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Writing Unique Island Mysteries
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One Woman's Struggle with the Hum I am 38 years old and currently living in the house in which I grew up, but I don't remember hearing the hum as a child. I started noticing it a few years ago when I'd stay up reading late at night. I work evenings and often don't go to bed until 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning. I live on a hill in the western part of the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles County and it's usually very quiet up here in the evenings. While I was reading, I would notice the hum and think it was airplanes flying overhead to land at Burbank airport. It never occurred to me that a) there was no Doppler effect and b) planes don't fly into Burbank at that time of night. Funny how the brain will filter out these things in order to come up with a logical explanation for the unknown, in the same way that we overlook outrageous incongruities in our dreams in order to make sense of what's happening. Eventually, the hum got so annoying that I started questioning these inconsistencies and began searching for the source of the hum. I went all around my house, listening at electrical outlets and near appliances, but the source seemed to be non-local. I went outside and could still hear it, but I could not pinpoint an area from which it emanated. It was as if it was all around me, suspended in the air like humidity. For me, the sound is felt as much as it is heard and it is usually that feeling of vibration in my ears that first alerts me to the presence of the hum. I have a touch of tinnitus that comes and goes and it is a very different experience from the hum. As you may know, tinnitus is a ringing in the ears that is internally generated. You can put your hands over your ears and you will still hear it, unaltered. When I hear the hum, I can shake my head from side to side and the sound will stop, only to return when I am still. This is a very unusual phenomenon, because even though sound is a vibration that is picked up by the bones in my ear and translated by my brain, shaking my head will only change the sound by changing the way the vibration hits my ear, not make it disappear. In other words, if I shake my head while listening to music or a person talking, my experience of the strength or tone of the sound may change, but I will still hear it. Not so with the hum. I definitely feel that it is from an external, man-made source and, as such, I tend to regard it as somewhat sinister. I have heard it suggested that it is the vibration of the planet (the so-called "music of the spheres") or the noise of civilization bouncing off the atmosphere, but I reject both of these out of hand since the hum (for me, at least) is transient and unpredictable. If it's the vibration of the planet, would I not hear it all the time? If it's the noise of civilization, why do I hear it primarily in the evening, when traffic is at a minimum and most of the city is asleep? I have not had any of the painful physical experiences that some people on the forum have reported, but the longer I hear the hum the more annoying it becomes and the more I want to escape it. I have a friend who speaks all over the world about occult religious symbolism, secret societies and conspiracies and I asked him about the hum. He said it sounded like the Taos hum, which I hadn't heard about. It was in doing research about the Taos hum that I came across the hum forum and many other sites about hum hearers around the world. Nobody seems to have an answer. I told my best friend about it and when I'd finished she stared at me open-mouthed, because she heard the hum as a child (in the 70s) when she lived down the hill from me and was terrified by it. She thought a plane was going to crash into her house at any moment. I heard it the other day in the afternoon and asked my mother if she could hear it. She stood very still, but said she couldn't hear anything. I called a friend who lives a couple of miles away down the hill from me and she could hear it. My new neighbor says she can hear it, but her son can't. Many times, I've left work less than 10 miles from my home hearing nothing, but as soon as I arrive home 15 minutes later and turn off the engine of my car, I feel the vibrations and hear the hum. The only logical explanation I can come up with is that it's coming from the Rocketdyne facility near my house, but why do some people hear it and others don't? Of course, it could always be aliens...
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