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Noises That Have Scared You

Ulalume said:
...Child says he thinks the loons sound this way because they're lonely. Which brings up an interesting question of how we relate a sound to an emotional state...
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To my mind, one of the most beautiful sounds in nature.

Over here we call them Divers, and I've had the privilege of hearing them calling across Scottish lochs: the most memorable time - possibly because it was the first - being many years ago when I was bivvied up by the side of a relatively small loch on the isle of Rum. The bird I heard on this occasion would probably have been a Black Throated or Red Throated Diver: the Great Northern is only a winter visitor, I think - and I was there in the early summer. The call isn't as epically mournful as the Common Loon/Great Northern Diver - which I've heard since in the winter months - but is still very atmospheric.

That same trip I also camped by the Singing Sands on Eigg - underneath a Manx Shearwater colony. Not much sleep was had: very noisy neighbours en masse, and individual vocalisations can occasionally be very disconcerting.

Not scary, but another favourite natural sound is that made by a raft of Eider - who sound like a coachload of old ladies who have just heard a particularly juicy piece of gossip (or, individually, as one youtube comment has it - Frankie Howerd looking through a keyhole).

Broken video link to Eider duck calls.
'The Sarcastic Duck' Sounds like this:

 
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Spookdaddy said:
To my mind, one of the most beautiful sounds in nature.

Over here we call them Divers, and I've had the privilege of hearing them calling across Scottish lochs: the most memorable time - possibly because it was the first - being many years ago when I was bivvied up by the side of a relatively small loch on the isle of Rum. The bird I heard on this occasion would probably have been a Black Throated or Red Throated Diver: the Great Northern is only a winter visitor, I think - and I was there in the early summer. The call isn't as epically mournful as the Common Loon/Great Northern Diver - which I've heard since in the winter months - but is still very atmospheric.

That same trip I also camped by the Singing Sands on Eigg - underneath a Manx Shearwater colony. Not much sleep was had: very noisy neighbours en masse, and individual vocalisations can occasionally be very disconcerting.

Not scary, but another favourite natural sound is that made by a raft of Eider - who sound like a coachload of old ladies who have just heard a particularly juicy piece of gossip (or, individually, as one youtube comment has it - Frankie Howerd looking through a keyhole).

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I always expect the Eider duck call to be followed by the word "Matron!"
 
Spookdaddy said:
Not scary, but another favourite natural sound is that made by a raft of Eider - who sound like a coachload of old ladies who have just heard a particularly juicy piece of gossip
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That reminded me of something that happened to me on hols a couple of years ago. Not scary, sorry for the thread de-rail.
Anyway, September, Northern France, motorbike camping trip. Found a nice quiet campsite on a hill, overlooking a rectangular fishing pool which was right next to a more natural pond surrounded by bullrushes.
Late in the evening, getting towards midnight, all was still and quiet, only a couple of other people camping. I became aware of the sound of ducks quacking softly. I lay there in my hammock, and I could hear the noise increasing, in the same way a crowd of people naturally get louder as they fight to be heard. More than that, I could hear one single duck "say" something and that would be followed by a tumult of quacking from the rest, then they'd settle down and the single one would set them off again. I remember thinking it was a gig at a Duck Comedy Club. This went on for ages, I dozed off, the row woke me up and I snapped,
"Will you PLEEEEASE SHUT. THE. FUCK. UP!" Silence. "Thank you!"
Lone Duck: (softly) "Quack quack quack etc"
Audience (softly) : "Quack hahahaha quack etc"
And so we were off again, the ducks getting louder and louder until I shouted to STFU and they piped down again. Fuck knows what was going on, but it went on all night till it got light, then there was peace and quiet - I imagined loads of duck wives were sitting up waiting for the drakes to stagger home, so they could give them a right earful.
Sorry, carry on...
 
