I have discovered, as of about 3:30 AM this morning, that the sound of a bookshelf over-loaded with many more hundred books than it should be, collapsing in the hallway into one wall and spilling into the bathroom, is about the most terrifying sound in the entire world. :eek:
Seriously, I’m not sure I fell back asleep after that. I think our entire apartment building shook.
Does anyone have any stories to share about being woken suddenly in the wee hours by some terrifying noise, to make me feel better?
My wife and I purchased two siamese attack kittens almost 4 years ago now. They could not make it up into the upper part of our home, they were so small they kept trying to leap up the wooden stairs and falling on their butts. Anyway, about a week after we got them, it was about 3 am when my wife and I heard this GOD AWEFUL loud crashing, and breaking of many things coming from our downstairs living room. At the time we lived in a home with exposed log beams, which the kitties could get up on very easily.
I had forgotten we had even purchased the cats when I grabbed my gun, and flashlight and went down stairs.
I slowly walked down the stairs, with gun in one hand and flashlight in the other. I peered around the corner, over the barrel of the gun, and saw two, extremely puffed up siamese kittens [ puffed like basketballs ] in the kitchen among the large bookcase they just knocked over. It had glass and metal figurines on it so the noise was deafening.
I put the gun down and picked up both cats…mildly scolded them and decided to gate the kitchen and clean up in the morning.
Meanwhile, my wife said: "Honey we have a problem: I called the cops they are going to be here any minute.
:rolleyes: - so they came, we explained and all got a laugh out of it. But for a precious few seconds…I was very freaked out.
How about a shelf of books crashing down onto your head in the middle of the night. Just a single shelf, and a dozen or so books, but not a nice way to be woken up.
This was in my girlfriend’s rented house at university. She had put the shelf up on her own. There’s a moral there somewhere.
We were in our new house for about 6 months when my wife wakes me up at about 3a.m. asking “What the hell is that sound?”
I listen and it sounds like a nextel phone, or walkie-talkie, or something making a couple beeps then a voice mumbles something unintelligable through a tinny speaker coming from the hallway. About every 60 seconds or so.
I’m thinking someone broke into our house and has their walki-talkie on or a cop is inside my house with his 2-way. It’s pitch black and my wife calls out “hello?” but no answer.
So I get out of bed and stand in the doorway looking down the hall peering through the dark. Nothing. But there’s also a couple rooms off this hallway with doors open and lights out. Suddenly I hear it again but this time it’s about 2 feet from my head. WTF!! I start swinging in the dark 360 degrees around me.
My wife clicks on a light and she discovers the culprit. Just above my head in the hallway is the smoke detector. When the battery is almost dead it beeps a couple times and a voice comes through the tiny speaker saying “battery low! battery low!” every minute or so. We never heard it before.
My wife thinks it’s funny now and it amuses her to sneak up on me in the dark and say “battery low! batttery low!”
Oh, I have one: shower shelves collapsing. See, I’d bought one of those things you can put in your shower to have extra shelf space. It consists basically of two steel poles, with a spring in one so that it fits snugly wherever you put it, and a few little triangular shelves that fit neatly in the corner of the shower. I installed it and used it for maybe two years.
Unbeknownst to me, water was slowly seeping into the seam where the two poles met, causing rust and weakening the structure. One night, it finally gave way. And the spring, doing what compressed springs do when the load on them is released, sprang back to its uncompressed shape, thrusting everything violently out into the tub. So, I got a cacophony of breaking metal, falling shampoo bottles, and hollow metal clanging on iron and porcelain, all happening right next to my bedroom, in that nice echo chamber we all call a bathtub.
I strongly suspect something similar happened to our bookshelf…it’d been leaning to one side for awhile now, yeah, but I think our somewhat obese kitty probably helped it on its way to meet its maker.
