Well… without sounding tiresome, the “marble dropping” sounds may well equate to what I previously posted (and tried to describe) … about having small rocks thrown onto the roof of our house - I’m quite sure the sound would be the same.
Perhaps there’s something in it? Oooooo-hoooooo I’m now gettin’ all kreepy-krawly with this stuff!!! LOL just kidding, trying to make light of a thread before everyone gets all spiritual and ghostie and all that stuff!
now enters the Medium for this session… let’s all join hands and think of those dear and departed loved ones that we wish to maintain contact with LOL
I’ve heard the marble sound too, and I live waaay out in the country–sounds more like something being dropped on my roof and rolling across. At first, I thought it might be acorns falling from the oak tree in the backyard but none of the branches come close to the house. Never even occured to me that this was a common phenomenon!
How bizarre!
Weird noises are yet another reason I really miss my cats. I could always blame the sounds on them and roll over and happily go back to sleep. Now, I hear weird noises and lie awake for 20 minutes trying to figure out what it was.
We once had a possum get underneath our house and muck about in between the pipes, which causes a lot more noise than you’d think, especially at 3 AM.
The sun shines on your roof. Your roof heats up. It expands.
The sun goes down. Your roof cools down. It contracts.
When I was in college I lived in a house with 5 other guys. I had the attic room. Every damn night at about the same time, the “Marble dropping on a wood floor” sound. It took me about two months, but I finally tracked the sucker down and put two long screws into the joint at the joists. Slept like a baby after that.
Ummm…do any of you people who hear marbles have steam heat? Those pipes get hot & expand when its running…and they cool and contract when its cycling. Copper expands & contracts at a different rate than the wood surrounding it…and the result can be some pretty funky tick-tick-ticking noises. Also, Radiators expand, but are very heavy and can make sounds as they move themselves in Infinitesimally small increments across a hard wood floor.
I was basically going to say the same thing. The “marble dropping” sound sounds an awful lot like the pipes contracting and expanding or water draining from them.
or maybe it’s a boogie-man
I’ve heard odd sounds - bangs, the occasional voice - while drifting off to sleep. Usually wakes me up at which point I realize that it was a hallucination. But years ago there was one place I lived in that every morning there was one of 2 sounds that I’d hear - either a high pitched warbling hum or a sort of a “ththp” type hiss with a sudden stop at the end.
In more recent years a Simpsons episode depicted an FBI truck that had tapped the phones and was making the exact same warble, so that explains that one. I never did figure out the “ththp” though.
My hubby works nights so I HATE it when I start hearing noises. Makes me want to call him home to investigate, like that would go over well with his bosses. Uh, wifey is scared again…
Never heard the dropping marble thing. Sometimes I hear voices as I’m falling asleep, but I have always assumed it was my brain falling into dream-mode a little too early.
I’ve heard the marble sound too. Never bothered me much - always just chalked it up to roof panels expanding and contracting.
I also have one of those walk-in closest with a sliding door on metal tracks. This thing always makes weird kkksscchinngg sounds (like a swords striking each other).
I grew up sleeping in a room with hot water pipes in the walls, and am very familiar with the tapping sound. The last thing my mom did before going to bed was turn on the dishwasher.
The most disconcerting noise to hear oustide your room at 3 in the morning is undoubtedly
My boyfriend and I also hear a marble-dropping sound coming from the apartment above us at about the same time every night. We’ve always wondered why the people that live above us don’t move whatever it is that they knock over all the time to somewhere that isn’t so heavily travelled so they’d stop knocking it over.
Brand new house and I asked the plumber on a return trip about the “marble sound.” It comes from water pipes expanding and tapping against the floor joists. He should know - he’s the plumber.
I don’t mind weird noises - I just don’t want the phone to ring at 3:00 am. It is never good news when the phone rings at 3:00 am.
In places, the roof of the house is almost abutting the retaining wall and connecting property. I believe they are fleeing dogs.
I don’t think Santa is involved, though venison stew would make a nice gift. These are nuisance deer who almost ignore us when we chase them away from our food gardens. There was a small herd down there one evening, and on the video one can see my wife running full bore at them while yelling and waving her arms. Only when she was 10 feet away did they hop over the vast blackberry gulch and stare at her from the street.
My husband works nights occasionally. It wasn’t so much ME hearing strange sounds when alone in the house, rather than the cats that were keeping me company on the bed. They would wake up simultaneously and both stare out into the hallway in unison. Not that I heard anything, but it always scared the bejasus out of me. It doesn’t seem so worrying now there is only one cat to do it - but 2 was always freaky.
Occasionally, in the last 10 minutes or so before I fall asleep, I hear a very far-away high-pitched ringing sound. It goes right on, a constant tone, until I fall asleep. It happened every night when I was little, but rarely nowadays.
The only weird thing I ever heard (It was at 4 in the morning, I s’pose that counts ) was once as I waited outside my house for a friend to come pick me up (I was outside and down the street a little so as we wouldn’t wake my parents when she got there). All of a sudden it sounded as though some choir had started up some religious chant or something. It was VERY faint. I couldn’t make out any words, just that it sounded like a children’s choir and that there was a definate music-like ‘feel’ or perhaps a rythym, to the noise. It seemed to fade in and out from being an almost cleary choir-like sound, and being just a noise. I knew most of the people living around me well anough to know that nobody was playing this kind of music at 4am. Or ever. Needless to say, it creeped me the hell out. I was very glad when my friend turned up, I jumped right into the car before she’d stopped. “Ok, drive on! Turn the radio on please, let’s go, come on, come on, what’re you waiting for? Seatbelts? Seatbelts are for people not being followed by ghosts of the Children’s Crusade. Whaddaya mean ‘What?’ Scared? Me? No. Faster, go faster.”
let’s see. so the ‘marble’ sounds are definitely not marbles and it is something else, probably contracting/expanding stuff.
can i ask for a cite or the straight dope[sup]®[/sup] for this?
PS i now have even more respect for pets after this thread, not only do they keep watch while you sleep, they also take the blame for whatever else that might disturb our sleep.
) was once as I waited outside my house for a friend to come pick me up (I was outside and down the street a little so as we wouldn’t wake my parents when she got there). All of a sudden it sounded as though some choir had started up some religious chant or something. It was VERY faint. I couldn’t make out any words, just that it sounded like a children’s choir and that there was a definate music-like ‘feel’ or perhaps a rythym, to the noise. It seemed to fade in and out from being an almost cleary choir-like sound, and being just a noise. I knew most of the people living around me well anough to know that nobody was playing this kind of music at 4am. Or ever. Needless to say, it creeped me the hell out. I was very glad when my friend turned up, I jumped right into the car before she’d stopped. “Ok, drive on! Turn the radio on please, let’s go, come on, come on, what’re you waiting for? Seatbelts? Seatbelts are for people not being followed by ghosts of the Children’s Crusade. Whaddaya mean ‘What?’ Scared? Me? No. Faster, go faster.”