The Ghost Between Two Chords

Jimi Hendrix, George Frideric Handel, and the apparition at Brook Street

There are addresses in London which seem to have been chosen by history for no discernible reason other than to amuse posterity.

No. 23 Brook Street is one of them.

No. 25 is another.

The extraordinary thing is that they are not merely nearby. They are neighbours. George Frideric Handel lived at No. 25 from 1723 until his death in 1759. Nearly two centuries later, in 1968, Jimi Hendrix moved into the upper-floor flat at No. 23. Today the two houses form Handel Hendrix House, but the walls between their respective histories remain rather more interesting than any museum could make them.

I had come to Brook Street to investigate a ghost.

Not, I should make clear, because I had any particular confidence in ghosts.

I have spent enough of my life pursuing them to have acquired the healthy suspicion that the supernatural is usually much less mysterious than the people who report it. A draught becomes a manifestation. A creaking floorboard becomes the footsteps of a dead aunt. A reflection becomes an apparition. A parish verger with a guilty conscience becomes an ecclesiastical phantom.

And, occasionally, an entirely respectable musician sees a dead composer in his bathroom.

That last category deserves rather more attention.

The photograph I had brought with me showed the staircase leading towards Hendrix's flat. It was narrow, steep and rather battered-looking—the sort of staircase upon which a Georgian gentleman might have broken his neck and a 1960s rock musician might have broken someone else's sobriety.

There was a story attached to it.

George Harrison, among others, visited Hendrix at Brook Street. One of the accounts preserved by the Handel Hendrix House Trust records that Harrison once had to step over one of Hendrix's guests, who had passed out on the staircase.

I confess that this pleased me enormously.

The Beatles, Handel, Hendrix, a staircase, an unconscious visitor and a ghost in the bathroom.

One could hardly ask London for a more concentrated parcel of cultural history.

But my real question was not whether Hendrix saw something.

He said he did.

The question was:

What did he see?

And beneath that:

Did Handel really appear to Jimi Hendrix—or did Hendrix's own mind manufacture the apparition?

The respectable answer is that we cannot know.

The interesting answer is that we must therefore investigate.

I. Two musicians separated by a wall and two hundred years

I began with the obvious.

George Frideric Handel came to live at 25 Brook Street in 1723. He remained there for thirty-six years, until his death in 1759. The house was not merely somewhere he slept between engagements. It was one of the great working spaces of his life. Music was composed there, rehearsed there, performed there, discussed there, bought and sold there.

The house still preserves that extraordinary intimacy.

One can stand in the composition room and contemplate the fact that music which travelled across Europe began as ink upon paper in a room scarcely larger than some modern London kitchens.

Then one walks next door.

And there, improbably, is Jimi Hendrix.

Not metaphorically.

Not in a book.

Not on a record sleeve.

There is the flat in which he lived in 1968 and 1969, restored and presented as the place where he entertained friends, played records, rehearsed, wrote, talked and lived.

It is one of those historical coincidences which becomes more astonishing the longer one considers it.

Handel:

1685–1759.

Hendrix:

1942–1970.

Two musicians separated by 183 years of birth dates, radically different musical languages, different technologies, different social worlds and different ideas of what a musician might look like.

Yet London placed them on the same patch of pavement.

Handel had his harpsichords.

Hendrix had his electric guitar.

Handel had royal commissions.

Hendrix had amplifiers.

Handel wrote Messiah.

Hendrix played The Star-Spangled Banner as though an electric guitar had suddenly acquired an opinion about history.

And between them was one wall.

London, I thought, has always had a mischievous sense of humour.

II. The first mistake

There is another charming detail.

Hendrix was delighted to discover the connection with Handel. Indeed, some accounts suggest that he initially believed that Handel had lived in the very same flat rather than in the adjoining house.

I rather understand the confusion.

The architecture does not announce its chronology. It simply stands there, indifferent to centuries. Brick does not say:

WARNING: THIS WALL SEPARATES A BAROQUE COMPOSER FROM A ROCK GUITARIST.

The houses have been altered, restored, converted and repurposed. Their histories overlap physically even though their occupants did not overlap temporally.

