Noise mysteries you've solved

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
41

I always go to work early and am usually there an hour before everyone else.

Anyway—every morning I started hearing scurrying noises in the drop ceiling. I figured its was field mice or something and let management know.

Then I started hearing bangs and thumps. And it was happening every morning. Management couldn’t find anything and no one else was hearing it when they came in.

I thought I was losing my mind. But every morning I would hear these noises, sometimes right above me.

A few weeks went by and I happened to look out the window near me and saw a bunch of birds settling on the fence. I went outside and walked around the building and saw a half dozen small birds coming out of a small air venting pipe above the window. They flew to the fence and then some others took their turn and went in.

Seems the flap on the vent had broken and birds were getting in, and from there had access to the heating ducts and space above the drop ceiling. And they were having a good ‘ol time up there.

42

Ah yes, cats. They have been both the source of and solution to various household noises…

We have an easily frightened / annoyed tomcat, and an affectionate black cat (female). She rubs on everything. These two also fight each other at random times and locations, about once a week. I’ve heard big crashes in the basement but not been able to identify what fell over, but for sure a cat was involved, as they were seen racing away from the scene just seconds later.

Once the little one managed to knock over an unused frame (head of the bed) from a queen sized bed that was leaning against a wall in a storage room upstairs. It fell with a tremendous crash and much force, enough to kill the cat if it had landed on her, but fortunately she wasn’t hurt. Both the bed frame and the floor had splinters where they hit.

On other occasions, one cat or the other gets interested in a random spot in the house, such as the crack under the door or the fireplace, where critters like bugs have been getting in. They warn us with meows. I was particularly happy when the tomcat meowed us into realizing a wasp had crawled into the house that way.

43

Not a great story here, as it doesn’t end conclusively.

A few years ago, at an apartment where I used to live, my upstairs neighbor was an elderly woman from whom I never got more than a scowl and a look of disapproval. The thing is, most nights, I’d hear her cleaning or moving furniture or something long after midnight. There’d be loud banging and stomping and the sound of heavy things being dragged across the floor at 4:00 in the morning. It didn’t make sense, especially because I’d been told that she lived alone. A year or two after moving out, it dawned on me that she was probably reacting frantically to cockroaches, because the whole building was infested.

So, like I said, inconclusive, although it was definitely an Aha! moment for me.

44

That reminds me of this video of two lynx (or lynxes, if you like. How did they get such a cool name?) disagreeing. If I didn’t know better and just heard it in the night, I’d be pretty sure it was two local teenagers trying to frighten people. It sounds like people making scary animal sounds.

45

The Mystery of the Electric Cow

My then-gf heard it first. And second. And every time after that. She said it was coming from outside, not in the house. And it sounded like an electric cow. I never heard it and I could not even imagine what an electric cow would sound like.

One day I was walking ‘round the ‘hood and way down on the block, I heard what reasonably could have been described as an electric cow moan (or maybe groan, I’m not really an authority on facsimile-bovine noises). It was coming from a portable generator or something, I forget. Whatever it was, it was way too far away to be heard at my place.

The mystery remained unsolved even as the Electric Cow entered legendary status (at least, amongst us). One time, I mailed my gf a little gift with the return address of “E. Cowe.” Then one day, I was walking home and heard a loud groaning sound. I turned and saw some dude across the street from my place having trouble closing his car door. It kept grinding against the front fender and would not close properly. It was a noise that kinda sounded like it was made by an electric cow. As I had seen that car parked on the street many times before, I was pretty sure the mystery was solved.

Not long thereafter, my gf and I were in a rare minor tiff about… something, I don’t even recall what. I was making my point and the noise outside – the same one made by the car door - barely registered. I finished what I was saying and just before she could respond, I said: “Wait a sec; was that the electric cow I just heard?“ Indeed, she confirmed it was. The tiff was instantly relegated to the status of the deservedly forgotten. She was ecstatic I had heard it at last - that we had heard it together - and much revelry ensued.

46

At the villa in Barbados, where we go for three weeks every winter, there are three BRs and my son came down to visit. One day in the BR he was using came the beeping of a dying smoke detector. But we could find no smoke detector in the room. There was a chandelier/ceiling fan in the room and I was convinced something in chandelier was making the noise. I called the cousin of the owner who managed the place (the owner lives in Montreal) and he went so far as to send an electrician who could find nothing. Finally he realized there were some locked cabinets above the cupboards and the sound was coming from one of them. But the manager didn’t have a key to the cabinets. Fortunately, the housekeeper did and we were able to open one and remove that battery. The other rooms all had smoke detectors out in the open. Who hides a smoke detector inside a locked cabinet???

47

I have the same issue with a Queen Elizabeth II solar toy…she waves in a queenly manner. But when it’s quiet, and she’s waving you can hear her.

48

Yes, I remember being freaked out before learning that sound came from a fox.

