“Darth Vader is my Co-pilot.”
I k know this sounds dumb, but my excuse is that my current job is the first job where I’ve worked while people were in the same building I was.
It took me weeks to before I found out what the bird chirping noises I kept hearing were. It was the message notification noise some smartphones use. 
A few years ago, whatever car I had at the time, had a rattle that was driving me up the wall. Granted, I’m one of those guys that will move change and keys and stuff in a car because it bugs me if they’re making noise while I’m driving, but this one I couldn’t figure out. No matter what I did, it still rattled. I’d move stuff, still rattled. Take all the loose change out, still rattled. Empty the glove compartment, still rattled. This had been going on for months. My next step was to pull the panel off the driver side door and see if maybe something fell in there. Luckily a few hours before I was going to do it, I was driving with my daughter and mentioned how annoying the noise was. She said ‘oh, that’s just some rocks I put in the back door (in the door pocket)’. Sure enough, that was it.
That’s pretty great. Good kitty! Who says a cat would never save your life?
I had a quiet ticking sound in my bedroom. It was incredibly faint, to the point that I would only hear it at night when laying in bed. I could vaguely tell that it was coming from the other side of the room, but when I walked over to inspect it, the sound would stop.
It turned out to be a metal shelf that would gently collide with the wall due to random vibrations in the building. When I walked over, just my weight on the floor was enough to tilt the shelf slightly, so that it couldn’t hit the wall. I shoved a towel between the shelf and the wall where it was hitting and the sound stopped.
We moved from Vic in southern Australia to Far North Queensland app 18 months ago now. Staying in a hotel prior to moving into permanent digs, I was at the pool one evening when a blood-curdling shriek assaulted my ears, it was truly horrible and very, VERY scary.
The following day I asked the hotel manager about my experience, wondering whether someone had been attacked or even killed…he just laughed.
And now in our current abode, there’s a pair who live in a small park a few hundred metres away (as the curlew flies) and every morning I hear the screams and carry-ons not long before dawn. Still sounds bloody awful though.
In my case, as noted previously, the bird chirping noises were caused by chirping birds.
I do. A dog would have barked incessantly to warn you. The cat, being a cat, was staring hopefully at the malfunctioning electrical outlet fantasizing that it would kill everyone in the house. 
Oh, I’ve got another one:
When I was in the upstairs bathroom, I kept hearing what I thought was something dripping. I couldn’t locate the drip, and was hoping the pipes weren’t dripping inside the walls, but there didn’t seem to be wet walls anywhere, or moisture in the basement where it would have been if the drip had followed the pipes all the way down there.
Then the battery on a clock in that room died. And – so did the “drip”. I’d been hearing the clock, with each tick, knock very gently against the wall. Replaced battery, moved the clock further from the wall. No more dripping sound.
A dog, particularly one like in your avatar, wouldn’t have heard a damn thing, especially over the sound of its own farts. The vastly superior hearing of a cat easily localized the problem. Of course, the cat is thinking: You goddamn idiot. You’re in a house with aluminum wiring from the 70s and you never bothered to install copper pigtails or any other ameliorative solution? You deserve to have your house burn down, but unfortunately I live here as well, and apparently it’s my responsibility to ensure you don’t kill yourself.
About ten years ago, my boss would complain that she heard an alarm go off in her office every afternoon at 4:30. She looked under the furniture and in drawers. She called us in to listen to it. No one could ever find it. Three years later it finally stopped. At her retirement party a couple of years after that, one of our old co-workers came and confessed that his last day while they were putting new sheetrock in her office, he’d dropped a cheap digital watch into the wall and set an alarm for 4:30. He had no idea it would continue to work for three years.
Your disdain for dogs is duly noted, and you will pay the price for this misguided anti-canine insolence. You will certainly never get into heaven, where all dogs go. My avatar represents a Bernese Mountain Dog, noted for their high intelligence and unconditional lifetime loyalty to one human. Whereas a Cat, observing a threat to the humans in its household, inevitably thinks “Die, MFs, die!”.
I started a thread a few years ago in which I heard a “THUMP!” at 10 p.m. I searched the house for what had fallen. Asked for guesses the next day, when I’d identified the sound–a very late delivery of a heavy package.
One night last week I was suffering from insomnia. I’d been lying in bed an hour or two when I heard a low vibrating noise. I ignored it the first time but then it happened again. It would vibrate for several seconds, stop, and then repeat again in four or five minutes. I did not want to get up to investigate but I knew I’d never get to sleep if I didn’t. I stood in the middle of the room to wait for the next iteration. The sound was coming through the vent near the ceiling so it must have been in the attic. I really didn’t want to go in the attic. That would involve finding the cats and locking them away so I could pull down the stairs. (I never give them a chance to get up there ). I checked other vents and the sound was only coming through the one in the bedroom. The air wasn’t on so it wasn’t from the HVAC system. The only other thing in the attic is the hot water heater, which is over the half bath in the bedroom. I decided it must be a water pipe vibrating somehow. I flushed the toilet and ran water in the sink for a few minutes. That stopped it.
