Abra Plays the Piano Telekinetically

Abra Plays the Piano Telekinetically is an early demonstration of Abra Stone’s unusual abilities: as a baby, she reproduced a piano passage without touching the instrument. The episode moves from a family’s remembered pleasure in music to the unnerving discovery that the notes can sound in an empty room, apparently suspended in the air. What begins as a question of whether someone is playing the piano becomes David Stone and Lucy Stone’s first clear encounter with Abra’s power.

The Song and Its Listener

Music was already part of Abra’s earliest home life. Lucy Stone had played piano since grammar school, and the family kept a Vogel in the living room, where Abra’s playpen had once stood. For Christmas in 2001, David Stone gave Lucy a book of Beatles songs arranged for piano. Abra had listened while lying in her playpen, responding with smiles and kicks when Lucy played.

Her strongest response was to “Not a Second Time,” a less prominent Beatles song whose lively instrumental break centers on a piano riff. David remembered that, when Lucy played it, Abra bicycled her legs rather than merely kicking. In his affectionate description, she lay on her back in a bright purple onesie, too young to walk but moving as if she were dancing. The detail makes the later performance a continuation, and then a startling transformation, of an ordinary family memory: Abra had first been known as an especially enthusiastic listener.

The passage she reproduced was brief and, to an adult musician, simple. David counted twenty-nine notes in the break, with the left hand picking them out. Its modest technical demands make the incident more striking rather than less: the task was not a complicated concert performance, but a recognizable sequence that her parents knew well. When the notes sounded perfectly, David heard not a vague resemblance to music but the exact piano break they had played for Abra.

The First Performance

The first incident came in the spring of 2002. David and Lucy were in bed reading, while a television weather report played during the late news. Abra was supposed to be asleep in her room. When Lucy asked David to turn off the television, he used the remote; then they heard the piano passage coming from downstairs. The timing—after the television was switched off—made the music seem to belong to the house itself rather than to a broadcast.

David and Lucy were frightened. They imagined an intruder, though the music was an absurd accompaniment to a burglary. David had no gun, and his golf clubs were in the garage, so he took the largest book he could find and went downstairs to confront whoever might be there. He had asked Lucy to take the phone and call emergency services if he shouted. The search yielded no person: the doors were locked, and the cover over the piano keys was down. The ordinary explanations fell away one by one. The house was secure, no one was at the instrument, and the piano was covered.

They went to Abra’s room without discussing what the incident might mean. David recalled that both parents seemed to suspect their daughter, but neither wanted to say it aloud. Abra was awake in her crib, simply looking at them. Her alert expression becomes the quiet counterpoint to the parents’ alarm: the adults have just heard something they cannot explain, while the baby offers no account of it. At this point, the music is associated with Abra, but its mechanism remains unseen.

Watching and Confirmation

After the first performances, David and Lucy tried to make a plan. They had several nights off, and David followed John Dalton’s practical advice to parents: anticipate a problem and organize a response. For the next three nights, he slept on the sofa directly across from the piano. The arrangement turned a frightening mystery into something he could watch for, placing a witness beside the instrument rather than relying on a sound heard from upstairs.

On the third night, the music began just as David was settling down. The Vogel’s cover was closed. He hurried over and lifted it, but the keys were not moving. By then he could tell that the notes were not coming from the piano at all. They seemed to issue from the space above it, from thin air. The change is decisive: the first night had left room for a hidden player or an unexplained sound from the instrument; the watched performance excluded the piano itself as the source.

Lucy was in Abra’s room. This time she was prepared to act, and she asked Abra to play the passage again. After a short pause, the same music sounded. David stood so close that he felt he could almost reach for the notes. His account gives the performance two witnesses and makes the repetition important: it was not only an unexplained sound overheard once, but something Abra could produce again in response to her mother’s request. John Dalton stopped writing as David recounted it, underscoring how the concrete particulars—a closed cover, still keys, and a repeated tune—make the story difficult to dismiss as a loose impression.

A Lullaby, Not a Disappearance

The repeated nighttime music ended when Lucy took Abra onto her lap and told her not to play at night because her parents could not sleep. The power itself did not disappear; rather, its audible use in that setting stopped. About three weeks later, the music returned once, much softer and from upstairs, in Abra’s room. The shift in volume and location changed the scene from a performance that alarmed her parents into something intimate and self-contained.

Concetta Reynolds interpreted that final occurrence as Abra waking and playing herself a little lullaby because she could not get back to sleep. The account does not describe the piano being touched or the notes being made by any physical instrument. Instead, the same passage that had sent David downstairs with a book now belonged to a quieter moment in the baby’s room. The episode therefore ends not with an explanation of how Abra’s ability works, but with a new understanding of what the music might mean to her: it could be more than a startling display for other people; it could also accompany her own waking and comfort.

Significance

The incident establishes a pattern that will matter in accounts of Abra’s abilities: an apparently ordinary event becomes extraordinary through careful attention to circumstance. The Beatles song is familiar to her parents, the piano is a fixed object they can inspect, and the locked house gives them reason to search for a human source. David’s watch beside the covered instrument and Lucy’s request for a repeat progressively narrow those possibilities. The story’s force lies in this domestic testing rather than in a technical explanation of the power.

It also marks a change in how David and Lucy understand their daughter. At first they respond as householders who fear an intruder; then, despite their hesitation, they recognize that Abra is connected to the sound. Their response is not simply wonder. They are startled, make a plan, watch the piano, and finally ask Abra to stop playing at night so they can sleep. Yet when the music returns softly in her room, its meaning broadens. The same unexplained capacity that frightened her parents can also appear as a private, soothing part of Abra’s life.