The HUM

The Hum is a mysterious low pitch noise that bothers up to 2% of people worldwide. It’s been annoying residents in San Francisco's Sunset District, where recently there’s been an outbreak of reports. In this story, we demystifies this strange global phenomenon.

Dale’s House Vibrates

Last year I did a story about the bridge that was called “Tracking Down a Mysterious Hum in San Francisco.” It was that story which inspired Dale Tutaj to reach out to me about his own mysterious hum. Dale lives in the Sunset District. Over the phone, he tells me that this is the third house he’s lived in in the neighborhood that hums and vibrates. It’s annoying, he says, and keeps him and his young daughters from getting sleep.

I go to visit Dale, and he takes me down into his garage to show me “the hum.” Huddled in the corner, we watch graphs form on his laptop screen, measurements he’s taken of the tremors in his home. The graphs are being generated by a ‘data logger,’ an expensive vibration measuring device. Dale’s an engineer by trade (he works in energy efficiency), so this kind of technical stuff comes naturally. He takes the graphs the data logger generates, analyzes them, and puts them on a website he made to raise awareness and find support. The data logger is attached to one of his water pipes, where he suspects the hum is coming from, but he’s not sure.

“It seems like it’s stronger on the street side, the intensity or magnitude,” Dale says. “But whenever I think it’s obvious, I take a measurement that’s counter to that. It’s just confusing, baffling.”

Dale tells me he comes down here in the middle of the night to chase the vibration/hum when it keeps him up, which is often. I noticed the bags under his eyes the moment I walked in. His wife, Cristina, can’t hear or feel it herself. But she’s convinced, like Dale, that it still affects her, and their kids. Whenever it starts, their three-year-old daughter wakes up, and her heart rate monitor spikes. Dale thinks it’s affecting their neighbors too.

“We’ve seen that at every place,” he says. “Bathroom lights come on from the neighbor’s building, or across the street they always have their TV on early in the morning on those really bad days. It seems so obvious.”

There are a handful of people in the Sunset District who also hear a hum like Dale. They’ve found Dale through his website and the social media app Nextdoor. But most people he talks with don’t take it that seriously.

Chasing The Hum

I agree to look into this hum for Dale. I want to find out if other people in the neighborhood really are experiencing the same thing as him. To learn more I head over to the house of Nelson Saarni, who met Dale through NextDoor.

Nelson’s a musician, so he’s actually made recordings of “the hum.” On his couch, I put on headphones, and plug them into an eight-track recorder on his coffee table. He plays it back, and at max volume I can just barely hear something that sounds like some kind of ominous creature breathing.

Then Nelson shows me the post he made on Nextdoor, in which he describes the hum he hears and asks if anyone else in the hood is hearing something similar.

“I looked at it a few days later, and just saw this tremendous chain of replies,” Nelson says. “And I didn't even read them. ‘Oh, God,’ I thought.”

Nelson’s post got more than 100 comments from about 60 different people. I end up personally speaking with nine of them, and they all do describe experiencing something similar. They’re usually the only ones in the house who hear it. They say it’s only heard indoors, even in some rooms better than others, and it’s low-pitched, like a distant truck idling. Some also feel a vibration, like Dale, but most just hear a hum. However, they all hear it at different times of day, and at varying intensities. Which tells me that while these folks all seem to be hearing some sort of similar hum, it’s probably not coming from the same source.

Here's the link for those interested in the entire story.

https://www.kalw.org/news/2021-11-01/the-hum-a-worldwide-mystery-sound-explained