Spookdaddy said:
I always used to think of them as a wilderness bird - but I've seen rafts of them on the Water of Leith, hard by the Commercial Street road bridge, sounding for all the world like they've just seen someone doing something on a bus that they really shouldn't have been doing anywhere.
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Ha, those ducks sound just like the Monty Python Pepperpot characters! :D
 
Last night was very eventful in Stockholm. We got what was in principle the three minute warning!

I'm being a bit dramatic maybe but we did actually get the Emergency warning signal. We have something in Sweden called the VMA (translates as Important Message Announcement). It is a system of sirens and alarms which sounds in the event of an emergency. There are horns and sirens in lofts, on roofs, in stations etc. When you hear it, you are supposed to move indoors and close all windows and doors. Information is then spread by National boradcasters about the state of the emergency. It can be anything from "thick smoke from a forest fire is heading your way so stay indoors" to "the bomb has dropped, get to an emergency shelter".

At 10pm last night, the sirens sounded in the whole of Stockholm. We literally stopped in our tracks. Imagine hearing air raid sirens in the middle of London at 10.00 pm on a Sunday evening. We knew that it wasn't one of the scheduled tests because they are always on a Monday at 3.00 pm. After a test, they sound an "all clear" signal and that didn't happen last night either.

The kids were in bed and we looked at each other - do we stay or go? What's the danger? We both dived onto social media to see what was happening and ZERO information came from the government. The police website crashed, the offical crisis website from the government had crashed, the emergency services switchboard was jammed and there was nothing on TV or Radio for over 10 minutes (which doesn't sound very long but it is when you're looking out of the window and waiting for a flash in the sky).

We are packing to go on holiday and so we have lots of clothes, bags, shoes and what have you in suitcases and all our passports are ready. I started gathering everything up and planning in which order to do things (wake the kids or pack the car first?) when one solitary message came through on Twitter. False alarm.

We breathed out again but waited for more confirmation. I wondered if everything had been hacked and maybe this was false information. We waited for the all clear signal. But it never came (and as of now, lunchtime the following day) it still hasn't sounded. The official response is that they tried to sound the all clear but the system wouldn't function. They had carried out a silent test but for some reason it sounded for real and then the all clear didn't work (sounds fishy to me).

So there are many hundreds of furious Stockholmers today. If that had been real then ALL of the channels which we are supposed to use crashed or were jammed. That was from only a few thousand users trying to access the info at the same time. Most of Stockholmers are on vacation now and have left the city. Imagine if this had been during a normal weekday with hundreds of thousands of people trying ot get through.

There is also a system of shelters in Sweden which we are supposed to use in case of something bad. However, most of these are now car parks, cycle storage or just locked and forgotten. We have one acreoss the road but I doubt there was a warden or anyone there last night to open it up when the sirens sounded.

And those poor old people who don't have Twitter, FB or access to social media. It was 11 mins before something came out on Twitter but over 45 minutes before any official statement was made. There was some info on the radio after 11 mins too but it was about an hour before you could easily find info on it being a false alarm.

Or was it? How close did we come last night without knowing it?
 
I can sympathize, Ringo, owing to a similar incident in my Tennessee hometown in summer 1969.

(NOTE: I'm having a sort of Mandela Effect moment ... I was certain I posted about this some years ago, but there's no trace of it to be found after strenuous searching.)

It was a common practice among my high school 'gang' to camp out at a local firetower (forestry observation tower) atop a high ridge. The tower was manned only about 4 - 6 weeks out of the year, and otherwise provided a relatively safe remote location. The tower was only about 1 mile from my family home, and each was readily visible from the other. However, the circuitous road routing was such that getting to the firetower from our house was a multi-miles drive that took 15 - 20 minutes minimum.

On that particular night, my friends (most of whom were now in college) and I had joined up with some new acquaintances from the local university. We were having our own micro-Woodstock - sitting around the campfire, singing folks songs, having deep group discussions about anything / everything, etc. In the post-midnight wee hours, and in the middle of a group sing, someone shushed the group and said, "Do you hear something?"

