to death with her own violin by her father, depending on which story you want to believe, but the end result is that her grave is supposedly very haunted. She was buried at a place called Elmwood Cemetery under a large gravestone bearing her image holding a violin, and it is said that if one is to visit her grave they will hear the sounds of an ethereal violin playing. There have been some who have even claimed the statue of Annie will shed green tears during these ghostly musical interludes, and it all remains a piece of obscure local lore that might be pure urban legend, but which persists to this day.

A rather weird tale of a haunted violin comes from the site Reddit, from a commenter who claims that they were actually in possession of one for a time. He claims that upon receiving this antique violin he found that other instruments in the vicinity would be found knocked over or even broken, even though there was no one there who would want to do such a thing, and there were other strange phenomena orbiting it as well. The instrument itself is described as an 18th-century “Milan school” model, and the witness says:

“Shortly after finishing this instrument and hanging it up in the humidity closet, strange things began to happen.Lights would go on and off by themselves, my daughter would wake me in the middle of the night to ask why I standing in her room. She told she could hear someone talking, but not very loud. 2 weeks ago, I had guests who slept in the same room as the closet were the violins are stored. They told me that the touch lamp in the room kept turning on, and that after unplugging it, they were awakened by someone touching their shoulders, but there was no one there.
 
The real kicker is that last week the electricity went off for a while, and while the family and I were downstairs, the door to the upstairs guest room shut, and we could hear faint classical music coming from upstairs. We do not own any battery powered radios. After my last experience, I did not discount the possibility that the new instrument could have a spirit with it. I took the violin out of the closet and placed it on the entertainment center. I then played a cd that was only solo piano music. If I left the room, to go upstairs, or if I went down to basement, I (and others who did not believe me) could hear a violin begin to accompany the piano music. If we went back to great room, the violin music stopped as soon as we were in sight of the haunted violin.”

Lastly we have the case of an account published on Fein Violins, which apparently happened in 2011 in the state of Minnesota to Andy Fein. It begins with a customer who came into the witness’s violin shop to try some instruments out and fell in love with a German specimen from 1870. It seems that this would be the basis of the strangeness that would follow, as he describes:

I gave him several violins to play. After a short while he kept coming back to one German instrument from about 1870. He kept playing other violins and then going, "No, there's something about that old German violin that I really love." Eventually, he played through all the violins and kept coming back to that one. He spent most of the afternoon playing it. As he did, I could hear his playing improve dramatically and I could hear the violin opening up and really singing for him. At the end of several hours Mr D said,"Wow! I really love that violin. I mean, I REALLY love that violin. I want to buy it, but my in-laws are coming into town tomorrow and then we're all heading up to the cabin. If it's still here in a couple weeks when I get back, I'll know it was really meant for me.

Two days later, I was opening up the shop as usual at 10AM. I opened the door and there was a violin that had fallen off the rack and crashed to the ground. The scroll was cracked. My heart sunk when I realized it was the violin Mr D had REALLY loved. Over the next few days, I did the best and fastest scroll reapir I had ever done. "Whew", I thought, "I'll need to tell him about the damage, but it plays as nice and sounds as good as it did before. Maybe he'll be happy. I can't ask for as much money."
 
Days went by. Weeks went by. I didn't hear back from Mr. D. Another client played the violin and was interested in it. I explained how much Mr. D had loved the violin and that I wanted to at least call him before I sold it to anyone else. Luckily, the player understood.
 
I called Mr. D's home the next day, and his adult son answered. I said who I was and asked to speak to Mr. D about the violin. His son said, " Yes, my dad was talking about that violin that evening. But I'm really sorry to tell you my Dad passed away." I was shocked! he was a pretty healthy guy as far as I knew. I said, "I'm so sorry, I really liked you Dad. How did it happen?" Mr D's son said, "Well, my dad went up to the cabin ahead of the rest of us to fix things up a bit. We got there at 10 the next morning. When we opened the door, there he was, dead on the floor." I again said how sorry I was and asked when that happened. His son replied, "Oh, it was just two days after he was at your shop.
 
Two days after he was in the shop???!! That was the day the violin that he loved had fallen off the rack. The violin that he REALLY loved. I guess the feeling was mutual. And very close. And independently, both his family and I had opened the door, walked in and there he/the violin were on the floor!”

Violins are certainly elegant, almost mystical instruments with a long history and often used throughout the ages, heirlooms that seem to resist the pull of time. It is perhaps this quality that draws in these supernatural forces, or maybe it is just the almost larger-than-life air they hold about themselves, haunting sounds demanding a haunting atmosphere. Whatever the case may be, these are some undoubtedly spooky accounts of haunted objects, and one wonders just what may be at the root of them, or indeed if they are even real at all.