And yet Hendrix did something rather wonderful with the mistake.

He did not merely shrug.

He investigated Handel musically.

According to accounts of the Hendrix flat, he acquired recordings of Handel's Water Music, Messiah and Belshazzar, and Kathy Etchingham recalled that he sometimes played along with Handel.

This is important.

Because it complicates the ghost story.

The usual version goes like this:

Jimi Hendrix lived beside Handel's former home.

One night, he saw Handel's ghost.

Therefore Hendrix, being a 1960s rock musician, must have been hallucinating.

That is rather too convenient.

Hendrix already knew who Handel was.

He was already interested in the music.

He had discovered that the house beside him had once belonged to one of Europe's most celebrated composers.

He was, in a sense, living beside a musical predecessor.

The ghost did not arrive in an intellectual vacuum.

The ghost arrived after the historical connection had already entered Hendrix's imagination.

And that matters.

III. The apparition

The account itself is almost comically precise.

Hendrix reportedly said that he saw “an old guy in a nightshirt and grey pigtail” walking through the wall.

The description has survived in several accounts of the Hendrix flat and its history. The Irish Times, recounting the story through Christian Lloyd of the museum, describes Hendrix seeing Handel's ghost in the bathroom mirror and then coming downstairs frightened, while others laughed and suggested he was drunk.

There is something I admire about the apparition.

It is not cinematic.

Handel does not arrive in a cloud of celestial fire.

He does not thunder:

JIMI HENDRIX!

from the other side.

He does not summon a choir.

He does not play a harpsichord.

He apparently looks like an old man in a nightshirt with a grey pigtail.

In other words, he looks exactly like the sort of person Handel might plausibly have looked like while wandering about his own house.

This is the first difficulty for the sceptic.

The apparition is not extravagant.

It is historically appropriate.

That makes it more interesting, not less.

If Hendrix had claimed that Handel appeared wearing sunglasses and playing a Stratocaster, I should have dismissed the matter before breakfast.

But an old Georgian gentleman in a nightshirt?

That is irritatingly plausible.

IV. The bathroom problem

There is, however, a second difficulty.

The ghost appeared in the bathroom.

This is not where I should expect Handel to make his grandest posthumous entrance.

A chapel, perhaps.

A rehearsal room.

The composition room.

A staircase.

Even a respectable London drawing room.

But a bathroom?

It is difficult to imagine the afterlife arranging its appointments so badly.

Nevertheless, the bathroom makes sense in one peculiar respect.

It was a private place.

Hendrix was alone.

He was looking into a mirror.

And mirrors have always been excellent collaborators in the manufacture of ghosts.

Jorge Luis Borges - the celebrated master of short stories, essays, and poetry - famously wrote that mirrors and copulation are abominable because they both multiply the numbers of men. Driven by a lifelong, uncanny fear of mirrors, the Argentine viewed them as tools that create a ghostly, spectral duplication of reality. In poems like Mirrors, Borges suggested that God created these reflective surfaces alongside dreams to show humanity that existence is merely a reflection and a vanity, born from his childhood dread that a mirror might take on a life of its own or trap him inside an infinite labyrinth.

A mirror is not merely a reflective surface. It is an optical machine which gives the brain two rooms where there is only one. Add darkness, fatigue, expectation, ambiguous lighting and an active imagination, and the ordinary world can become remarkably theatrical.

There is no need to invoke the supernatural to explain why a person might briefly interpret an ambiguous reflection as another human figure.

That does not prove that this happened.

It merely establishes that it could.

And so the case for hallucination must be taken seriously. But…

V. The LSD question

Naturally, someone eventually asks the question which everyone thinks but polite people hesitate to formulate.

Was Hendrix simply on drugs?

The answer requires rather more caution than the question.

Hendrix belonged to a period in which psychedelic drugs were part of the cultural environment surrounding many musicians. But the existence of drug use in Hendrix's world does not establish that he was under the influence of LSD at the particular moment when he reported seeing Handel.