It was a single siren coming from the town (circa 2 - 3 miles distant by crow's flight). We recognized it as one of the emergency warning sirens. No sooner had someone suggested it must be some sort of mistake or technical screw-up involving a single siren than the remainder of the town's warning network sirens joined in. The sirens were blaring a sustained continuous tone.

No sooner had someone wisecracked about it being a glitch affecting the whole local network than the sirens' tone began to fall and then rise in unison - the pattern we all knew from our Cold War era schooling meant 'imminent attack'.

It was unnerving enough to be perched atop a ridge from which none of us could expect to make it home in less than the quarter-hour we'd been advised to expect as a max warning timeframe. To make matters worse, our location was roughly centered between two large guided missile plants - one in each of the valleys to either side - which had earned my hometown a presumptive status as a potential target.

There was no point in running. We looked around at each other, then one by one declared we couldn't think of anywhere we'd rather be, and returned to singing with heightened intensity under the impression this might well be 'it'.

Yes, it indeed turned out to be a hardware glitch / operational accident. Nonetheless, it definitely 'left a mark'. We subsequently referred back to that incident as a time (for some the first time ... ) we'd each had to seriously confront the worst-case scenario.
 
Scary times, Ringo.
Might it be worth asking for a key to the shelter across the road?
 
It was a very un-nerving experience.

The shelter across the road from us is in the basement of a tower block of flats. I think that the entire basement is designated as a safe room but we wouldn't have been able to get through the security entrance door.
 
Ringo said:
It was a very un-nerving experience.

The shelter across the road from us is in the basement of a tower block of flats. I think that the entire basement is designated as a safe room but we wouldn't have been able to get through the security entrance door.
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Ahh. That puts it in a different light.
The shelter possibly would suffer damage if the block of flats went down (unless the engineers factored that in to the design). Yikes.
 
Ringo said:
It was a very un-nerving experience.

The shelter across the road from us is in the basement of a tower block of flats. I think that the entire basement is designated as a safe room but we wouldn't have been able to get through the security entrance door.
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That does sound frightening, Ringo. :eek: Any further information on what might have caused the glitch? (ETA - if it really was a glitch.)

It might be a good idea to ask the city council about those old locked shelters. Maybe it's time for the city to check if they are still usable, just in case.
 
Back when I was at college doing 'A' levels, the history teacher showed me a government leaflet about what to do in the event of a nuclear attack. One piece of advice was to rip a door off its hinges and set it up inside the house as a temporary shelter.
As if that would protect anybody from a nuclear strike.
 
Mythopoeika said:
Back when I was at college doing 'A' levels, the history teacher showed me a government leaflet about what to do in the event of a nuclear attack. One piece of advice was to rip a door off its hinges and set it up inside the house as a temporary shelter.
As if that would protect anybody from a nuclear strike.
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Better than the curtains.
 
jimv1 said:
Better than the curtains.
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I suspect the curtains are for blocking the flash.
However, they'd go up in flames just before the glass explodes everywhere.
 
I used to be absolutely terrified of an LP my parents had when I was very little. Hated the damn thing. It was something to do with household sounds, or somesuch (I've no idea what the title was) but it had a vacuum cleaner on it and the noise of that was unbelievably terrifying to me.

Also I find - am I the only one? - that I am very scared of loud noises in general. I don't know why, they just unnerve me. I feel very on-edge if I hear loud snoring, loud children crying... noises that in and of themselves are not scary, but they just set me on edge somehow.
 
Schrodinger's Zebra said:
I used to be absolutely terrified of an LP my parents had when I was very little. Hated the damn thing. It was something to do with household sounds, or somesuch (I've no idea what the title was) but it had a vacuum cleaner on it and the noise of that was unbelievably terrifying to me.