What article about haunted and cursed instruments would be complete without mention of haunted guitars? One notorious story is connected to not the guitar itself, but to the guitarist. In this case, we go back to 1967, which saw the formation of one of the most beloved and best-selling bands of all time, the British-American rock group Fleetwood Mac, which was originally founded by the original guitarist Peter Green. The group achieved phenomenal success throughout the 70s and 80s, with their breakout smash album being 1977’s Rumours, which remained at the top of U.S. charts for 31 straight weeks, produced four U.S. Top 10 singles, and sold around 19 million copies in the United States alone, and currently has sold over 40 million copies worldwide, making it the 8th best selling album of all time.

Fleetwood Mac has seen a lot of shuffling and changing of its members over the years, to the point that the only member who has remained consistent is drummer Mick Fleetwood. Yet while most of these departures and changes have been the normal evolution of a music group over the ages, one slightly spooky exception is the long series of bizarreness that has seemed to have befallen the position of the group’s guitarist. The original guitarist, Peter Green, was forced to leave the band after doing too much acid in the 1970s, after which he was replaced by Jerry Spencer, who ended up getting strung out on mescaline and joining a weird sex cult in 1971. In 1972, another Fleetwood Mac guitarist, Danny Kirwin, had a bizarre meltdown on stage wherein he bashed his head on a wall and then descended into the audience to taunt the other band members. Kirwin would be committed to an insane asylum and would die homeless years later. As recently as 2012, the band would see the deaths of two of their guitarists; Bob Weston, who died of an aneurysm, and Bob Welsh, who committed suicide after losing the ability to walk. Indeed, the only Fleetwood Mac guitarist who hasn’t seemed to have been plagued with death and misfortune is Lindsey Buckingham.

A more modern account of a haunted guitar is the so-called “Satanic Six-String,” a nondescript guitar with the logo removed that would otherwise be pretty mundane if it weren’t for the mysterious stories surrounding it. It is said that in 1979, a teenager owned the guitar who was into all kinds of macabre and occult practices. The posting for the sale of the guitar on the site Reverb comes with a description that reads:

“A kid that lived on my street when I was growing up was rumored to be into devil worship, seances, Aleister Crowley, Black Magic, and other dark endeavors of the Spirit World. I later learned that this neophyte necromancer was born in June of ’66, and died tragically on Halloween, October 31, 1979, when he was just thirteen years old. His death has never been solved, but the calamitous kid was found lying on his bed with THIS GUITAR draped across him, apparently electrocuted, even though this is an acoustic guitar! Additionally, when the damnable corpse of this soulless stooge of Satan was eventually discovered, a 45 record of Blue Oyster Cult’s ‘Don’t Fear the Reaper’ was playing repeatedly on the Mephistophelean moppet’s GE Wildcat record changer!! Years later, I ran into the defunct boy’s mother (herself a propagating practitioner of the Pagan arts), and when I informed her that I was a professional guitarist, she offered me her devilish, daisy-pushin’ son’s git-fiddle. I've heard the strings discordantly ring out, despite no one being near the guitar. Further, on three occasions I put the guitar in my bedroom closet, only to find the guitar on my bed when I returned home (and I live alone!) The finals straw occurred when I saw the guitar levitate out of the trash can I had somberly placed it in. It’s better owned by someone more in tune with the tenebrous forces of the malevolent netherworld. Please use EXTREME CAUTION when conjuring the phantasmic spirits that seem to be channeled through this iniquitous instrument.”

The price of the guitar was listed as $666, and it was snatched up by none other than the host of the TV show Ghost Adventures, Zach Bagans. Completely ignoring the warning in the description of the instrument, Bagans has said:

“I don't play the guitar very well, but you can rest assure that I will most definitely play this instrument and see if anything happens to me. I was really blown away by the story behind the guitar and how the seller got the guitar directly from the boy's mother," Because of that provenance is why I jumped as fast as I could to buy the guitar. I was literally driving in my car when my phone started blowing up about the guitar for sale and was shocked when I was able to buy it. Because the musician who had the guitar experienced so much with it, including it levitating and playing by itself, I will display it securely at The Haunted Museum for close observation.”

The guitar can be seen at Bagans’ museum to this day alongside a menagerie of various other haunted and cursed items. Is it really haunted or was this all a practical joke pulled off by the one who put it up for sale? Who knows? In the end who really knows what the deal is with any of these haunted or cursed instruments? What we can be sure of is that music has held an important place in the human psyche for a very long time, and so perhaps just as other things and places it too can be infused with paranormal forces.