This low hum is hardly ho-hum.
People in the Stanwood and Camano Island area told The Herald in an Oct. 22 story about a bizarre low hum they were hearing that won’t go away.
Since then, the story has resonated throughout Snohomish County. Others say they, too, are losing sleep. They wonder if they’re losing their minds.
What in tarnation is it? The low hum sounds like a diesel engine idling, except it’s everywhere.
Some think it’s a secret submarine transmission. Others wonder if they’re hearing the male toadfish’s love call.
Maybe, more practical killjoys say, it’s just a train idling or a buried power line.
Joe Mullins, a retired electrical and mechanical engineering professor who researched the same kind of hum in 1994 in Taos, N.M., said he can rule out those theories.
The noise, his research indicated, is probably all in people’s heads.
“We did have a special low-frequency microphone that was anywhere from 100,000 to 1 million times the sensitivity of the human ear,” Mullins said by phone Friday. “We never got any tone or sound that was in the right frequency range that these people were hearing. The actual sound is not there.”
That led Mullins and his colleagues to theorize that a small percentage of the population suffers from an unknown neurological disorder.
“That was one of our hypotheses, but it’s one of those things that doesn’t kill people, so it’s hard to get funding for” additional research, he said.
Out of money, he never got the chance to follow up.
Mullins does not doubt that the sounds seem very real.
“It is really a distressing sound, ominous, and they can’t get away from it,” he said.
In the Oct. 22 story, Kathy Ostrander of Stanwood described the sound that keeps her awake many nights. “It’s like my central nervous system is resonating with something,” she said.
Pat Timko of Camano Island described it as “omnipresent,” with no obvious location, similar to a diesel engine idling.
Theresa Metzger said she heard it off and on for several years.
Mullins said people in Taos had similar descriptions.
Since the Oct. 22 story, nine other people in Snohomish County, from Arlington to Edmonds, reported having heard the sounds, too.
“Now I know I’m not going nuts,” said Arthur Taft of south Everett. “I only wished that when I first started hearing it I had documented it.”
The Stanwood PUD office also got a lot of calls after the story was published, spokesman Scott Faries said.
“Most everybody thinks it’s the trains” idling at sidetracks in Lakewood and Stanwood, Faries said.
John Meitzen, a graduate student at the University of Washington studying neurobiology and behavior, sent The Herald an e-mail about research done in Washington on the toadfish’s bizarre mating call.
But Timko said the toadfish call, which she listened to on the Internet, did not sound like what she has been hearing. And the frequencies do not match; Mullins said Taos residents identified simulations of their noise at 76 hertz, while the toadfish’s call is 100 hertz.
People in Taos had similar hypotheses about trains, power lines, gravel operations and submarine communications.
“It sounds so very, very familiar to me,” Mullins said. “We chased a lot of those.”
Most were ruled out, he said.
The 1994 Taos story made the national news, and people from all over the world called Mullins to report hearing the noise, too.
While he still does not know the source, Mullins said some people in Taos found ways to reduce the aggravation. Some used background noise to distract themselves from the hum until they fell asleep. Earplugs don’t help because they only screen out the higher frequencies, making the hum more obvious, he said.
“Someday, somebody will get to the bottom of it,” Mullins said. “I certainly hope so. It’s an interesting mystery.”
Reporter Scott Morris: 425-339-3292 or smorris@heraldnet.com.
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