The Effect
It is 1848, and the famous Polish composer and piano virtuoso Frederic Chopin is performing his Sonata in B flat minor at a recital in London. Despite being a natural introvert, the recital is going well and the gathering of people in attendance is enraptured by the ethereal music streaming from Chopin’s fingertips. Then, quite without warning, Chopin stops playing.
He freezes as if in a state of abject terror, gazing in horror at the half-opened case of his piano. His mouth drops, eyes peeled in fear, the colour emptying from his face. Then, to the shock of those present, Chopin abruptly starts away from the piano and rushes out of the room.
Chopin’s small audience are themselves now enveloped by a creeping sense of dread. What could possibly have made this respected composer hasten away from his instrument in such a panic? The scene, to them, looks completely normal. The half-opened piano case is still sitting as it should be, and they can see nothing whatsoever about the room that could have been the source of such alarm.
Little does this audience know that it is not the first time such an episode has unfolded in Chopin’s life. He later wrote to a friend about what had happened during that piano recital in London: “I was about to play the March when, suddenly, I saw emerging from the half-open case of my piano those cursed creatures that had appeared to me on a lugubrious night at the Carthusian monastery. I had to leave for a while in order to recover myself…”
The night at the monastery Chopin was referring to in this letter had occurred some time earlier, and the incident was described by his lover George Sand in her memoirs. She wrote that Chopin had regularly experienced terrifying visual hallucinations, but the visit to the monastery, in particular, was
“full of terrors and ghosts for him”.
Plagued by ill health from childhood, Chopin claimed to see ghosts his entire life and always had a peculiar - and some might say, unhealthy - fascination with the morbid. His diaries were riddled with references to corpses, and horrifying accounts of encounters with “cohorts of phantoms”, as time and time again he was struck by extraordinary and horrifying visitations. It was as though wherever he went, he was besieged by crowds of appalling and demonic entities, crawling over themselves to get to him, evil glinting in their dark eyes, malicious intent set deep in their perverse expressions.
Yet, as well as being introverted, Chopin was also a notoriously complex person. He was known to be charming, yet at the same time capable of explosive demonstrations of rage. He was a renowned composer, crippled by self-doubt. He was shy yet vain, sensitive yet spiteful, witty yet cold. In short, his personality was a knotty cluster of contradictions.
Could such a contradictory character - respected composer or not - really be believed when he said he was so frequently being plagued by visions of the dead? Were these visions merely the colourful workings of a sensitive and brilliant mind? Or might they instead have had something to do with the fact that it was rumoured he took laudanum, made from opium, to ease his anxiety?
Many of those who had witnessed Chopin’s reaction to the diabolical creatures he’d seen rising up en masse from his piano at that London recital were convinced. He had definitely seen something terrible that night, he was, without question… haunted. And so he probably was taking laudanum in a bid to ease the terror of these bloodcurdling visitations. And who could blame him for that?
Frederic Chopin died in 1849, at the age of 39, just one year after that fateful London recital. He had continued to report being haunted by ghosts and phantasms right up until his death. So was this really the case? Could these hair-raising spectres with evil intent even have killed him? Or might there have been another explanation for these seemingly very other-worldly terrors?
The Method
Was the 19th century composer Frederic Chopin really plagued by, not only ghosts, but legions of phantasms and other terrifying visitations from the other side? Might these horrible apparitions even have been responsible for his death?
Perhaps because of his well-documented poor health, Chopin has long been a popular subject for posthumous diagnoses. Originally reported to have died of tuberculosis, Chopin’s cause of death was later identified as more likely having been cystic fibrosis or liver disease, according to extensive research by medical historians. However, until very recently, few researchers paid much attention to the composer’s neurology. After all, in Chopin’s lifetime, doctors understood little about psychosis or other potential mental health disorders. Might one of these have been behind his ghostly sightings?
Hallucinations are known to be symptomatic of a number of psychiatric disorders, including schizophrenia, but in sufferers of this illness, they usually take the form of voices rather than actual visions. Similarly, a mental health condition causing migraine with an aura is another possible cause that can be struck off the list of theories as to what might have been happening to Chopin, since his terrifying visions were too brief. And even though he was known to consume laudanum, this can also be ruled out as a potential cause of his hauntings, as they started long before Chopin began taking this medication.
Chopin fan and radiologist Maneul Vasquez Caruncho of Xeral-Calde Hospital in Lugo, Spain, has his own intriguing theory about what may have been causing Chopin to see “cohorts of phantoms.” In a recent study, Caruncho, aided by the neurologist Francisco Brañas Fernández, consulted numerous descriptions of Chopin’s behaviour, recorded during his life by his friends and pupils, as well as examining Chopin’s own diary entries.
These records, they found, were full of vivid and disturbing accounts of Chopin, late at night, and I quote: “pale in front of the piano, with wild eyes and his hair on end”. For short periods of time this behaviour was so intense that even Chopin’s friends claimed to be unable to recognise him. Chopin spoke often of the “cohort of phantoms” that haunted him, and was, at other times, totally convinced his friends were phantoms too, seeing them as the walking dead rather than solid, living beings. During these occasions of visual disturbance, Chopin himself described feeling unwell and not of this world, or “like steam” as he put it.
During their research, Caruncho and his team identified that there are only a handful of neurological disorders that produce these kinds of sensations. The visions Chopin so vividly described, such as the ghosts and demons that crawled out of his piano and besieged him on his visit to the monastery, are now known as Lilliputian hallucinations. These are detailed visions of people or objects that are much smaller than they are in real life. Dr Manuel Caruncho then went on to deduce that these short hallucinatory episodes, in particular, are a hallmark of one very specific condition: temporal lobe epilepsy.
In the kind of seizures produced by temporal lobe epilepsy, it is common to experience strange visions and intense emotions, such as those described by Chopin and his friends during his lifetime. Indeed, testimonies from witnesses can be key in diagnosing epilepsy even today.
Could Chopin actually have suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy, a little-understood condition at the time and with no treatment available? Might this have been responsible for his sudden, uncontrollable hallucinations and feelings of being haunted? Could temporal lobe epilepsy also have been responsible for some of his personality traits, like those outbursts of rage or so-called ‘coldness’?
Caruncho and his team acknowledge that without the aid of modern day testing, it is difficult to make a definitive diagnosis. But they believe that knowing Chopin may have suffered from epilepsy helps to separate the romanticised legend of this world-famous composer from the reality, helping us better understand Chopin and the music he created, music that endures to this day.
© 2025, Lora Jones. All rights reserved. Reproduction prohibited without written permission.
