The Hum

I'm hoping maybe one of your listeners has experienced something like this too. Because, and here's the thing, I've felt so alone with it for years now. Back in 2012, I was in Sechelt visiting some friends, and that's when I first heard it. This low-frequency drone, like a diesel engine idling somewhere nearby. I remember looking around, thinking it was float planes out on the water. You know, we get a lot of seaplanes up here on the Sunshine Coast. But the sound didn't go away. It followed me back to Gibsons, where I live. I'd hear it at night mostly, lying in bed. This constant thrum, thrum, thrum. Like someone left a truck running outside, except there was no truck. I'd get up, look out the window, walk around the house. Nothing. The sound was everywhere and nowhere at the same time. At first, I thought I was losing my mind. I'm a schoolteacher, I've also done some work at UBC. I'm a rational person. But this noise, it was driving me crazy. It was loudest at night, and it was always worse indoors than outdoors. Some nights I couldn't sleep at all.

So I did what anyone does these days. I Googled it. I typed in something like 'low frequency humming sound' and, I swear, my entire perspective changed in an instant. Pages and pages of results. Turns out I wasn't alone. Not even close. It's called The Hum. Capital T, capital H. hear it too, started for me in 2014 - Felix' And people all over the world have been hearing it for decades. Bristol, England back in the 1970s. Taos, New Mexico in the early 1990s. Windsor, Ontario. Sydney, Australia. All these different places, all these people describing the exact same thing I was experiencing. The descriptions were identical to what I was hearing. A low rumble, between about 30 and 40 hertz. Some people compared it to a diesel engine idling, others said it was like a distant rumbling. But the key thing, the thing that made me realize this was real, was that only certain people can hear it. About two percent of the population in any given area. And it's more common in middle-aged people, usually between 55 and 70 years old, though I was younger when I started hearing it.

I started reading everything I could find. Academic papers, forum posts, news articles. The more I researched, the more fascinated I became. This wasn't just some random phenomenon. This was something real, something measurable, something that's been affecting people for at least fifty or sixty years. Back in the early 1990s, researchers in Taos, New Mexico did a whole study. They found that about two percent of the local population could hear it, each person at a slightly different frequency, somewhere between 32 and 80 hertz. They brought in equipment, they did acoustic monitoring, they interviewed dozens of people. And they couldn't figure out what was causing it. And here's the thing, the people who hear The Hum aren't crazy. We've got normal hearing. It's not tinnitus, which is what doctors always want to blame it on. Tinnitus is a high-pitched ringing. This is a low rumble. Completely different. And besides, multiple people in the same area can hear The Hum at the same time. That's not how tinnitus works.