Over the years I have experienced my own paranormal events. I default to the understanding they are of a paranormal nature as usual reason and consequential attempts at debunking these occurrences have left me with no other satisfactory explanation.
One of the events occurred several years ago and is one of two that took place in schools, not a strange coincidence considering I was a teacher for many years. I use to teach in a Catholic school situated in a building with its origins in the 1930s. The large, airy classrooms had lead light in the windows imported from Italy and rather thriftily the nuns old wardrobes were used as storage cupboards. Elderly Nuns still lived in the school, in the far end of the wing I taught in and in parts on the floor above it. The nuns no longer taught but were often seen wandering around the school. There was a chapel and two classrooms, the nuns bedrooms, a kitchen and a few offices in this older part of the building. The rest of the school was newer and had been built a little away from the original building. My classroom had glorious views and above it was an unused classroom and a turret. The turret room was used for storage and closed up.
One night a group of five of us were at the school, standing outside in the courtyard. We had returned from a performance venue to the school, where parents were asked to pick up their children. As it was already dark and late we did not open the locked school but stood instead in the courtyard, waiting for the last, notoriously tardy, parent to arrive. The school was in darkness and we stood chatting in front of the verandah of my classroom, the barricaded turret looming over us.
The first indication something was not as it should be was when I happened to look up at the small turret window and from within it thought I could see a soft flicker of light.
I knew that no one could get into the room easily and looked behind me to see if perhaps it was a reflection. I could see no light sources or reflections that could explain what resembled the light cast by a candle. The window was gabled and the more I looked the more I could now see a light flickering from within, against each of the panes. Just as I was bringing the light to the attention of my colleagues we all heard, at the same time, the mournful sound of a violin. It was so loud and so clear you could hear the bow as it scraped across the strings, the instrument ebbing and flowing in peaks of what was a most sorrowful melody. By this point we had all moved closer and were standing directly under the turret, the music playing, it's evocative song undulating and filling the night air as what seemed to be a candle flickering, accompanied it.
Our attention was momentarily distracted by the late parent as she bustled through the school gate all full of excuses and the music stopped. Inside the window now there was only darkness. After the parent left we watched and listened but nothing more happened. We parted and headed home, a sense of uneasiness unspoken between us as the ever sensible principal declared it to have been a trick of the light or perhaps one of the nuns playing the instrument in another part of the building, though we knew of none of the elderly inhabitants that played the violin. The principal laughed it off declaring we could check in the morning.
I was in early and one of the groundskeepers and myself climbed the rickety stairs to the small room in the turret. It had all manner of school debris piled around and across the door, none of it looking like it had been moved in recent times. The groundskeeper and I shifted some things and with a lot of determination opened the jammed door to be greeted by a room filled with discarded junk, stacked high and across the floor. It looked as though no one had been in the room for years. We jammed the door shut replacing the items that had been in front of the door and left.
We didn't mention it again, the bustle of school life and no obvious explanation causing us to somehow agree, without saying a word, to just let it go, until one day I found myself chatting to one of the nuns that lived in the convent. She nodded and assured me that of course I heard the violin and it had been a nun that used to play the instrument but she had died young, she did however still like to come back and play when the mood struck her.
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