Sue Taylor first started hearing it at night in 2009. A retired
psychiatric nurse, Taylor lives in Roslin, Scotland, a small village
seven miles outside of Edinburgh. “A thick, low hum,” is how she
described it, something
“permeating the entire house,” keeping her awake.
At first she thought it was from a nearby factory, or perhaps a
generator of some kind. She began spending her evenings looking for the
source, listening outside her neighbors’ homes in the early hours of the
morning. She couldn’t find anything definitive. She had her hearing
checked and was told it was perfect, but the noise persisted. She became
dizzy and nauseous, overcome, she says, by a crushing sense of despair
and hopelessness at her inability to locate or escape the sound. When
things got bad, it felt to Taylor like the bed—and the whole house—was
vibrating. Like her head was going to explode. Her husband, who had
tinnitus, didn’t hear a thing. “People looked at me like I was mad,” she
said.
Lori Steinborn lives in Tavares, Florida, outside of Orlando, and in
2006 she had started hearing a noise similar to the one Taylor was
hearing. Steinborn thought it was her neighbors at first: some nearby
stereo blasting, the bass coming through the walls. It would start most
nights between 7 and 8 p.m. and last until the early hours of the
morning. Like Taylor, she began searching for the sound; leaving town
helped her get away from it, but it was waiting when she returned...
The experience described by Steinborn and Taylor, and many others, is what’s come to be known as “the Hum,” a
mysterious auditory phenomenon that, by some estimates, 2 percent of the population can hear...
After it was first reported in Bristol, it emerged in Taos, New Mexico; Kokomo, Indiana; Largs, Scotland.
A
small city newspaper would publish a report of a local person suffering
from an unidentified noise, followed by a torrent of letters to the
editor with similar complaints...
Hum sufferers have been consistently written off as either delusional or simply suffering from tinnitus...
Further confusing matters is the fact that some reports of the Hum
have been definitively traced to specific sources and corrected. The
Hum was heard in Sausalito, California, in the mid-1980s, but was
eventually found to be the result of the mating sounds of a fish called
the plainfin midshipman, whose call could penetrate the steel hulls of
the houseboats in the marina. The Windsor Hum was investigated by the
Canadian government and ultimately traced to factories on Zug Island,
across the Detroit River in Michigan. After an extensive study of the
Hum in Kokomo, Indiana, researchers determined that it was caused by two
nearby manufacturing plants whose production facilities were emitting
specific low frequencies...
Crucially, Deming was
able to distinguish the Hum from
tinnitus. Tinnitus, usually a ringing in the ear, can take a number of forms,
but while its intensity may wax and wane, it is more or less omnipresent, and
those who suffer from it tend to hear it in any environment. The Hum, which is
constant but only under certain circumstances (indoors, rural areas, etc.),
defies a simple correlation with tinnitus. Additionally, Deming notes that
if
the Hum were related to tinnitus, one would expect a fairly normal geographic
distribution rather than clusters in small towns.
For a long read on the subject, see the source article at
The New Republic. The embedded image is a screencap from the
World Hum Map (zoomable at the source).