The worst thing was not being able to find said kitty for about five minutes after running out to check on noise. All I could think was that he was somehow buried under the truly heroic pile of books littering the hallway!! (luckily, he was not - he was hiding under the couch giving the dead bookshelf the stink-eye and, as you said, puffed up quite impressively)
We awoke around 2:00 AM one night to what we at first thought was a helicopter or jet crash. Just this horrifically loud, high pitched, Banshee whine coming from somewhere close but just out of view. It sounded like a jet engine on full throttle but the location of the sound didn’t move.
Come to find out it was a 18" main at a gas transmission/pipeline plant that had burst and all the high pressure gas was blowing out at an unbelivable rate. Soon we see traffic picking up on the usually quiet street, hear sirens from police and firetrucks, all our neighbors coming out in robes to see what the hell’s going on. My fear was that it would become a situation like that in Russia a number of years ago where a line broke, the gas accumulated in a depression and a passing truck ignited a massive explosion.
After about an hour it had bled off enough that we could go back to sleep but that was the most ominous sound I ever remember waking up to.
I wasn’t totally asleep, but I had gotten out of a dead sleep to assess the weather situation (it was snowing). I looked out the picture window and saw the snow gently falling in the early dawn light and BAM! Fucking BAM! A tree falls on Mr. K’s car. Scared the hell outta me.
My sister told me about one time she and two of her friends went to our parents lake house over the weekend. She went unbeknownst to my parents. They thought she was spending the weekend at her friends house.
Anyway, the girls get there; do whatever it is teenaged girls do when in a lake house all alone and then finally fall asleep upstairs.
Halfway through the night they hear what sounds like someone rummaging about downstairs. I mean they hear glass breaking and all sorts of other noises. Enough noises in fact that all three of the girls where huddled together in a corner crying there eyes out. They thought for sure some psycho creep was down there with an axe just waiting for them to come down.
Finally, they hear what sounds like a screen door shutting and the noise stops. So the three brave little girls go down stairs to investigate.
When they get down there the kitchen is torn to shit. The refrigerator door is wide open and food is scattered all over the place.
As they’re looking the kitchen over thinking WTF?! they hear a noise outside. They looked out there and as it turns out; it was a fucking racooon!!
Apparently, the girls never did shut the door before they went to sleep and the racoon got in and made himself at home.
If you heard my sister tell you this story, you’d pee your pants from laughing so hard.
This happened in the daytime, but scared the heck out me. We had a heavy dense snowfall and about 10am, I heard this huge rumbling, booming, and thudding noise. I had visions of the roof collapsing. I went running to the back window to try a figure out what was happening, I noticed an odd pile of snow in a straight line on the ground parallel to the house.
I walked outside and realized that the sun had heated up the newly installed solar panels. Most of the snow went sliding off the slick surface all at once as an avalanche, thus the source of my rumbling, booming and thudding noise.
Now with large snows, we look forward to these events and I warn the kids not to be playing in this area until it happens. The installer never told me that solar panels are self-cleaning.
Shakes, that reminds me of an “awakening” an artist friend of mine related to me. He and his family moved to remotest Alaska to get away from it all. They built a cabin at the end of 17 mile road out from Homer, already considered “the end of the road”. (Yes, it’s where Tom Bodette lives.) One night his young son came into their bedroom, shook him awake and said “Dad, a bear just got my pillow.” He said “You were dreaming, go back to sleep.” Then he started thinking, got up and looked outside his son’s open bedroom window. There on the ground was the pillow, covered with bear slobber. The bear had leaned in through the window and slowly pulled the pillow out from under his son’s head with his teeth.
When we had our natural swimming pool built the landscape architect at 18 tons of boulders and rocks delivered to our house. They arrived at 4:00 a.m. in several dump trucks.
I’m a sound sleeper and I didn’t hear the “beep beep beep” of the trucks backing into the driveway but I did hear the roar when the dumped the boulders in the yard. I wet the bed it startled me so badly.
Raccoons are capable of shrieking in the most terrifying way. That’s fun, especially in the dead of night.
Dogs make an interesting noise just before they throw up. Not a loud noise, but one that is so frightening that it will certainly and immediately rouse any dog person out of the deepest sleep - particularly when said dog is on the same bed as the person.
