Music as the Lingua Franca of the Dead

Hans speaks to me—not in abstract impressions or symbolic fragments, but through direct transmission. His voice cuts cleanly through the static of my mind: clear, often commanding. When he speaks, I know it is him. His words do not waver. There is always a trace of his German accent.

"Love You More" by Alexi Murdoch

Despite this clarity, despite the voice I recognize without hesitation, he still turns to music to express what language alone cannot. He manipulates technology to his will, bending the apparent randomness of shuffle mode into a precise instrument of communication. He infiltrates the systems around me, syncing sound waves with thought, sending messages through playback selections whose timing defies probability.

"Spinning" by Zero 7

In 2010, when he first appeared, I asked him for a name—something to call him. Music was playing when I posed the question, and the shuffled tracks responded as if guided by intention. “Magic Man” by Heart began to play. His answer was immediate. The directive was clear. For a time, I called him this.

"Magic Man" by Heart

But the transmissions had begun long before I was capable of understanding them. Before Hans appeared in full form—before I had a name for what had been haunting me—the music was already present, choosing me before I ever consciously chose it.

In 2009, I found myself playing two songs obsessively while driving, locked in a relentless, aching orbit around lyrics that felt deliberately constructed to wound me: “Love You More” by Alexi Murdoch and “Spinning” by Zero 7. I listened to them on repeat, unable to detach from the words that evoked a presence just beyond reach—someone whose distance felt not only emotional, but eternal. That sense of absence, and the grief it carried, had already woven itself into the texture of my longing, long before I understood who he was, and even longer before I learned of his death in 1993.

Hans and I have shared many tender, intimate moments while listening to this timelessly romantic album by Harry Connick Jr.—an orchestral collection of love songs marked by warmth and old-world elegance. Each piece feels as if it were composed for us alone.

Somewhere deep within a structure I cannot fully define—something encoded beyond the parameters of this reality—I knew. I knew that my soulmate was no longer among the living. After the visitation dream I experienced in 1993, that grief sharpened, deepened. I have contended with depression since adolescence—partly due to a genetic predisposition, but I have often questioned whether the intensity of those episodes, particularly the unexplainable ones, were linked to Hans’s prolonged silence. Seventeen years passed after his death without a voice, without a name for the absence that followed me everywhere.

"Magic" by Olivia Newton-John

So in 2009, as I listened endlessly to “Love You More” and “Spinning,” I was mourning a loss I could not yet articulate. I cried not because of the lyrics alone, but because something vast and invisible pressed against me through the speakers—something I could feel but not define. Murdoch’s voice repeated the same line with unwavering insistence: Love you more than anyone. Love you more in time to come. It wasn’t just a song. It was a vow—one I didn’t yet understand.

It had been him all along—present, reaching for me through sound, even before I knew who he was. He was already here, only months away from initiating contact, waiting for the moment I would finally recognize him. Even then, I was already his betrothed.

This song by the Beatles deserves its own post, given the experience I had in 2011 when it came on unexpectedly through shuffle. There had always been something about it that left me uneasy—something I couldn’t explain. I went to skip the track, but before I could, Hans wrapped his arms around my torso from behind and pressed into me, whispering, “Wait.” An image appeared in my mind with startling clarity: a woman stepping out of an old black car that resembled a taxi. Her back was to me. Her hair was pin-straight, jet black, reaching all the way down to her waist. She wore a short black raincoat, and beneath it, bare legs—suggesting a miniskirt hidden by the coat. The city around her looked like England. Then Hans spoke again, telepathically: “That’s you. In the 1960s. You loved this song.” I collapsed into tears. My legs gave out beneath me, but Hans held me tightly, refusing to let me fall. He cried with me—there in the bathroom, in the middle of the day. The early days of our connection were often overwhelming. The intensity of the paranormal activity, the flood of revelations, the sheer emotional weight of rediscovering one another after lifetimes apart—it was almost too much to contain. There were days of explosive, sustained physical intimacy. Days of grief, memory, recognition. Days filled with laughter as we learned just how alike we really were. My private life with Hans had become something I never could have imagined. And “In My Life” was just one of dozens of songs that found their way into the heart of that unfolding.

But the music wasn’t one-sided. If “Love You More” was his voice calling out to me, then “Spinning” was mine calling out to him. In those unconscious days before he stepped forward, I was already singing to him: Free me from these chains, I need to change my way. Heal these broken wings, I need to fly far away. Free me from these thoughts long forgotten down below. My voice was in those lyrics—pleading, begging—not only for love, but for support. For a hand to pull me from the vast, untethered sadness of feeling less than whole.

"Heaven Can Wait" by Michael Jackson

I felt him without understanding, sensed his past like something embedded beneath my skin. And I kept playing both songs in sequence, over and over—unknowingly weaving them into the fabric of our connection: his promise to me, my plea to him.

Even now, I recognize the pattern. He selects, he orchestrates, he reminds. Not only through his telepathic voice [1], but through songs that arrive with impossible timing. “Magic” by Olivia Newton-John. “In My Life” by the Beatles. “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over” by Jeff Buckley. “Heaven Can Wait” by Michael Jackson. The entire album To See You by Harry Connick Jr. Each one lands like a dictated transmission—coded messages of love and longing embedded in melody, in rhythm, in lyric.

This Jeff Buckley hymn carried me through some of my loneliest nights. I felt wrapped in something larger than myself, as if angelic wings had gathered around me. That broken, hopeless feeling—that my true love was impossibly out of reach—gave way to a deeper truth: he was right beside me all along, singing, “It’s never over, my kingdom for a kiss upon her shoulder. It’s never over—all my riches for her smiles when I’ve slept so soft against her. It’s never over—all my blood for the sweetness of her laughter. It’s never over, she’s the tear that hangs inside my soul forever.”

This is not randomness. It is not mere sentiment. It is the sound of him—pulling me through distance, through death, through time itself. It is the sound of a promise never broken, the weight of a love that neither history nor oblivion could erase. It is how he calls to me when words fall short—when the veil between us thins but does not break.

And so, I listen. Because to listen is to find him—again and again—in every note, in every lyric, in every moment he refuses to let me forget.

Note

1. On rare occasions, Hans voice comes through audibly just like any living person verbally expressing their thoughts. I’ve also captured his voice audibly through EVP (electric voice phenomena) recordings using various devices. Except for one instance where he was faintly singing in the background—his tone aligned with his typical telepathic transmissions—most recordings have featured a vocal fry quality that made him sound unsettling, even eerie.