Unfiltered Story #283601

Many decades ago, when my sister and I were quite young, while on holiday we were taken to a highly entertaining wax museum. One of the exhibits which delighted us macabre little brats was one of a coffin slowly opening with a creaking noise, while a skeleton in a black robe played spooky music on the organ. Oh, how we loved it. We would watch it over and over again. And for a few years after that, when the same summer holiday time came again, we would be taken back to this museum to watch it all over again.

Not long after that, we moved home from a benighted rural community to a modern cosmopolis which had something akin to culture. All new to us, of course. Anyway, Sunday came along, as it did, and we went to church with our parents, as we did (they were very devoutly church-going), and we sat through a church service very much the same in structure and feel to the ones we were used to in the tiny village we came from. Now this being a cultured cosmopolis, the organist was a little more accomplished than the octogenarian who could just about fumble his way through a hymn tune that we were used to, and actually had some classical music in his repertoire.

Imagine the reaction of my sister and me when the exit music was played on the organ when it was time to leave. It was exactly that spooky piece of music that we had heard in the wax museum. Could we stifle our snorts and giggles? Our parents couldn’t get us out of there quickly enough.

For the record, the piece of music in question was Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. We weren’t to know what it was, to us it was just that spooky music.

To this day, I can unfailingly make my sister laugh uproariously when I just hum the first few notes of that piece of music.