Noise mysteries you've solved

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Ever heard a noise you couldn’t immediately identify and investigated?

Just the other night I suddenly began hearing a strange high-pitched whistling noise while I was in my basement. It just started all of a sudden. We’ve just recently gotten the cicada hoard here but it definitely wasn’t that. I listened over by the furnace, it was quieter there. I just got a new computer, so I turned that off and it wasn’t that. It was very localized to a small area, so as I was looking around there, I picked up my DrinkMate bottle to take a sip of soda, and that’s when I realized that the cap wasn’t screwed on tightly and the pressure from the carbonation in the bottle had loosened the cap just enough to let a tiny bit of air out through the gasket in the top and that’s what was making the sound. :man_facepalming:

Then this morning I was feeding the cats when I started to hear a clicking noise. I looked all over the kitchen and eventually it turned out to be the Wallace & Gromit solar toy my MIL gave me on her last visit. The sun had just begun to hit it while I was scooping out the cat food.

Has this ever happened to you? What did you hear and what did it turn out to be?

2

I rarely have “noise mysteries” thanks to my lousy hearing. However, one night I was in the living room and heard a loud scraping sound that I thought was coming from the attic. My gf wasn’t home yet, so I went up to the attic and found…nothing.

When my gf got home I mentioned how I thought I’d heard something in the attic, when the noise happened again and per my gf it was very loud and coming from the chimney. I opened the flue and retrieved a bird, releasing it outside.

3

Mental image of someone burying a chest full of insects in the dark of the night…

4

Something from only a few days ago:

A loud hissing sound, like a burst in a pipe or something peeing on plastic. Turned out to be a moth that had worked its way into a tight plastic grocery bag and was fluttering its wings.

Something from many years ago:

The roof of the car rattling like a Smurf was standing on top with a small jackhammer. Turned out that it was a dead leaf suctioned in place to the slightly moist roof and vibrating in the moving air. (I think a leaf similarly made a loud whistle once, too.)

5

Are odor mysteries acceptable here?

I recently noticed a faint “bad” odor in our basement. The basement is large, with areas for laundry, storage, my man-cave, the dog’s crates and a run, a single bed (the dogs’), etc.

I asked my gf if she smelled anything bad in the basement, but she said no. I searched, assuming a dead mouse was somewhere, but didn’t find anything. Several days passed and I definitely could smell something. I took the blankets out of the dog crates and run and cleaned thoroughly, even laundering the blankets.

The odor got even worse, so that even my gf was able to detect it. We searched together, dividing the basement into quadrants. I moved everything, even the big basement refrigerator/freezer. No joy.

It reached the point where I thought cadaver dogs should be called in. Smelled that bad. Then I discovered the one place nobody looked: on top of the refrigerator. Turns out my gf had taken a roast out to thaw and set it on top of the fridge “for a second”. Well, it thawed.

6

I would hear this muted shuddering sound “DDDDDDDDD…” sound ( almost like someone trying to roll their Ds ) in my house every now and then. I’d go outside to hear where it was coming from, but I never could. As time went on I’d hear a 5 or 6 second burst of sound that was like muted Cicadas. Sometimes preceding or following the shuddering sound. For weeks it drove me nuts.

One evening i was outside relaxing with a drink on my patio and noticed a small bird going into, and coming from my fireplace chimney. Trying to connect some dots, i went inside, and with the fleshy part of my closed fist, thumped the fireplace a few times just below the mantle…which immediately produced the Cicada-like sound. Turns out the shuddering sound I heard was a mother Swift fluttering up and down the chimney to build a nest and/or tend to her baby chicks, and the other sound were baby Swifts chirping in unison. Later in the year after they had all left, I partially opened the damper, put on goggles, gloves and an LED headlamp, and found an empty bird’s nest, and the upper surface of the damper plate coated in a thick layer of bird crap.

7

Two:

My in-laws had what was clearly a smoke detector complaining of a low battery, but they couldn’t figure out which smoke detector it was. At one point they had disconnected and pulled down every smoke detector in the house, and yet the beeping persisted. I finally found it was a CO detector plugged into the wall, but hidden behind some furniture and forgotten.

I think I’ve posted this one before. One evening my wife and I heard a very quiet hissing sound, and we couldn’t localize it, or figure out what it was. The cat found it. He was staring very intently at an electrical outlet, and close inspection with the room lights off revealed an arc inside the outlet. This of course prompted going through every receptacle, fixture, and electrical connection in the house to remediate the aluminum wiring.

