Things That Go Bump in the Night

Three records this week about things that won’t stay put after dark, arranged by how far away they are. First, from 1911, “That Mysterious Rag” — Irving Berlin and Ted Snyder writing a song about a tune that gets into your sleep and wakes you up screaming, and then making it catchy on purpose. The haunting is the record you bought. Then back to 1903 and the best ghost in the English language: Benjamin Binns has been hanged, he’s allowed home for one hour after midnight, he finds his widow remarried and her new husband wearing his old clothes — and instead of weeping about it, he explains his new job. He’s working séances now. Rapping tables, playing the instruments. The thing that goes bump in the night has a trade. And we finish in 1908 with “The Phantom Brigade,” a ghost army built entirely out of a dynamic marking: it comes out of silence, marches past, and dissolves, and nothing is ever shown to you. It’s the quietest record of the three and the only one that raises the hair on your arms. One other thing. On all three discs, somebody’s name is a lie — and not one of those lies was sinister. That’s just how the record business worked in 1908.