Most of the experiences I had as a child that I thought of as paranormal were ones that I’ve been able to explain away in adulthood. There remains, however, an exception which I will describe to you now. This is only a small thing, but to this day, I can’t account for it.

I was around eight years old at the time. My bedroom was at the end of the house, across from my parents’ room, with a short hallway between us. Down at the other end of the hallway there was a door which let onto the living room. Just inside the living room there was a computer desk. The distance between my room and the computer would have been about twenty feet (six meters).

I was lying awake one night (I had bouts of severe insomnia back then). I don’t remember what time of year it was, but the attic fan wasn’t on, and neither was the heat. On nights like that, you could hear everything that happened in that part of the house.

A strange, eerie music began to play from the computer. Now, this was a clunky old thing that ran on DOS, not even state of the art by mid-80’s standards. We only had a handful of floppies for it, and, being a curious child, I knew them all. This was not music from any disk we had.

The moment the music began, I was paralyzed with fear. It may sound like an overreaction, but I was afraid because everyone else in the house was asleep. If anyone had gone into the living room, I would have heard their footsteps. Moreover, I would have heard them turn the computer on (it had a huge red switch that made a loud clunk when you flicked it, and we never left it running unattended).

The music played for a short time, I would think less than a minute, and was gone as suddenly as it had begun. I was too frightened to investigate and just laid there awake for the rest of the night. I never told my family about it and it never happened again so far as I can remember. The event did instill me with a certain anxiety, though, as I dreaded that it might reoccur. The computer broke a few months later and we never replaced it.

This story has an addendum. Several years later, while watching a cartoon, I heard a piece of music that sounded so much like it that it gave me chills. If you can imagine a low-quality midi version of the first forty seconds or so of this, then you’ll have a good idea of what I heard that night: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6Ud952M0SE

Even after all this time, I still don’t really like to listen to that. ^.^;