There is a substantial difference between:

“Hendrix used psychedelic drugs.”

and:

“Hendrix was hallucinating from LSD when he saw Handel.”

The first is a historical question.

The second is a claim about a particular moment for which we need evidence.

I found no reliable evidence establishing that Hendrix was under the influence of LSD during the reported apparition.

So I refuse to convict the poor man on circumstantial chemistry.

Besides, there is a rather delicious problem with the drug explanation.

Suppose Hendrix was intoxicated.

Very well.

Why Handel?

Why that Handel?

Why the nightshirt?

Why the grey pigtail?

Why the house next door?

Why the composer whose music Hendrix had actually been listening to?

A psychedelic experience could certainly incorporate memories, expectations, cultural associations and recent thoughts. That is perfectly compatible with a psychological explanation.

But it does not make the story boring.

On the contrary.

If the apparition came from Hendrix's own mind, then Handel had still entered the room.

He had simply arrived by a different door.

VI. The ghost need not have been supernatural

This is where I found myself becoming slightly sympathetic to both sides.

The believer says:

Hendrix saw Handel.

The sceptic says:

Hendrix hallucinated Handel.

But these statements may be answering different questions.

The believer is asking:

Was there a real presence independent of Hendrix?

The sceptic is asking:

Was the visual experience generated within Hendrix's own consciousness?

We have no reliable means of establishing the first.

The second is entirely possible.

Yet there is another possibility which interests me more.

Perhaps the ghost was not an external being at all, but neither was it meaningless.

Perhaps Hendrix's mind produced a vivid image because the past had become psychologically present.

That may sound like a retreat from the supernatural.

It is not necessarily.

Consider music.

When I hear a recording of a dead composer, I do not hear merely vibrations produced by a machine. I hear an arrangement of intentions, habits, decisions, memories and imagination created by someone who has ceased to exist.

The dead can remain active in the living.

Not biologically.

Not necessarily supernaturally.

Culturally.

Musically.

Spiritually.

Historically.

And perhaps occasionally optically.

VII. The man with the pigtail

I went into Handel's rooms.

I looked at the portraits.

There he was.

The familiar face.

The heavy expression.

The enormous wig.

The unmistakable presence of a man who seems to have been born already mildly irritated by lesser musicians.

I have always liked Handel for this.

He does not strike me as a man who would have been particularly impressed by rock stardom. Therefore, if Handel really did appear to Hendrix, why should he have bothered with theatrical trappings? He could perfectly well have materialised in a comfortable nightshirt, with his ordinary pigtail, as though he had merely stepped out of the adjoining house to see what all the infernal racket was about.

And had he not materialised voluntarily, he would have hardly felt intimidated by the presence of a rock star.

He had already survived singers.

That alone would have made him difficult to intimidate.

But I wondered what Handel would have thought of Hendrix.

The question is absurd.

Therefore it is worth asking.

Would Handel have disliked the electric guitar?

Perhaps.

Would he have disliked amplification?

Almost certainly.

Would he have understood distortion?

That depends on what we mean by understanding.

Would he have recognised the principle of a musician commanding a room through sound?

Immediately.

That is the essential continuity.

Handel was not merely a composer in the modern academic sense.

He was a theatrical musician.

He understood spectacle.

He understood public appetite.

He understood the emotional force of massed sound.

He understood performers.

He understood publicity.

He understood money.

He understood London.

And he understood that music could make an audience feel that something larger than ordinary life had entered the room.

Hendrix understood that too.

Their technologies were different.

Their musical languages were different.

Their hair was different.

Their wigs were, admittedly, rather similar.

But both men understood musical presence.

VIII. “I haven't heard much of the fella's stuff”

There is another Hendrix remark which I particularly enjoy.

He reportedly said, in effect, that he had not heard much of Handel's music, while mentioning Bach as something he enjoyed.

The exact wording varies in recollections, so I would not put it on a brass plaque.

But the sentiment is perfectly Hendrix.

And it makes the ghost story even more amusing.

Imagine the afterlife.

Handel, after two centuries of immortality, finally encounters a musician who has occupied his former home.

He waits for reverence.