8

Oh, man. One summer day when I was about 12, I was home alone for the first time in the house we’d just moved into. I walked past the downstairs den (separated from the hallway by a sliding-glass door),

and heard a low ghostly moan coming from the den.

Being twelve, I both knew that ghosts weren’t real and 100% knew that ghosts were real. Cautiously, I opened the door and went into the den to investigate. But as soon as I went in, the sound stopped!

I went back out and closed the door, and as I left the moan rose to a shrieking noise.

By now I was just about ready to flee the house forever, but I also knew that ghosts weren’t real, so I slowly opened the door to investigate again, and the shriek died back down to a quiet moan before disappearing.

This time I noticed that the change in the sound corresponded exactly with my opening and closing the sliding glass door. So, terrified beyond all reason, I experimented with it. As I opened the door, the noise disappeared. As I closed the door, a breeze formed in the narrowing gap, flowing into the den, and the moaning started, rising to a shriek as the gap closed.

That was it. I eventually figured out that our air conditioner had an intake vent in the den, and when the gap between the metal doorframe and the metal frame of the glass door was small enough, it became a horrific musical instrument as the vent sucked air from the rest of the house through a vibrating aperture.

Still one of the spookiest moments of my life.

9

Oh yes, definitely, these noise mysteries drive me nuts until I can solve them.

When I was a little kid (referencing @Left_Hand_of_Dorkness ‘s story) I often stayed at relatives’ homes in the southern US during summer visits, and heard a lot of odd noises. A weird, muffled jangling sound startled me awake, and I was bothered by the sound late one night. The next day I somehow learned it was a bunch of empty coat hangars being moved around inside a closet in an adjacent room by my mom who was unpacking.

The worst kind of noise mystery is when an electronic device starts beeping, and I can’t tell where the sound is coming from, and because it is often triggered by situations such as low battery – and is not a sound made during normal operation – then it is even more likely to be mysterious. So late at night (it’s always late at night) I am moving around the house, waiting several seconds in the darkness with mouth open, trying to figure out from whence the sound is coming. At least one time it was my son’s digital watch alarm that was inexplicably set to go off at 3AM.

Another time it was the battery backup on the garage door opener in the garage. Now, THAT one took a long time because I had no idea that garage door openers even had backup batteries. The sound, too, seemed to be coming simultaneously from the basement and the upstairs, and was hard to isolate. Finally figured it out, got the large and drained rechargeable battery replaced, and it’s back to silence.

10

I was watching one of those how-to videos on YouTube when I heard a smoke alarm beep, evidently announcing a low battery. I walked around my condo, standing under each smoke alarm and waiting for it to beep again. I could not, for the life of me, identify the alarm that was beeping. No matter which one I stood under, the beep always seemed to be coming from somewhere else. I thought I was losing my mind.

It turned out that the guy who made that YouTube video had a beeping smoke alarm in his house, and apparently decided to ignore it and finish recording his damn video. :roll_eyes:

11

This. ^^ (reply to @erysichthon ) Happens to me all the time.

Here’s a similar kind of “pet peeve” I have: Radio advertisements that feature car noises, such as engines revving, tires squealing, or car crashes. When I am driving–and that is the only time I listen to the radio, TBH–these sounds stress me out to an extreme degree. For me, sound input when driving is monumentally important, so for instance I would never be caught driving with headphones on. I need to hear. And, false distress sounds are absolutely not welcome.

12

Years ago I had a 1994 Toyota Corolla that was mostly driven by my son. When the car got to be about 15 years old it started making a very loud, shrill whistling noise at speeds greater than 55 mph. It drove my son crazy and he started taking apart the car; removed the inner door panels, taped all around the windshield, tried rolling the windows up and down. Nothing. I sat in the passenger seat while he cranked up the speed and all I could tell was that it seemed close by. Finally he removed the passenger side mirror and tbe noise stopped.

13

Two for me.
First one was an odd hissing sound. Finally tracked it down to the bathroom, flipped the light on and saw my contact container (Clear Care) over flowing through the little vent hole.

