Kentish Express Ashford & District
‘Piano man’ mystery that played out to a worldwide audience
It is one of our county’s strangest mysteries. And 15 years on, it is still not known how a man from Bavaria ended up soaking wet on a beach on the Isle of Sheppey. Unable or unwilling to speak, the only sound emitted came via the keys of a grand piano. John Nurden reports…
It was shortly before midnight when bemused police officers found him dripping wet and peering into McDonald’s in Sheerness. He was wearing a smart, dark suit but with no identification. Even the labels had been removed.
It looked like he had washed ashore at The Leas, Minster. Concerned onlookers spotted him near an abandoned boat and called police.
Officers eventually found him wandering in town and were even more puzzled to discover he could not, or would not, talk.
With few other options, they dried him, as best they could, and took him to Medway Maritime Hospital’s A&E department.
After doctors gave him a clean bill of health, the mystery man was handed into the care of social worker Michael Camp. And so began a four-month saga as the world’s media struggled to solve the secret identity of the stranger who became known as ‘Piano Man’.
Left alone with a sketch pad to write down his name, he drew a picture of a grand piano instead.
Puzzled, Mr Camp took his new charge to the hospital’s chapel where he was amazed by an instant transformation. As he sat at the keys of a piano, the stranger became calm and relaxed for the first time.
He could even play surprisingly well and was heard reciting sections from Swan Lake by Tchaikovsky and what appeared to be his own compositions.
After three weeks without any sign of recovery, a desperate Mr Camp turned to the Daily Mail to help launch a public appeal for information. Freelance photojournalist Mike Gunnill from nearby Upchurch was despatched to take pictures.
The former Kent Evening Post photographer recalled: “It was a Friday afternoon and I was looking forward to the weekend when I took a call from the picture desk.
“They said it probably wasn’t much of a story but a man had been washed up on a beach and had lost his memory. Could I go and check it out?”
So, on May 6, 2005, Mike turned up at the hospital.
The social worker had been given permission to help get a photo but the mystery man would scream whenever he saw a new face. So the pair hatched a plot.
The photographer hid in bushes with his Nikon F3 film camera and 300mm lens and halfan-hour later Mr Camp led his charge through the hospital’s grounds for a walk.
Mike, 69, said: “I only managed to fire off five shots before the man spotted me and became distressed, covered his face with his plastic music folder and started making strange noises.”
But those were the only five shots ever taken of him. Mike said: “Even then, I wasn’t sure I had what we needed.”
He drove home and spent an agonising hour in his darkroom processing the film to see the results.
Of the five shots, two were no good. The others captured a frail, lightly-bearded figure with spikey blond hair, wearing his by now dried-out suit and white shirt and with every possible button done up.
Mike emailed them to the Mail’s picture desk in London and explained that the man wasn’t talking but loved playing the piano.
“Like a piano man?” replied a weary voice at the other end of the phone.
Three weeks passed but still the photos had not been used.
Then Mike received a call saying the executives weren’t going to use his pictures because they believed the man was an asylum-seeker and it was an elaborate hoax. But Mike was welcome to sell the pictures to anyone else.
The Mail was not alone. The manager of a pub near where he was found maintained the stranger was “just another illegal immigrant” who had either jumped ship or been pushed overboard by people smugglers as coastguards closed in.
Instead, it was down to the Mail on Sunday to break the news on May 15. Mike’s front page photo unleashed a worldwide media storm as news organisations fought to be the first to find out who the mystery man was.
Only later would he be unmasked as 20-year-old German Andreas Grassl following an appeal when more than 800 calls swamped the National Missing Person’s Helpline.
Canon Alan Amos, the hospital chaplain, said at the time: “Playing seems to be the only way he can control his nerves and his tension and relax.
“When he is playing, he blanks everything else out. He pays attention to nothing but the music.”
If allowed to, he would play for three or four hours at a stretch and at times had to be physically
removed because he refused to stop.
The ‘piano man’ was later transferred to Littlebrook Hospital, a secure mental health unit in Bow Arrow Lane, Stone, near Dartford, where manager Ramanah Venkiah said: “He has been playing the piano to a very high quality and staff say it is a real pleasure to hear it. But we don’t know what his position is because he is not co-operating at all.”
By late July, nursing staff were wondering whether their patient’s voice box had been damaged or had been removed. But all speculation came to an abrupt end on the morning of Friday, August 19, when a cleaner went into his room and asked routinely: “Are you going to speak to us today?”
Unexpectedly, the Piano Man opened his mouth and replied: “I think I will. I am not feeling very well.”
He explained he was a 20-yearold Bavarian who, far from stepping out of the sea, had arrived in England by Eurostar train from Paris and had been trying to kill himself in the hours before he was picked up.
He told hospital staff he had two sisters and admitted he couldn’t play the piano particularly well and had only drawn one because “it was the first thing that came to mind.”
By the time news of his recovery reached the press, Andreas Grassl was back with his dairy-farming parents in the tiny village of Prosdorf in Bavariawhere he would only speak in carefully measured statements issued through the family’s solicitor Dr Christian Baumann.
His father Josef, 46, and wife Christa, 43, were delighted to have their son - one of the most famous missing persons in the world - back home in southern Germany.
Josef, ruddy-faced and wearing green Wellington boots, overalls and cap, wept as he told the Daily Mirror: “We honestly thought he was dead. Not knowing what had happened to him was torture.
“I went to bed every night and woke every morning wondering where he was, wondering if he was dead or alive.
“At one stage I thought it would be better to find out he was dead, just to stop me and my wife going through this torture. She has been terribly upset and bothered with her nerves.”
When Andreas was finally reunited with his family at Munich airport he said simply: “Mir gehts gut” - I am fine. Then he said: “I am so happy to be home.”
He told Josef: “Dad, you know that I am famous now. I know that my picture has been shown all around the world.”
Andreas added: “I just do not know what happened to me.
“I get little flashes of my past, like in a film. But I have no idea how I ended up in England like that, or why I couldn’t talk. I just suddenly woke up and realised who I was.”
Josef added: “He knows he had some kind of illness and breakdown but I know he would never make something like this up. He learned to play the keyboard from the age of 10 and can also play the accordion. I think he found some comfort in the piano, except towards the end.”
There was still no clue how Andreas reached Sheerness, from his tiny village near the German-Czech border.
He had no money, no documents and the labels had been cut out of his soaking suit. Josef said: “He had no passport, no driving licence, nothing. Not even papers or a ticket.
He still does not really know how he got into England. He thinks he got a train from France and then maybe a ferry.
“Given that he had no travel documents, I really do wonder, and worry about what might have happened to him.
“Was he attacked or robbed? Hit over the head? We just don’t know. He just woke up and suddenly realised who he was. Before that, he could remember nothing, not even his own name.”
He added: “We honestly thought something had happened to him. He always seemed to be unhappy and found it hard to express his feelings, to show his love.
“But the doctors in England somehow have cured him of that, they have worked a miracle.
“They have given me a new son back. He tells me that he loves me. I cannot put into words how we feel.”
A friend of the family reportedly said Grassl, now 35, went to a grammar school and had wanted to get into radio or TV or study journalism.
Back in Britain, Grassl was denounced as a ‘fraud’and the cost of his stay to the authorities was said to be more than £50,000.
The real-life story was turned into a play called The Piano Man in 2014 by London theatre company AllthePigs.