It was around 2005 that Simon Payne started hearing it. A strange, low, rumbling sound that travels through walls and floors and seems to come from everywhere. At first, he was convinced the noise was from some kind of machinery, but he couldn’t find the source. It didn’t go away; he couldn’t run from it. Even when he travelled 12,000 miles from his Cambridgeshire home to New Zealand, he could still hear it. It wreaked such havoc on his life, he had to quit his job. He became increasingly isolated and stopped seeing friends. But when he started to look around on the internet for more information, he discovered he was not alone. “I found out that it was all over the place,” he says. “There’s no hiding from it.”
Payne was hearing “the Hum”, a mysterious global phenomenon that is thought to affect as many as 4 per cent of the world’s population. The earliest reliable reports of the Hum date from the Seventies, when numerous Bristol residents wrote letters to the Bristol Evening Post to complain about hearing the noise, which has since been compared to the sound of an idling truck or thunder – and is different from tinnitus. Some Bristolians still hear it to this day, and it’s been reported in places around the world, from the suburbs of Tokyo to Taos in New Mexico and Largs in Scotland. It’s left many “hearers” anxious and depressed, and has been linked to several suicides. Over the years, many theories have been posed and investigations conducted, but there is no clear consensus on the cause.
In 2010, reports of the Hum began to emerge in Windsor, Ontario. They caught the attention of Canadian author Jordan Tannahill. “Residents described hearing a low, reverberant sound that would cause their windows to vibrate,” he says. “It would sometimes elicit nosebleeds, headaches and even insomnia.” The Hum became the inspiration for Tannahill’s 2021 novel, The Listeners, which has now been adapted into a BBC One drama. It follows Claire, a schoolteacher played with haunting intensity by Rebecca Hall, who one day begins to hear the Hum out of nowhere. She slowly becomes totally preoccupied by it; more than that – consumed, obsessed. None of her family or colleagues can hear it, but one of her students can. The pair strike up an unlikely friendship and, seeking answers, fall in with a community support group that ends up being much more extreme than they could have predicted.
In the fictional case of Claire, the Hum tears her family apart and she loses her job. For Payne, it had a huge impact on his work and social life. “It was a nightmare. It ruined my career,” he says. “I gave up my job at one point, so I was living on savings and trying to get by. It was pretty horrific – I wasn’t able to sleep because of this noise drilling into my head the whole time.” He says he gave up on everything. “I used to be the life and soul of the party, but I withdrew from my social life. It made me feel very isolated, and I stopped doing everything, more or less.” His relationship, though, remained intact. “My partner is very accepting and understanding of the whole thing, so I don’t think it really did us any harm in the long run, because we’re still together.”
Suddenly, one day, Payne stopped hearing the Hum. “It had gone on for about 10 years, and I was just about on my knees,” he says. “At first I thought, ‘Oh, it’ll come back tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,’ but it didn’t. Gradually, my life went back to some sort of normality.” He sought out a fresh start and moved to Somerset, where he lives now. “I’ve been becoming more outgoing again, and hopefully I can build some lasting friendships here,” he says.
But there was always a niggling worry for Payne that the sound would return, and a few months before we speak, he started to hear “something” again. “I would say it’s a hum, but it’s not the Hum,” he says. “I can discern between the two, and it’s actually at a level that doesn’t bother me. I’m still a bit of an insomniac, but it hasn’t reached the point where it’s really intrusive and destroying my life, which it did before. I turned the corner a long time ago, and I’ve tried to put it behind me. So when stuff like [The Listeners] comes up on the telly, it does kind of make me jump.” He wants to move on, but admits he might watch the drama out of curiosity.
This difference between a hum and the Hum is important, says Glen MacPherson, a hearer who first heard it in his small town of Sechelt in coastal British Columbia in 2012. MacPherson, who has a PhD and a background in social research and psychology, set up The World Hum Map and Database Project, where he invites people to report their experiences so he can map them and pore over the data for clues. “One purpose of my project is separating anthropogenic sounds from the Hum,” he says. “For example, the mains electric hum, mining, heat pumps, marine traffic, and so on, can often present in ways that can be mistaken for the World Hum. Some people are simply too lazy to do the work to discover what it is they are hearing. There is no doubt that countless numbers of people have been tortured by sound, but the question is, what sound?”