Also I find - am I the only one? - that I am very scared of loud noises in general. I don't know why, they just unnerve me. I feel very on-edge if I hear loud snoring, loud children crying... noises that in and of themselves are not scary, but they just set me on edge somehow.
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Nope - I suffer from hyperacusis too and can get very irritable - almost to a misophonic level.

What's helped me is the new hearing aids I recently bought that I can tap into music directly from my phone. So if the typing in my office starts to melt my brain I just turn some music on.

I also explain to people that I'm sensitive to sounds, people eating drives me up the wall, I explain that I don't hate them, just the sound they are making. :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperacusis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misophonia
 
Naughty_Felid said:
Nope - I suffer from hyperacusis too and can get very irritable - almost to a misophonic level.

What's helped me is the new hearing aids I recently bought that I can tap into music directly from my phone. So if the typing in my office starts to melt my brain I just turn some music on.

I also explain to people that I'm sensitive to sounds, people eating drives me up the wall, I explain that I don't hate them, just the sound they are making. :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperacusis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misophonia
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Oh wow I didn't know it had a name! Thank you for the links. If anything I'd say I fit the first link more closely... I'm not saying I have it severely or anything, but certainly it seems to fit (and linked with anxiety and tinnitus, which I have, and ear infections which I have always had loads of throughout my life). Mind you the second link about annoyance of some sounds - I certainly have that at times.

That sounds like a handy feature on your hearing aids (not that I'm saying it's a good thing that you need hearing aids... hopefully you know what I mean). Sometimes words don't come out right :)
 
Schrodinger's Zebra said:
Oh wow I didn't know it had a name! Thank you for the links. If anything I'd say I fit the first link more closely... I'm not saying I have it severely or anything, but certainly it seems to fit (and linked with anxiety and tinnitus, which I have, and ear infections which I have always had loads of throughout my life). Mind you the second link about annoyance of some sounds - I certainly have that at times.

That sounds like a handy feature on your hearing aids (not that I'm saying it's a good thing that you need hearing aids... hopefully you know what I mean). Sometimes words don't come out right :)
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Hyperacusis has links to tinnitus and ear infections so that's another giveaway. Just google and there's plenty of advice out there. The best thing though is not to trivialize it or feel embarrassed about it. It's real and can be disabling.
 
My father owned an apartment a few hundred meters away from the Family Law Court building in Parramatta, a suburb of Sydney in the 80's.
In April 1984 I was staying there when a bomb went off at the Court (one of a series of bombings & shootings) which rocked our building and was the loudest thing I'd heard up until that time. Then the sirens began. This was pre-internet days and it was frightening not knowing what was going on. It sounded like we'd been invaded.
 
Lord Lucan said:
My father owned an apartment a few hundred meters away from the Family Law Court building in Parramatta, a suburb of Sydney in the 80's.
In April 1984 I was staying there when a bomb went off at the Court (one of a series of bombings & shootings) which rocked our building and was the loudest thing I'd heard up until that time. Then the sirens began. This was pre-internet days and it was frightening not knowing what was going on. It sounded like we'd been invaded.
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I lived in a suburb near Parramatta in the eighties as a Young Un as well...
 
Lord Lucan said:
My father owned an apartment a few hundred meters away from the Family Law Court building in Parramatta, a suburb of Sydney in the 80's.
In April 1984 I was staying there when a bomb went off at the Court (one of a series of bombings & shootings) which rocked our building and was the loudest thing I'd heard up until that time. Then the sirens began. This was pre-internet days and it was frightening not knowing what was going on. It sounded like we'd been invaded.
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That must've been terrifying; I'm guessing the sirens were probably scary too?
 
Heard my own lung crackle with pneumonia a few years ago. Up until then I'd thought yeah got pneumonia, got antibiotics, couple of days off an' I'll be right...

It's easy to neglect pneumonia as it creeps up on the patient and they can struggle on until it's too late. Even after the diagnosis they might not take it seriously.

I may have been going that way, but the sound of that physical symptom brought home to me how ill I was. Off to bed.
 
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