In life, Eloise Kanner was not a frightening woman.
In fact, she was the kind of woman people imagined when they spoke of someone having a "calling." She walked with poise but never pride. She wore long skirts and soft blouses, always with a shawl wrapped around her shoulders like a second skin. Her perfume was lavender, faint but ever-present, and her voice — when she spoke — was the sound of calm water meeting shore. No one ever heard her yell. She never needed to.
She was the music teacher at St. Edmund's High School — a once-proud institution nestled between rusted suburban railways and wilting maple trees. For decades, Ms. Kanner was its heart. She believed music wasn't just art — it was memory. Emotion. A secret language carved from the breath between souls. To her, a melody was sacred.
Her classroom reflected that belief.
The old music wing had been built in the 1950s, and somehow, her room seemed frozen in that golden time. Velvet curtains in deep red swept across tall windows like theater drapes. The floorboards, old and slightly bowed, creaked rhythmically when you walked, as if the room itself was humming along. The chalkboard was green and stained with ancient notes. A grand piano sat at the front, its black lacquered surface gleaming despite the cracked bench.
Every day, Eloise Kanner arrived early. She dusted each music stand, polished the brass instruments, and re-aligned every crooked chair before the first bell rang. Her desk was never cluttered — only a teacup, a metronome, and an upright file folder of carefully laminated sheet music.
Her students called her Ms. Echo.
Not because she was spectral — not then — but because she had a habit of singing their names during roll call. She'd call out, in a gently rising lilt:
"Leo? Leeeo."
"Carla? Caarlaaa."
"Miriam? Miii-rii-aam."
It became something of a tradition. A soft joy. Students would smile behind their sheet music, secretly hoping she'd call their names just once more.
But schools, like songs, don't always end on the right note.
By the late 1980s, St. Edmund's had begun to rot — not all at once, but in slow, invisible ways. Paint peeled from lockers. Water fountains stopped working. The principal's office
door stayed shut more often than not. The school board made cuts — first to art supplies, then to field trips, and finally, to the music budget.
The music wing became a ghost town.
Funding dried up. Sheet music vanished. Instruments disappeared, stolen or broken, often returned in pieces with mocking notes inside the cases. A clarinet snapped in two. A trumpet filled with chewing gum. The students changed, too. The shy, dreamy ones began skipping class. And in their place came a new crowd — loud, unruly, armed with sarcasm like knives.
The jocks — once content to keep to their own — began prowling the halls in groups, laughing at anything they didn't understand. The music wing became their favorite target. Ms. Kanner, to them, was a relic. A woman out of time. Her softness made her a mark.
Still, she didn't stop.
She kept holding rehearsals even when only four students showed up. She mopped the choir room floor herself. She taped stolen sheet music back together. And when the Winter Recital was approved — her first performance in nearly two years — she poured herself into it like it was salvation.
She spent weeks writing an original piece. A ballad called "Listen for the Light." Her eyes would glimmer when she mentioned it. She described it as a hymn for the lost, a song that reached into the shadows and pulled something warm and golden back out.
Some students believed in her. A few stayed late after class to rehearse, their voices trembling but sincere.
But others didn't. Some resented her resilience. Others thought it was hilarious. A plan began — childish at first, but crueler as the days passed.
They thought it would be a prank. Just a joke.
Recital night came in a blizzard of snow. Parents and students filled the aging auditorium, their breath fogging in the cold air. The curtain swayed as the orchestra tuned. Ms. Kanner emerged onto the stage like a dream in black velvet. Her dress flowed like ink and shimmered with tiny stitched silver notes. She held her baton with a steady grace, raised it, and turned toward the audience.
Then the feedback screamed.
It wasn't just loud — it was monstrous. A shriek of feedback from the speakers, the kind that doesn't sound man-made. It was layered and broken, an inhuman screech that clawed through every eardrum in the room.
Ms. Kanner froze.
She dropped the baton. Her eyes went wide. Her mouth opened — a silent cry. Her hands flew to her head, gripping her temples. Blood appeared at the edge of her ears. She fell to her knees, then flat to the stage, body convulsing.
The sound cut out. Someone finally unplugged the system.
For a moment, there was silence. Then screaming. Footsteps. Panic. Teachers rushed forward. Parents gathered their children.
A few of the boys — the ones behind the prank — were still laughing when they were pulled aside. That laughter died quickly.
She didn't wake up that night. Not properly.
She was hospitalized. When she finally opened her eyes, the world was silent.
The doctors called it a complete auditory rupture. Not damage. Not partial loss. Her eardrums were shredded, her nerves destroyed. She would never hear again.
The woman who once lived for sound… was deaf.
She returned home. She never answered phone calls. Her blinds stayed drawn. Students sent cards. None were answered. One former student claimed to have visited — said Ms. Kanner just sat in her chair, staring at her piano with eyes full of water and nothing behind them.
Three weeks later, the janitor found her.
It was early morning. He was unlocking the old choir room for storage inventory when he noticed the lights were on. Inside, it smelled faintly of lavender. And hanging from the rigging above the stage, wrapped in an old orange extension cord, was Eloise Kanner's body.
She had dressed herself in the same black gown from recital night. Her shoes were off. Beneath her feet was the piano bench, turned on its side.
On the music stand below, someone had placed a torn sheet of her original song. Written in flowing cursive on the margins, in black ink, were six words:
"I hope silence suits you all."
The school called it a tragic accident.
No press. No police reports. The administration repurposed the music wing for storage. They canceled the winter recital indefinitely. Counselors were brought in. Students were told not to talk about it. Not officially. Not at all.
But some rooms remember.
…
The hauntings began slowly.
First, it was just odd sounds: whispers that echoed after students spoke. Doors closing when no wind blew. Music sheets fluttering when no one had touched them.
Then came the mimicry.
A girl walking past the choir hall claimed she heard her own voice whisper, "Help me" — from behind the locked doors. Another student was lured into the music wing by what he thought was his friend calling his name. He was never found. Only his watch remained, ticking inside the piano.
No one could prove anything.
Eventually, the wing was sealed entirely — "for renovations," the school said.
But survivors claim that when two or more people enter the choir area together, especially if they're arguing or divided, the ghost of Ms. Echo wakes.
And she listens.
She listens not with ears, but with the hatred of a soul robbed of its song. She takes your voice — your most human trait — and twists it, echoing it in wrong places, wrong tones, wrong moments. She lures friends away with fake cries. She plays arguments between groups on a loop. The more chaos she hears, the stronger she becomes.
Some say she doesn't kill quickly.
Instead, she conducts.
You'll hear your name whispered sweetly behind your back. You'll answer.
Then you'll hear yourself crying for help, even if your mouth is closed.
Then, when you shout, she'll echo it — louder, layered, like a hundred mouths repeating your scream in a tunnel of mirrors.
Until finally, when you're lost and deafened by sound, she appears.
Wearing her torn black gown, holding the same baton from her final recital.
She conducts your death like it's the final movement of a great performance — slowly, beautifully, and with immense pain.
They say the last thing you hear before your eardrums rupture is the faint echo of her song, the one she never got to finish…
"Listen for the light…"
To this day, in the silence of the sealed music wing, if you press your ear against the door… you may hear it.
Not music.
Not crying.
But the distant sound of your own voice, calling back at you.