Instead Hendrix says, approximately:

“I haven't heard much of the fella's stuff.”

I imagine Handel's ghost looking wounded.

Then Hendrix puts on Messiah.

And Handel realises that the boy next door has begun listening.

That is perhaps the beginning of the real haunting.

Not the appearance.

The listening.

IX. The staircase

I returned to the staircase.

It was the photograph that had brought me there.

It looked less like a staircase than an argument between carpentry and gravity.

The wood was old and scarred. The proportions were narrow. It rises through the house with the peculiar vertical economy of an old London building in which every square inch had to justify its existence.

And suddenly I understood why the photograph bothered me.

The staircase is a perfect metaphor for the entire story.

It connects floors which belong to different lives.

You climb it and move from one world into another.

From ordinary London into Hendrix's private London.

And somewhere beyond that, through another wall, is Handel.

The ghost story happened in precisely this kind of space: between one room and another, between one century and another, between historical fact and private experience.

Even George Harrison becomes part of the architecture.

He climbed these stairs.

He stayed in the flat.

He was among the musicians who entered Hendrix's world.

Another famous musician, another layer.

Another ghost, almost.

Because that is what happens in old houses.

People leave.

The rooms remain.

And eventually the distinction between architecture and memory becomes very thin.

X. I began to suspect Handel

I should explain something.

By this stage I was becoming suspicious of Handel himself.

Not Hendrix.

Handel.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that ghosts exist.

Why would Handel appear to Hendrix?

The answer might be embarrassingly obvious.

Because Hendrix was a musician.

If I were a dead composer condemned to haunt my old house for eternity, I should hardly waste my time appearing to a plumber.

I would wait for someone who understood music.

And Hendrix did.

Perhaps the ghost was not saying:

You live in my house.

Perhaps he was saying:

You are doing something interesting with the place.

There is an enormous difference.

The haunting may therefore be interpreted not as an accusation but as a musical encounter.

Handel does not drive Hendrix away.

He does not curse him.

He does not object to the electric guitar.

He appears.

And then Hendrix starts a communion with Handel.

That is a remarkably courteous haunting.

XI. The impossible duet

I began imagining the conversation.

Not because I believed it happened.

Because the imagination is occasionally a better historian than the calendar.

Hendrix sits on the floor.

Handel stands beside the wall.

Hendrix holds the guitar.

Handel looks at it suspiciously.

“What is that?”

“A guitar.”

“It has wires.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“To make it louder.”

“Why does it need to be louder?”

“Because people like it.”

Handel considers this.

“People have always liked things being louder.”

“Yeah.”

“What is the advantage?”

“I can make it scream.”

Handel looks at him.

“So can a tenor.”

Hendrix laughs.

Then Handel notices the amplifier.

He walks around it.

He examines the controls.

He asks what each one does.

Hendrix explains.

And gradually the old composer understands something.

The electric guitar has done something the harpsichord could not.

It has made timbre itself into a compositional parameter.

Handel had dynamics.

Hendrix had electricity.

Handel had orchestration.

Hendrix had distortion.

Handel could summon trumpets.

Hendrix could make one guitar sound like a storm.

Different means.

Same obsession.

Sound.

XII. The museum

The modern museum makes the coincidence almost indecently neat.

The two addresses are now presented together as Handel Hendrix House. The museum describes them as the homes of two major musicians who lived there nearly two centuries apart.

There is even a programme called “Baroque and Roll”, in which music is performed in both spaces: baroque music in Handel's rooms and blues and guitar music in Hendrix's bedroom.

This is precisely the sort of thing that would have annoyed me had it been invented by a public-relations department.

Except that it works.

Because the buildings themselves demand the comparison.

The museum does not have to manufacture the connection.

The wall did that already.

History did that.

London did that.

Two hundred years did that.

The musicians did the rest.

And so I decided that the only proper way to investigate a musical ghost was to listen.

Not to search for a cold spot.

Not to bring along an electromagnetic gadget designed by someone who has never successfully explained electricity.

Not to sleep in the bathroom.

Certainly not to ingest anything.

I would listen.

XIII. The night of the music

That evening, London was doing what London does best.

