Rogue Pi­anos Con­nected to Van­ish­ing Stu­dents?

Note: the fol­low­ing story is fic­ti­tious. Any cor­re­la­tion to ac­tual peo­ple or events is co­in­ci­den­tal. 

MISHAWAKA—Bethel has been blessed with an abun­dance of lovers of mu­sic and tal­ented mu­si­cians, and as a re­sult there is a plethora of mu­si­cal in­stru­ments all over cam­pus, in­clud­ing sev­eral pi­anos. But over the past week, a mys­te­ri­ous phe­nom­e­non has the cam­pus ex­tremely con­cerned. 

Cliff Bayse, a ju­nior and res­i­dent of Manges Hall, had the grave mis­for­tune of ex­pe­ri­enc­ing the events first­hand af­ter his room­mate, sopho­more Mal­colm Tolderow, be­came a lit­tle too cu­ri­ous. 

“It was just Mal and I, hang­ing in our room like any other Wednes­day night,” said Bayse. “We heard some­one play­ing the pi­ano in Sailor, a real spooky tune, and Mal de­cided to take a break from study­ing to go see who it was.” 

Bayse is still shaken up by the events that fol­lowed. 

“He was gone, five min­utes maybe, and then the mu­sic just stopped,” said Bayse. “I fig­ured he was talk­ing to the pi­anist, and I waited, like, half an hour, but when I went out there, the room was empty.” 

Bayse tried tex­ting and then call­ing his friend, but re­ceived no re­sponse, and when Tolderow was still miss­ing at the 12:30 cur­few, Bayse called Cam­pus Safety. 

“They came and looked around a lit­tle, had a lot of ques­tions,” said Bayse. “They prob­a­bly thought I was nuts. Maybe I am. But Mal’s still miss­ing, and I, I just don’t know what to do.” 

Bayse be­came too over­come with emo­tion to con­tinue the in­ter­view, but we did man­age to speak with an­other stu­dent who had a sim­i­lar en­counter, fresh­man Mira Shirley. She was spend­ing the evening in the base­ment of the Ever­est-Rohrer build­ing with her best friend, Josie Bary. 

“We were just talk­ing, spend­ing a lovely evening to­gether and try­ing to for­get about home­work,” said Shirley. “Then, we heard the grand pi­ano—you know, the one in the prac­tice room—any­way, we heard a real eerie song be­ing played on it. Haunt­ingly beau­ti­ful.” 

Shirley and Bary wanted to see who was play­ing the pi­ano, so they walked over to the room. 

“The door was shut, so we opened it slowly in case there was some kind of event or pri­vate les­son or some­thing go­ing on that we did­n’t know about,” said Shirley. “But as we opened the door, the mu­sic stopped, and by the time we had it open wide enough to see in­side, the per­son was gone.” 

Shirley and Bary looked around briefly for the mys­te­ri­ous pi­anist be­fore giv­ing up and go­ing back to the lounge. But then the mu­sic started again. 

“We both ran to the door, but we were too late again,” said Shirley. “The mu­sic stopped, and the room was empty.” 

They re­turned to the lounge, and when the mu­sic started again a few min­utes later, Shirley did­n’t want to in­ves­ti­gate. 

“I just felt like it was too weird, some joke or some­thing, and I did­n’t want to keep wast­ing time chas­ing it,” said Shirley. “But Josie wanted to know. She had this in­sa­tiable cu­rios­ity.” 

Shirley stayed in the lounge as Bary crept slowly up to the door and slid silently into the room. 

“I was sur­prised the mu­sic did­n’t stop,” said Shirley. “It kept play­ing for about a minute af­ter she went in be­fore end­ing, right in the mid­dle of a scale.” 

As soon as the mu­sic stopped, Shirley leapt to her feet and ran into the room. 

“It was empty,” said Shirley. “She was gone.” 

Shirley im­me­di­ately called Cam­pus Safety, and they are in­ves­ti­gat­ing. They have their hands full, with a to­tal of 17 stu­dents miss­ing since the be­gin­ning of the month and a cas­cade of re­ports about the strange mu­sic. Cur­rently, only Bay­se’s and Shirley’s en­coun­ters have pro­vided any di­rect con­nec­tion be­tween the mu­sic and the dis­ap­pear­ances, but it is pos­si­ble that there sim­ply were not wit­nesses pre­sent for the other van­ish­ings. 

Cam­pus Safety re­leased the fol­low­ing com­ment con­cern­ing the cases: 

“Cam­pus Safety is in­ves­ti­gat­ing the in­ci­dences. We en­cour­age stu­dents to avoid be­ing alone with pi­anos and not to try to solve this case them­selves. We hope to reach a con­clu­sion in the mat­ter very soon.”