The second noise, I’d only hear at night. It was a loud, slow, rhythmic thumping. And by loud, I mean, I could just kinda hear it, but I could tell the source of the noise was loud but just happened to be far away. For years I’d hear this sound most nights. I finally asked someone about it and he said ‘oh, that’s the Ladish hammer’. We have a big factory here (called Ladish) with, what I learned, is the world’s largest counterblow hammer. This is the only video I’ve ever been able to find of it.

14

About two days ago, and exactly that. I was hunting all over the house and in a state of massive frustration – that particular beeping noise hits all of my noise triggers, think scraping on a chalkboard levels --; finally I got down on the floor to try to look behind a rarely-used desk in case something capable of beeping had fallen down behind it, and there, invisible unless I was down on the floor, plugged into an outlet at the back of the desk’s open footwell, was a CO2 detector, beeping away.

It had probably been put in there several years ago during a burst of other electrical work, and if anybody had told me at the time about it I’d forgotten all about it.

The replacement battery refuses to seat properly, and is located so that it’s next to impossible to push hard on it to get it to do so. There’s a functioning one upstairs. For the time being, at least, the thing is just silenced; maybe I’ll manage to get the battery in properly one of these days.

15

Having just had the bird’s nest problem in my vent dealt with, this was not a case of a mysterious noise but the location of it. The Birdmen found a nest, along with a live mama bird which flew away, blocking the dryer vent. They were very nice and remarkably patient with me when I whined and insisted that I had heard bird chirpings in the laundry room coming from the ventilation fan. They even went into the attic to check where the ducting ran (it went to the roof) and checked the vent cap on the roof, which they assured me was in good shape and which no bird could get into, and that the entirety of my problem was the birds in the dryer vent.

I realize now that I was just completely mistaken in thinking the sound was coming from the ceiling fan, mainly because I’d forgotten about the dryer vent and assumed the birds could only be in the fan ducting. Later on I finally realized why running the ventilation fan perversely made the musty smell of bird’s nest worse rather than better: it was sucking air through the bird’s nest in the duct and out through the dryer into the laundry room.

Thankfully it’s all fixed. Right now I’m running the dryer empty for 40 minutes on extra hot to blow any bugs or other crap the hell out of the ductwork.

16

I had an issue with my 2019 Jeep Cherokee last year.

I would be driving at low speeds (30-35) and it sounded like Darth Vader was in my Jeep. That labored breathing!

Thought it might be the AC/compressor it was blowing old air just fine

After a couple weeks of this Darth Vader sound, I took it into the dealership and after two hours of trying to figure it out, they found it:

The panel from the rear driver side wheel well had loosened and was rubbing against the side of my tire. And the noise traveled through the body of the car and it was making that Darth Vader sound.

17

One night as I was just falling asleep a dull crash was heard and a huge, “twang” that actually vibrated my bed. I looked out the windows but didn’t see anything. In the morning I saw a large branch that had fallen on the electrical wires and twanged it. The masthead where the wires enters the house is on the corner of the upstairs bedroom about 8 feet from the bed.

Just a few days ago we were watching TV when the light on the ceiling fan suddenly came on. We glanced at each other and looked for the kitten since shes like to pounce on things like my printer on/off switch. A day later it did it again. I finally thought of how smoke alarms let you know that the battery is low by chirping and wondered if that was how the fan let you know. Yep!

18

It took me approximately five years to realize an occasional loud ringing sound came from our balance beam scale and not some weird thing in the walls. To this day I don’t understand what causes the noise, since the scale has no electronic parts and does not move on its own. If you touch the scale the noise will cease. It might have to do with magnetism… I dunno…

~Max

19

Shortly after I bought my current car, a used 2012 Mazda 3, I was driving around and started hearing a strange knocking sound. It was not coming from the engine, but rather it seemed to be coming from the roof somehow. I checked all around the interior and exterior of the car’s roof and found nothing. I went on Mazda forums and asked and no one had any clue. Eventually I opened the trunk to get something out and realized what was causing the sound: a miniature souvenir Louisville Slugger baseball bat was sitting on top of a bunch of stuff in a milk crate, and the butt of it was knocking against the trunk lid whenever the rear suspension went up and down while driving, and the noise was traveling up through the car’s body and was amplified by the roof.

20

I’m convinced that at some point a data leak from Kiddie or First Alert will reveal that smoke detectors are deliberately programed to only warn of a low battery if it’s been dark for at least five hours. If the battery gets low, but it’s still light out, then they wait to issue a warning.