~Max

49

When I was a teen, late at night, I could here someone breathing heavily outside my bedroom door. I couldn’t figure it out because no one was there. A few years later, I’m on my own and I started hearing it again in the middle of the night. Well, that narrowed the problem down considerably. I started listening more closely. The “breaths” were a bit fast, and I could only hear them in one ear. Aha! It was actually the blood running in an artery near my ear drum and the breath was my heartbeats pushing the blood along.

Now that I’m much older and my ears have taken serious noise abuse from my lifestyle, I don’t hear it.

50

Back sometime in the 90’s, I switched over from a pager to my first cell phone. Because they were serviced by the same company, I think AT&T, I kept the same phone number. That is still my cell number today. A few months after getting the phone, I woke up to a muffled moaning sound. It scared the crap out of me. I searched and finally found the cause. It was my old pager. My daughter had called my cell phone but I had turned it off for some reason. The call went to my pager instead. The batteries in the pager were almost dead. AT&T did not turn off the pager when I switched over to a cell phone.

51

Which reminds me of a story. Thank you.

Back in the late '80s I lived on the then-outskirts of Las Vegas in a house in an area that was a mix of infill new-build suburbia and small groups of older houses / mini-ranches on 1/2 to 2 acre lots with provisions for critters like horses and chickens. A few of the old houses still used their corrals for horses vs motorcycles or lawn tractors. Most folks were more rural-minded than rural critter-equipped. I lived on the perimeter of a new development backed up to a row of the old houses along one of the original streets into the countryside.

I got married and my new wife moved into what had been my house.

We’d both hear roosters at sunrise pretty regularly. Both nearby and distant. Then one day it started. Wife claims she hears a pig snorting. Only early in the morning. And it’ll only snort or squeal once or twice then shut up. I can’t hear it. We’d be laying there in the quiet morning and she’d say “Did you hear it? There it was!” Nope. And it’d never do it again while I was concentrating.

This goes on for a couple months. She’s increasingly frustrated. I’m baffled, and wondering if I married a hallucinating nut.

Eventually the mystery is solved. I’m looking over our back wall to the old house whose back yard abuts ours. It’s a tall concrete block wall and I was on a ladder pruning trees; from the ground the wall was too tall to see over.

And there rummaging around in the neighbor’s back yard was a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig*. This was during the heyday of those things as pets.

As the wiki drily puts it

by the end of the decade the “pot-bellied pig” was being marketed as a pet. Not all of these were purebred, and some grew to considerable size; the fad was short-lived.

Yeah. An ordinary farm-type swine make a lousy pet for sure. Eventually their “purebred VPBP” they paid a lot of money for grew to 200 lbs with no sign of stopping and they got rid of it.


*
52

I was the only one home and in the lower level of my house. Then I heard someone talking upstairs.

I went to investigate. Nobody came home. No televisions or stereos on. I looked outside and saw nobody. WTH?

Went back downstairs and a few minutes later I heard talking again. Sounded like they were either upstairs or in my backyard. Investigated again. Stayed upstairs for a while but heard nothing. WTF?

While walking down the stairs I heard talking again. I couldn’t make out what they were saying. It sounded muffled like they were outside. Goddamn it, who’s in my yard? Checked, nothing, nobody.

Stayed upstairs. Heard the voices again. Holy shit, someone’s in my bedroom! Went into the room, cleared the room. Found nobody.

Walking down the hall I heard a voice again! Coming from my bedroom closet! But I had already checked it. Opened the closet, nobody is in there! Now I’m freaked.

I stood there for about 10 minutes. C’mon, you sonovabitch! Whatever you are, speak!

And then it spoke:

I forgot to put my radio in the charger at work. I never do that. It was still in it’s holder on my duty belt in my duffle bag in the back of the closet. Hence the unintelligible muffled sound.

Mystery solved. Face red.

53

This one is better.

https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B08KG6XHN1/20140003-20

54

I had just finished installing a sound system in a church. I turned it on for the first time and heard a loud BANG! That is not a sound that I was expecting to hear. I was surprised and a little worried. I turned it off and turned it back on again. BANG! Now I’m starting to panic. What could I have done wrong?! As an experienced audio professional I knew what sort of undesirable noises a system can make and the likely causes. But there is no reasonable explanation for the system to be making this BANG noise.

I went out into the sanctuary to listen to the speakers and try to localize which speaker(s) might be making the racket. Another BANG! It seemed to be coming from the both of the main speakers at the front of the sanctuary. Now I was really panicking!

I shut the system off and walked to the back of the church to go outside. I figured it would be good to take a break, remove myself from the situation and think through potential causes for this anomaly. As I was walking out I heard another BANG! But as the sound system was off, there was no way the new equipment could be making that sound. Then another BANG! This time it seemed to be coming from the basement.

I went down to the church basement to discover a couple of workers busting a hole in a concrete wall to install a new elevator. They were working next to the forced air furnace. It turned out that their demolition noise was being carried throughout the building by the HVAC duct work. Two of those ducts came out near to each of the speakers at the front of the sanctuary, which is why it seemed the noise was coming from the speakers.

