What Are Those Strange Sounds I Keep Hearing at Night?

All over the world, reports of strange sounds are occurring. These sounds are common throughout the year but particularly frequent at night and on colder days. For those concerned about poltergeists, fear not, science has an explanation!

Those eerie sounds sometimes heard in the distance really do have a down-to-earth explanation and it has to do with weather. During a temperature inversion, a layer of colder air gets trapped below a layer of hotter air in the atmosphere. When this occurs, some remarkable audible and visual transformations will take place. Sound waves become distorted and easily identifiable noises are no longer sounds we would recognize.

A very common source of these sounds is road construction. When a temperature inversion takes place, road construction equipment will change frequencies where higher pitches are lost in the upper atmosphere and only the lower rumbling pitches transfer to us thereby producing an eerie effect. There is no paranormal link here, just basic physics playing tricks on the mind.

The anomaly of course is not limited to road construction. Virtually any common sound can be distorted under these conditions whether they are running cars on a highway, generators, wind, techno-music and even drafts in crawl spaces can cause similar phenomena. By the time it reaches someone's ears, it may sound little or nothing like the original sound source. Couple this with the fact that sound travels farther on colder days and that nearby power plant or transformer that never bothered you in the past may suddenly leave you stumped. So the next time you hear (or see) something strange that you cannot explain, take solace in the fact that most likely there is a logical explanation and probably no need to hide under the bed with the dog.