So my wife and I were woken last night by an unsettling sound that sounded like a loud bang. It was quick and did not repeat or have any real echoing effects. We sleep right above the garage, so my immediate thought was that the torsion spring on the garage door had failed and that was the resulting noise. Not so. I initially cased the whole house for any signs of an intruder and then opened the garage door to test it. Worked fine. Same operational noises and sequence as usual.
My next thought was that maybe the water heater popped from excessive pressure. I know that there is a pressure release valve to prevent that very thing from happening, but I checked anyway. Nothing. No water, no signs of leakage, nothing.
Since my wife and I are unsure if it was below or above us (attic), my father thought it might be a roof trusses snapping or something like that. I’m gonna head up into the attic later and take a peek, but I really doubt it was something like that.
Our house is a 1 story bungalow with basement and is relatively uncomplicated. I can’t even think of anything else that would cause a noise like that.
Anyone have any other ideas? Ghosts? We ended up not getting much sleep last night because it was understandably quite disturbing to hear at 1:30 AM.
Something outside. Something fell off a shelf or off a hook somewhere. Stuff seems a lot louder in the still of the night. If you don’t find a cause then it’s probably ghosts because they like to make noise at night and then leave no physical evidence of their existence behind.
Mine, too. Did power go out somewhere in your neighborhood? This has happened several times in our neighborhood. The most recent time was in the middle of the morning, and I didn’t even notice the power outage until I used my phone to look something up on the internet and noticed that it was using data instead of wi-fi!
This happened once in my sister and brother-in-law’s house. Only it was in the early evening, and it was Thanksgiving to boot, with lots of relatives over. One loud pop that everyone in the house heard and that was it.
My bet is that the house was settling. Pressure built up in a certain joint but instead of giving gradually as it usually does, it held on until it it couldn’t handle any more. Then BANG!
I think Finagle is close, but it had to be a duck instead of an owl or hawk. elninost0rm said it didn’t echo, and everybody knows that a ducks thwack doesn’t echo.
See, what had happened was, the wife and I were out for a moonlight walk when things got a bit, um, frisky, see. And we couldn’t resist. Didn’t know we were under your bedroom window. Sorry.
Once I bought a home that had a whole-house fan (a.k.a. attic fan) that I thought didn’t work because it was old. Turns out that it had sort of frozen shut, and when current was applied, would sort of “wake up” every 21 hours or so with a loud THUMP. So for the first 6 months I owned the house, I swore to f*ck that the thing was haunted until the electrician was checking out something else and unstuck the fan.
We ended up not getting much sleep last night because it was understandably quite disturbing to hear at 1:30 AM.