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Pipe Organ Man

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LEXINGTON, S.C. -- I've met a lot of dreamers in my travels across North and South Carolina.

I met a man who dreams of meeting extraterrestrials, so he built a UFO Welcome Center in his front yard. 

I met a man who dreamed of having a house with a coffee mug collection to end all coffee mug collections, so he started pounding nails into the siding of his house and hanging mugs on those nails. He now has tens of thousands of coffee mugs covering every square inch of his home's exterior.

Dreamers all. A smidge weird for sure. But dreamers, nonetheless.

Well, I met a different kind of dreamer the other day.  Not so much weird as he is remarkable.  But on the "odd dreams" scale of 1 to 10, his dream is at least a 9.

Jim Ingram’s dream? Someday having a full-blown church pipe organ in his home. Yes. A pipe organ! In his home. He did it. Remarkable.

To see it is to marvel. And when he plays it, it's magnificent! Nothing sounds and feels like a pipe organ. Its thundering low end vibrates your skin, while soaring high notes sound like a choir of angels.

It's preposterous how this 12th century instrument (actually started in the 3rd Century B.C., but perfected as a church organ in the 12th) can fill your soul with emotion! It's just wind blowing through pipes, right? And yet it is something so much more than that.

Here's the catch: pipe organs require a very tall ceiling, like nearly 30 feet. Most homes don't have a 30-foot living room ceiling. But (and this is where it gets a little weird) Jim and his wife Sarah didn't add a room on to the house to accommodate the pipes; they built an entire house from the ground up AROUND the organ!

Roughly 700 pipes fill one enormous vaulted-ceiling music room, which looks like a cathedral at the front and center of the Ingram home. The room is temperature and humidity controlled to perfection. Apparently the pipes can go out of tune easily with even mild climate changes. Who knew?  

There are thousands of feet of computer wire too. Today's pipe organs are a complicated mixture of 12th Century know-how and 21st Century technology. Computers control the whole organ but then you see the billow blowing a rush of wind through the pipes for that unmistakable heavenly sound and you just smile. Close your eyes and you're in a gothic cathedral in Europe! 

The more things change the more they stay the same. Thanks to dreamers like Jim Ingram, that is true still. Watch, listen and enjoy our video version of this story. It's the best way to experience it.