Queens' College's ghost stands out within this register for being defined entirely by a sound rather than any sighting, and for provoking a response from those who live with it that is closer to indulgent tolerance than fear. Residents of the President's Lodge, the private accommodation of the college's head, have for years reported hearing a piano being played somewhere within the building late at night, at hours when no live musician could reasonably be expected to be practising.
No figure has ever been seen at the instrument, and no name, date, or identity has become attached to the unseen player, leaving this as one of this register's purest purely auditory hauntings, unaccompanied by any of the visual detail, a figure, a costume, a specific historical death, that usually gives a ghost story its more memorable shape. What has kept the story alive and affectionately told within the college, rather than treated as a nuisance to be resolved, is a specific and almost charming detail: by every account, the unseen pianist actually plays rather well, competently enough that the college has apparently never felt any real urgency to attempt an exorcism or otherwise put an end to the nightly recitals.
This good-natured tolerance sets Queens' apart from Peterhouse's rather more dramatic 1997 response to its own Combination Room haunting recorded elsewhere in this register, two Cambridge colleges taking entirely different views of what to do when their own resident ghost makes itself known, one calling in the whole fellowship for a formal exorcism, the other simply enjoying the nightly music.
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