55

Boy howdy, that was me too.

56

Definitely. I was being lazy and Amazon’s search wasn’t being particularly helpful that day.

The last roll-over image in that ad is a testimonial to the Evils that lurk in the hearts of Man! :wink:

57

Turn on closed captioning in that Lynx video to see what the captioning system says about their “conversation” :slight_smile:

58

Three stories for your enjoyment:

The Curious Case of George the Chonk
When I was a pre-teen we had two cats that I somehow named George (yellow tabby) and The Panda (black and white mix).

One late fall Saturday afternoon my mom said she could hear a cat crying out. I could hear it too once I got to the hallway leading to the main bath and the bedrooms. We searched under all the beds and furniture, opened all the closets and cabinets, listened at the vents, to no avail. The sound seemed equal no matter where we were. Finally I thought to look in the washer and dryer in the main bath, and the sound got much louder from the dryer. I looked through the clothes inside but no cat! But I could still hear the cat clearly.

Turns out old George had found the dryer vent leading to the outside wall and thought hey, this is a warm place to hang out on a chilly day, and deftly climbed inside. The vent was still warm from the previous load of clothes. He was probably happy with his choices until the next load was put in and the dryer turned on. This vent was a considerable length as the laundry closet was not next to the outside wall. They’d built a metal vent tube inside the wall of the bathroom all the way to the outside, so about 15 feet. George was fairly close to the dryer end. The tube was narrow enough that he couldn’t turn around nor was he built for backing up in such tight quarters.

We moved the dryer and could tell he was around a bend that we couldn’t see down nor reach around. No amount of coaxing would bring him towards us. I finally went outside and started threading a stiff garden hose into the outside vent, hoping to convince him this new threat from behind was worth moving towards the Source of Too Much Heat and Wind that had recently plagued him.

Out scrabbled Poor George, covered in lint. He was just the right size to clean out the duct thoroughly.

The Strange Affair of the Blinking Headlights
We had a late 90s car that began blinking the headlights twice every time we turned it on. I thought it was a short, but the lights never failed while driving. After a couple of weeks I thought to search the internet for this phenomenon (Google was just a baby, I think I used Yahoo).

I finally found one forum where someone asked about the same thing. The answer is that it was a “feature” (undocumented of course) where if one of the two headlight elements, low or high beam, went out, both headlights would blink to let you know something was amiss. We never used our high beams or thought to test them, and that turned out to be the issue. Easy solve.

The Ancient Whispers of 80s Hair Bands
And finally, my most recent mystery. A couple of years ago late at night I was in my basement enjoying horror movies by myself. At some point I paused all the chainsaw and screaming noises to get a drink or use the bathroom. I distinctly heard muffled music coming from outside the house. Thinking it was a car passing through (we live at a cul-de-sac so it’s not uncommon for cars to come down our street and turn around, sometimes with loud music blaring), I got my drink or used the facilities and came back to resume my bloodfest viewing. Again, I could clearly hear this muffled music, and despite my utter lack of appreciation for 80s hair band music, I could vaguely recall this was a popular song.

I walked around the basement, finally determining it was coming from the wall nearest me. Thing is, the sides of the basement are mostly underground, just the back is a walk out. The opposite wall of the basement is shared with a duplex home, but no sound was coming from there, just the outside north wall. I went upstairs and asked my partner if she could hear it. Nope. I could vaguely hear it at the top of the basement stairs, but walked around upstairs to see if I could hear it there. Nope, not even the same wall that I could hear it at downstairs.

I stepped outside and walked around the front yard and couldn’t hear anything. No radio, no sound at all except for distant highway traffic.

Returning downstairs, the music had stopped. I chalked it up to the dead partying down in the cemetery that the developer never moved and continued watching my movie. After a while I could hear this music again, clearer than ever. Muffled, with mostly bass tones coming through, but I could make out the singing too. Still 80s hair bands plaguing my audio space. Again I walked all over the house upstairs and then outside. I stood still and listened intently in my yard for some time, then I caught it, very faintly. It seemed to be coming from the house to the north, but that was some 300 feet away. How could I hear it clearly downstairs but not outside?

My best guess is that they were playing their music in their basement (underground), and either the ground itself or some connecting pipes were carrying the vibrations and my wall was acting as a speaker, amplifying it only in the basement.

59

There was originially one from Thinkgeek that was even smaller (and no longer available, but the link in the link will lead you to some nice Voltron merchandise for some reason)

60

Not exactly a noise mystery, but continuing the Eviltron hijack …

Years ago I had one of these: [u]**https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000WWB8PW/**[/u]. It’s sound triggered and will flop around madly for awhile when it hears a loud noise. I customized the trap board and the head with a little ketchup that dried to a nice color.

At the time I ran an office with 20 employees, of whom 19 were female. Leaving this little gem mostly behind a filing cabinet or under some papers on a work table produced some really great noises. No mystery though, except which person had let out that screech or squeal. The more noise they made, the longer the thing flopped about. It was really pretty darn effective.