There are two specific buildings(Both in Las Vegas) where this has happened to me. The 1st time was probably about 10 years ago when I was staying at Hooters. Whenever I would go to my room(probably on the 4th floor) I would feel like the ground was moving under my feet and this would cause a slight dizzyness and nausea.
It wasn’t enough for me to want to change hotels or even rooms but it was a definite feeling I was experiencing. My girlfriend didn’t notice or feel anything but when some friends who were staying elsewhere in town came for visit one of them, immediately upon entering our room, said she felt like the floor was moving. No one else could feel it.
Then, in 2016, I was playing a pool tournament over the course of a week at the Westgate. The tournament was was held in 3 separate but huge rooms each with 100’s of pool tables in them. Our ‘room’ was the last one so it was a bit of a hike from the front of the casino to our banquet hall and everytime time(probably 6 or 8 times throughout the week) I crossed the threshold to our hall I had the same feeling I had at Hooters. Slightly unstable but not near enough to feel like I was going to faint or get sick but it was pretty constant. No one else on my team said they felt anything.
I’m just wondering if anyone else has had this experience and/or if anyone can offer an explanation as to how this can occur.
No dizziness/nausea, but 15 years or so ago I posted a thread here about this one particular house…
A local guy hired my band to come to his house and record backing music for a song he had written. Every time we went there, I would immediately have an overwhelming urge to urinate. And then I would have the urge again, every 10-20 minutes. It was infuriating, and a little embarrassing, having to constantly get up to piss. It wasn’t something I ever experienced anywhere else. But we were in that house on 4-5 occasions, and it was the same thing every time.
I guess you’re talking about vertigo and one building comes to mind for me. It was a whole whopping
6 floors and I only worked on the third, but often I would be walking from one end of the floor to the other and it felt like the minor earthquakes I would feel growing up in SoCal. I assume the building is meant to move since this is hurricane territory. Or it’s cheap materials and shoddy workmanship
I get an uneasy and a disoriented feeling when I walk into a large open space. Sometimes I get it outdoors around our pond. I feel like I’m not stuck to the floor or ground. I believe mine is caused by agoraphobia. Nausea happens if I persist staying in the space. Never barfed, yet. Yet.
Our company headquarters is in a tall building in the financial district of San Francisco. I visit there occasionally, along with others in my department. One woman had a very difficult time on those days. Most of the meetings were above the 16th floor, and as high as the 22nd. She would literally get sick. I think some colleagues suggested something on her ears, and/or medication. I cannot remember the details, but evidently it is not unheard-of.
I used to do audits in the city, and was in hundreds of different buildings over the course of ten years.
I do know the feeling you’re talking about. For me, it was when the office or apartment was over or near vibrating machinery giving off low frequency tones. It would make me feel slightly disoriented, and nauseous. Never knew why this sometimes happened, until an accountant I was meeting told me he always felt ill at this particular business because of the low frequency rumbling from their air conditioner system.
Hmm…wait, here’s an abstract from Noise & Health Journal
I have a somewhat-related story. When I was about 7 or 8, my grandmother was in the hospital for a few weeks or months after a stroke. My family and I would visit her fairly frequently. Two separate times, I started feeling nauseated either just as we were leaving the hospital or on the car ride home (I can’t remember which). There was no vomiting, but I sure felt like it could happen at any moment. The wave of nausea lasted for several hours. The common thread in these two visits was that I was having fun using the wheelchair that was next to my grandma’s bed. I’m not the type who easily gets motion sickness, though, so I don’t think the wheelchair ride had anything to do with the nausea. Plus, the nausea didn’t occur until well after the wheelchair play was over.
I don’t think so. I’m somewhat afraid of heights but I went to the top floor of the World Trade Center and was okay even while looking out the windows.
I used to work in the original (destroyed in 2001) WTC on the 90-some floor. Some people got a little dizzy or even nauseous in high winds…because you could see from looking at the second tower that they were moving significantly. It was sometimes enough for doors to swing open or shut.
Most very tall buildings are stiffer than those were. Newer ones often employ steel reinforced concrete in their structures which is stiffer than the all steel frame of those buildings, and some older ones (like the Empire State) were all steel but more over-designed for strength, hence also stiffer in winds.
4th floor shouldn’t be actually moving enough to mess with you. More likely it’s infrasound, i.e. airborne vibrations at frequencies too low to be properly perceived as sound. You can’t really hear them, although that pulsation may be physically felt if it’s loud enough. Even at intensities too low to really consciously notice, the vibrations can cause a variety of interesting psychological effects, including a sense of dread/fear, or a perception of a supernatural presence.
At Niagara falls, on the Canadian side, there is a tunnel that leads you to an observation deck near the bottom of the falls. You descend in an elevator to the dead end of the tunnel, and from there walk the tunnel’s 150-foot length to its open end. The tunnel behaves like a resonant organ pipe, collecting and amplifying the very low frequency content of the noise coming from the falls: the 150-foot tunnel length corresponds to the wavelength for 7.5 Hz, or half-wavelength for 3.75 Hz. My recollection from visiting this tunnel ~10 years ago was that there was an intense throbbing sensation you could feel with your whole body, despite not really hearing much (other than the higher frequencies that were within the normal range of human perception).
Seriously, I have not experienced that phenomenon, even in places like the top of a skyscraper or top floor of a crowded mall where one can feel the building/floor moving. It’s actually kind of cool to me, I like it.
Yep. For me, it has nothing to do with heights or building movement or low frequency noise: it’s the HVAC/machinery thing. If I’m too close to it, the vibrations in the floor can make me nauseated. At the least, I feel uncomfortable.
It happened/is happening in my current office, actually. After a renovation in the fall, I moved from a cubicle on the outside of the building to an interior office that shares a wall with a machinery room and is immediately above and below some HVAC ducts (I’m on the 9th floor of a 12-story building). At first, the vibrations were so bad that from time to time I had to go sit at a cubicle. The building’s facilities manager investigated, and even brought in a rep from the company that had done the renovation, but the upshot was that nothing can be done. I tried a padded chair mat and a seat cushion; neither made much difference. I was told that the problem was likely caused by the static buildup when the heat runs, and that (a) the system might settle down over time and (b) it might not be an issue when the weather changes and the building switches to A/C.
All of that was back in October. I still notice the vibrations, and at times am uncomfortable (like right now as I type this), but either they’ve lessened or I’ve gotten used to them because I haven’t felt sick/had to sit somewhere else in a few months. Not everyone notices/is sensitive to them, though, so it can be easy to sound like a nutjob. Luckily, my boss did notice them; also luckily, no one here treated me like I’m crazy (to my face, at least). Still, I’m counting the days until the switchover to air conditioning in the hopes that things get better…I figure we’ve got another couple of months.
Prior to this job, I’d noticed it in two other offices and one Olive Garden.