I have one that I have not solved and it still irks me. Last month I was watching TV when I heard the ice maker drop ice in the bucket. Which was really weird because the ice maker was not on. It hadn’t been on for days. I have to turn it off when the bucket gets full because the sensor that tells it that it’s full doesn’t work. Anyway, I checked all the cabinets to see if something had fallen but everything was fine. The sound had come from the kitchen but I checked every room for fallen objects. I even rewound the movie I had been watching to see if the sound had come from there. My brain clearly identified it as ice dropping but I guess I’ll never know what it really was.
I had one like that. I heard, what very distinctly sounded like one of the pieces of drywall or plywood leaning up against the wall in my basement falling over and landing flat on the concrete floor…or at least what my brain assumes that would sound like. Nothing in that pile of drywall had moved. I spent probably an hour looking for anything that may have tipped, fallen or otherwise moved and everything appeared to be in a spot that someone would have placed it. That is, nothing was on the floor, nothing was laying on it’s side, nothing was broken etc.
At the time, my ex was in the process of moving out, so things were getting shuffled around and a random object shifting or falling and making a noise wasn’t entirely uncommon. But I never did figure out where that came from.
I had another one a while back. I was laying in bed and could hear what, very distinctly, sounded like running water. It was very faint and I knew the only water pipe anywhere near that part of my house was for the spigot outside. Initially I tried to ignore it, because I didn’t feel like going out into my backyard in the middle of the night, but it was bugging me so I went in the basement and shut the water off. The noise continued. It kept me up for probably 45 minutes before I finally found that it was my cell phone charger letting out a very faint noise.
A few years ago I kept hearing that low-battery chirp smoke alarms give off every arbitrary amount of minutes (there might be some standard I’m aware of, but I couldn’t figure out the timing for the life of me.) I could not, try as I might, figure out where that sound was coming from. It seemed completely non-directional to me. I stood at the top floor landing by the detector and waited. Eventually, I heard the chirp coming from … somewhere. So I stood on the main floor landing by the smoke detector. Same result. Basement. Same result, but it seemed a little more distant here. OK, so somewhere from the first or second floor – maybe it’s not a smoke detector. Maybe it’s some electronic device that also has a low battery chirp, or some toy on the fritz, or who knows what. I drove myself crazy for an hour and just gave up. Noise went through the night. Couldn’t figure it out for the life of me. Luckily, I’m a heavy sleeper, so I just eventually ignored it and went to sleep.
The next day, I’m doing yard work. I hear that crazy chirping again. This time, I realize where it’s coming from. My next door neighbor was away and had left a window open. My windows were open, as well, so the sound of her dying smoke detector was going off and that’s why it was so bloody difficult to ascertain where exactly in the hell in my house it was coming from. Unfortunately, she was gone for another day, so I had to shut my windows.
I somehow wound up on a Fluke mailing list and my eye caught a term I’d never seen before in a spam message just as I was deleting it: Acoustic imager. Behold the Fluke ii900!
Expensive but probably gets to the bottom of nuisance sounds in no time flat.
For the folks who still work in actual offices, this is a nice “gift” to leave in the back of somebody’s desk drawers or maybe duck-/duct-taped to the underside of a nearby chair. In a cube farm they can be hidden inside the cable run of the cubicle panels.
You’re welcome! :evil_grin:
My previous cat once helped tip us off to a CO problem by refusing to enter the bedroom the offending heater was in.
I seemed to hear a noise many places. When I was outside it appeared to be insect chirping. When I was outside it appeared to be the hum of florescent lights. Actually, it was because I have tinnitus.
I live in the High Dry Desert, on the backside of a huge mountain range. So its hot, dry, cold and dry and hotter and colder.
I’ve heard … revvvveeeereeeet
On the coldest nights, not a drop of rain in weeks.
But it is a frog. Seen it. Got photos.
How? Why? How?
Every year for the last 20 or so. I really question my understanding of the natural world behind this frog.
Many years ago, my husband and I drove out at night to park somewhere with no lights, because there was a huge full moon and we wanted to enjoy it. We sat in the car by the side of the road near a forest. From the forest, there came a hair-raising weird screaming - it sounded like a woman being tortured. After a couple of minutes, it stopped. We called out, but there was no answer. When we got home, we called the police, who said they’d look into it. We never heard back about it.
Then, a couple of years later, I was watching a nature documentary about foxes, and it showed their mating and denning behavior. At one point in the show, the vixen started screaming - it was the exact sound that we had heard that night. Mystery solved!