It rained without conviction.

The pavement shone.

Cars passed.

People hurried beneath umbrellas.

Somewhere a siren complained.

Somewhere else someone was playing music through an open window.

I returned to Brook Street.

The houses stood quietly.

No. 25.

No. 23.

One composer.

One guitarist.

One wall.

One ghost story.

I entered the museum's musical spaces.

A harpsichord waited.

It is difficult to look at a harpsichord without feeling that someone has hidden a small mathematical argument inside a piece of furniture.

Then the music began.

Handel.

Not recorded Handel.

Live Handel.

The difference is considerable.

The room changed.

The notes seemed to belong to the walls.

And suddenly I understood something I had missed during the afternoon.

The question was not whether Handel's ghost had literally walked through a wall.

The question was whether Handel had ever really left.

Music makes that question inconvenient.

The composer dies.

The music does not.

XIV. The second musician

Then came the guitar.

The change was astonishing.

The room which had belonged, imaginatively at least, to powdered wigs and harpsichords suddenly acquired electricity.

A guitarist played.

Not Hendrix.

I am grateful for that.

A good impersonation would have ruined the moment.

The instrument spoke in another vocabulary.

Blues.

Bends.

Sustained notes.

Feedback.

Space.

The sound seemed almost deliberately insolent beside Handel.

And yet, after a few minutes, something peculiar happened.

The contrast began to disappear.

The music was not the same.

But the purpose was.

Both musicians were reaching for something beyond speech.

Handel had one method.

Hendrix had another.

The centuries between them became less important.

I thought of the ghost.

I thought of the bathroom.

I thought of the old man in the nightshirt and grey pigtail.

And I suddenly found myself wondering whether Hendrix had not seen the right ghost in the wrong place.

XV. The mirror

The bathroom remained the problem.

So I went back to it.

I stood where Hendrix was supposed to have stood.

There was a mirror.

I looked at myself.

For several seconds nothing happened.

I was relieved.

I have always preferred my ghosts to make appointments.

Then the lights shifted.

For an instant, reflected in the glass behind my own shoulder, I thought I saw an elderly man.

White hair.

Dark coat.

A severe face.

He seemed to be looking not at me but beyond me.

I turned.

There was nobody there.

I looked back.

Nothing.

Now, before anyone begins composing my obituary, let me explain.

It may have been a reflection.

It may have been a trick of light.

It may have been my own face distorted by the angle.

It may have been the fatigue of a long day.

It may have been imagination.

It may have been absolutely nothing.

And yet—

for one extraordinary fraction of a second—

I understood Hendrix.

Not because I had seen Handel.

But because I had experienced the peculiar shock of seeing something which the mind immediately interprets before reason has time to object.

The experience was real.

The explanation remained uncertain.

And that, I think, is where the honest ghost story begins.

XVI. The musical denouement

I returned to the main room.

The guitarist had finished.

The harpsichordist was preparing another piece.

I sat down.

And then something happened which, had I been writing this as fiction, I should probably have rejected as too obvious.

The harpsichord began to play.

A familiar Handelian phrase emerged.

Not Messiah exactly.

Something smaller.

Something intimate.

Then the guitarist joined.

Very softly.

One instrument answered the other.

Harpsichord.

Guitar.

Baroque.

Blues.

Eighteenth century.

Twentieth century.

Two houses.

Two lives.

Two rooms.

One London.

The guitar sustained a note.

The harpsichord answered.

The guitar bent the note.

The harpsichord returned to its phrase.

And suddenly I heard the entire mystery differently.

Perhaps the ghost had never been there.

Perhaps he had.

Perhaps Hendrix had seen an hallucination.

Perhaps he had seen something no scientific instrument could record.

Perhaps the apparition had been produced by a tired brain, a reflective surface, a loaded imagination and the peculiar architecture of an old London house.

Perhaps it had been Handel.

I cannot prove otherwise.

But as the two instruments continued, I realised that the most extraordinary part of the story was not that Hendrix claimed to see Handel.

It was that Hendrix heard him.

He heard the dead composer after learning that he had lived next door.