My bed collapsing as I was sleeping in it also made a rather scary noise.
But the most impressive noise I’ve heard in the dead of night started as a simple drip-drip-drip from the ceiling. It was a few days after Katrina hit NOLA, just long enough for the storm to make its way up to these parts (by that time just a bad rainstorm, no more hurricane). It was also during that time that the roof of my house (directly above my bedroom) was in the middle of being repaired. When the drip-drip-drip began, I gathered that they hadn’t sealed the roof well enough, and I stuck a bucket under the drip, and went back to sleep. Soon there was another drip. And another.
Soon the drip-drip-drip sound became drowned out by pieces of plaster falling off the ceiling, which in turn became drowned out by the sounds of me cursing and muttering and removing all my stuff from that corner of the bedroom.
Then, the sounds of pieces of plaster falling off the ceiling, and the cursing and muttering and moving of furniture, became drowned out by the sound of the bottom portion of the ceiling falling off and exposing the insulation above.
Fortunately by that time the rain had stopped, so it was quiet at last.
Having been cat owners for almost three years now, our default assumption when we hear some unexplained noise in the night is, “What are the cats up to now?”
I was about 14 years old and at home alone one night, watching “Halloween” on TV, huddled up in bed under the cover.
There’s a scene where Jamie Lee Curtis is hiding in a closet to escape the psycho killer. At the EXACT moment when said killer tries to yank the doors open we had a minor earthquake. There was a loud whump, a rumbling and the closet door three feet from the bed slammed shut with a bang.
I don’t know if many 14 year olds die from heart attacks but I almost did. Scared the hell out of me.
One time I woke up to the sound of what I thought at the time was some idiot setting off fire crackers at 5AM. However, I NEXT awoke to the sound of chainsaws at 8 AM. Turns out the tree RIGHT outside my window (a pretty hefty specimen) had fallen during the night. Luckily, it had fallen AWAY from the building.
Another time, our smoke detector went off, and the house smelled of smoke. So I was woken by that, but in my sleepy haze, I was simply annoyed, covered my head in my pillow and tried to go back to sleep. My mom had to practically drag me out of my bed to get me out of the house, I was pissed that, geeee, the house smelled of smoke and the detector went off and we had to LEAVE the building!?!
(Luckily, everything was fine, for that matter, the firefighters didn’t even find anything to put out)
Just a few months ago at roughly 3:20 am our house was in the way of a small tornado. I was dozing off and on as the thunder got louder, but was roused out of my slumbers when the big birch tree on the left side of the house was blown down. I thought “that doesn’t sound good.”
Almost immediately after the birch hit the ground, the debris started hitting the house. It sounded as if 100 angry giants were trying to break in. I thought “that doesn’t sound good either.” My impression was that it was a hail storm and I shouted the same to my wife. Then the windows started to break as roofing slates, tree limbs, and lumber started crashing into them.
I thought “that sounds really bad” as I jumped out of bed and ran down the hall to get my 5 year-old out of his bed and into the laundry room. My wife was right at my heels to get the 7 year-old. Our 13 year-old daughter fled her room just as her window broke, but by the time we got our 10 year-old out of his bed, we could hear the storm moving off - - I hadn’t heard the “freight train” sound until then.
After that all was quiet in a spooky kind of way, and then I heard one of our neighbors from across the street yelling “HELP ME! HELP ME!” Turns out a tree had crushed part of his house and had trapped him in his bed. Thankfully he wasn’t hurt, but my first realization that it had been a tornado and not a bad hail storm came when I ran into our bedroom and stepped barefoot on broken glass. Lots of broken glass. I gingerly made it to the window to shout to Jordan that I’d be over as soon as I got some pants and shoes, and then saw all the trees down and the parts of other people’s houses in our yard.
I never did go back to sleep. Thankfully the damage was rather light - - the tornado was lifting up and it mostly jumped over our block. Still, I lost 10 big windows, parts of my roof, some clapboard siding (either blown away or pierced by bricks and roofing slate), three trees, and most of the back of our new van.
