The Piano in the Empty Music Room Never Reaches the Final Measure

Our school music room is at the end of the second floor of the old building.

You have to turn once more down the hallway beside the art room to reach it, and through the small window above the door, you can partly see the piano inside. During the day, it is just a music room. Students line up for performance tests, someone plays the recorder wrong and everyone laughs, and someone gets scolded for putting their bag on the piano bench.

But after school, it feels a little different.

When the sun goes down, the hallway on the second floor of the old building darkens first. If the music room lights are off, the piano beyond the window looks less like a piano and more like a black shape.

The seniors used to say this when passing that door.

“If someone’s playing inside, just keep walking.”

At first, I did not know what that meant.

Piano ghost stories are a pretty old school rumor. Even Ghost Stories has an episode where an unmanned piano plays “Für Elise” in the old school building’s music room. But the story at our school is not really about a cursed song. It is closer to practice that never ended.  

I first found the rumor properly because of an old timetable beside the music room door.

Under this y