He bought his records.

He listened.

He played along.

And somehow, two hundred years after Handel's death, a young American musician living at No. 23 Brook Street began answering the music of the man who had lived at No. 25.

That is a form of communion.

Whether supernatural or not, it is real.

The final notes began to fade.

The harpsichord played one last delicate figure.

The guitar answered with a single sustained tone.

It hung in the room.

Then disappeared.

Silence.

I remained seated.

And in that silence, I thought of the staircase.

The battered steps.

The musicians climbing them.

The guests.

The nights.

The bottles.

The guitars.

The records.

George Harrison stepping over an unconscious visitor.

Hendrix standing in his bathroom.

Handel composing next door two centuries earlier.

And the old man in the nightshirt walking through the wall.

I smiled.

For if Handel did appear to Hendrix, then the old composer had chosen his audience with remarkable taste.

And if Hendrix merely hallucinated him, then his mind had conjured exactly the ghost that London itself had been waiting for.

Either way, Handel got the last word.

Not through an apparition.

Not through a séance.

Not through a supernatural visitation.

Through music.

XVII. My verdict

I have therefore returned from Brook Street without solving the case.

This may disappoint those who expect an investigator to return with a photograph of Handel's ectoplasm and a certificate from the Royal Society.

I have neither.

I cannot establish that George Frideric Handel's ghost appeared to Jimi Hendrix.

I cannot establish that Hendrix was under the influence of LSD when he reported the encounter. The available accounts do not establish that specific claim.

Nor can I establish that the experience was merely the consequence of intoxication.

The historical record supports something more modest and, to my mind, more fascinating:

Hendrix lived at 23 Brook Street; Handel had lived next door at 25; Hendrix became aware of the connection; he acquired and listened to Handel's music; accounts from people connected with the museum preserve his story of seeing Handel's ghost; and the story subsequently became part of the mythology surrounding the house.

Everything beyond that belongs to interpretation.

And perhaps that is appropriate.

A ghost story which could be completely solved would cease to be a ghost story and become plumbing.

My own conclusion is therefore deliberately incomplete.

Did Handel really appear to Hendrix?

I do not know.

Did Hendrix see something?

He certainly believed he had.

Could the experience have been psychological?

Certainly.

Could it have been supernatural?

There is no reliable evidence sufficient to establish that.

But there is one thing of which I am entirely convinced.

The strangest apparition in Brook Street was not Handel.

It was music itself.

For music has an extraordinary habit of making the dead inconveniently present.

Handel died in 1759.

Hendrix died in 1970.

Yet put a harpsichord in one room and an electric guitar in the next, and neither man seems entirely absent.

Perhaps that is why the coincidence of Nos. 23 and 25 feels so unnervingly perfect.

London did not merely put two musicians next door to one another.

It placed two centuries of musical history on opposite sides of a wall.

And then, as though the city were incapable of resisting one final joke, it sent one musician's ghost—or the other musician's imagination—through it.

I left Brook Street late.

The rain had stopped.

The pavement reflected the lamps.

Behind me were the two houses.

Twenty-three.

Twenty-five.

Hendrix.

Handel.

Rock.

Baroque.

Electricity.

Organ.

Guitar.

Harpsichord.

Ghost.

Memory.

I walked away thinking that perhaps the dead do not haunt houses at all.

Perhaps they haunt continuities.

A phrase passed from one musician to another.

A melody heard by someone born long after its composer died.

A room in which one genius worked, followed two centuries later by another.

A staircase on which musicians climbed into the night.

A wall which separated two men who nevertheless managed, somehow, to meet.

And somewhere above Brook Street, in the silence after the last chord, I fancied I heard an elderly gentleman clearing his throat.

I turned.

Nothing.

Then, very faintly, from the direction of No. 25, came what sounded like a single note.

From No. 23 came another.

I smiled.

“Good evening, gentlemen.”

The second note faded.

The first seemed to answer.

And I went home.

After all, if Handel's ghost has learned anything from Jimi Hendrix, it is probably that the proper ending to a musical argument is not an explanation, but another chord.