What sound, and indeed, what cause? There are countless theories surrounding the Hum, says Tannahill. “There are many natural theories, which I think are quite poetic and mysterious in that we still may not know our own world fully at this stage.” He cites the example of a team of French scientists who proposed that the Hum was potentially made by ocean waves hitting continental shelves, shaking the Earth and causing vibrations. Other scientists have hypothesised that it could be linked to volcanic eruptions and earthquakes.
As with any mystery, the Hum has been used as a jumping-off point for wild conspiracy theories. “One of which, of course, is 5G,” says the author. “I was fascinated while writing the book by how 5G conspiracy theories were prompting people across the UK to burn 5G masts. There are also the most extreme fringe theories around military and government sonic weaponry and mind control. And ELFs – extremely low frequency waves that are used to communicate with submarines – have led to theories that the Hum is the accidental by-product of military technology.”
Perhaps it’s just natural human instinct to want to know the unknowable, and have a simple explanation for that which is complex
In his own research online, Payne has encountered a lot of conspiracy theorists. “You know, the tinfoil hat brigade,” he says. “They say it’s this, that or the other. It’s the Russians or it’s the Chinese. But I’m a rational thinker, I’m not given to all that kind of stuff. And to me, there has to be a rational explanation for every kind of physical phenomenon. It just means we don’t know what it is yet. That’s all.”
At one point, Payne did ask himself, “Am I going mad? Is it in my head?” So he went to see the doctor, who dismissed it as tinnitus. “It’s clearly not the case,” says Payne. “It’s not a tinnitus-type noise. It’s a low-frequency pulsating. It’s very pervasive. And no matter what you do, you cannot block it out. The difficulty is, nobody’s actually managed to record it. For some reason, it’s incredibly elusive. It seems to be coming from all directions at once, almost like it’s coming up through the ground.”
MacPherson says that “conflating the Hum with tinnitus has been unfortunate”. “The phenomena present very differently, affect drastically different proportions of the population, and have dramatically different histories – tinnitus has been documented for thousands of years, whereas the Hum rose to prominence in the early 1970s.”
When writing The Listeners, Tannahill wanted to explore this idea of doctors dismissing the experiences of patients. It happens to Claire in the book. “There is, of course, this long history of women’s symptoms and relationships with their bodies being ignored by the medical establishment and by the patriarchy,” he says. “At one point, Claire is told that perhaps it’s perimenopause. My mother had that experience. She began to report different pains in her body and a number of different symptoms that doctors were dismissing or attributing to menopause, which later turned out to be stage 4 metastatic cancer. I think there’s a part of me that was reeling from that lived experience with my own mother.”
In The Listeners, Claire becomes alienated from her family, who, like her doctor, can’t understand what she’s going through and are questioning her own experience of her body. It’s her loneliness that drives her towards a group of strangers who can hear the Hum. “It’s the power and seduction of being listened to when you aren’t elsewhere,” says Tannahill.
The leader of the support group in Tannahill’s story, a man called Omar, links the Hum to the Schumann resonances, “a real-life geoscience phenomenon in which the Earth is hit by 8 million lightning strikes a day, and that builds up a huge electromagnetic charge in the ionosphere, and this causes the air between the surface of the Earth and the ionosphere to resonate”.
Omar encourages those who can hear the Hum to embrace it, to not just hear it but listen to it, in order to be closer to the Earth. “This is when real science begins to enter into pseudoscience,” says Tannahill. “I’m very interested in these thresholds between belief and conspiracy, truth and fantasy, science and pseudoscience, and that slippery slope. Even people who are educated and who we would see as having a good grip on the facts are really prone to this magical thinking, whether it’s astrology or pseudoscience remedies that have very little scientific basis. I’m curious about what soft thinking we allow ourselves as a salve. Perhaps it’s just natural human instinct to want to know the unknowable, and have a simple explanation for that which is complex.”
So, what does MacPherson, who has undertaken years of research on the Hum, think it could be? He tells me his study has shown that fully ambidextrous people, and people with a family or personal history of ADHD or autism, are overrepresented in the data. “And we are currently exploring the possibility that hearing the Hum might be triggered in some people by the use of a particular class of over-the-counter painkillers,” he says. “We are reasonably certain that the Hum is an internally generated perception of sound – that is, it is not actually a sound, just as tinnitus is not actually a sound. It is likely caused by some combination of specific anatomy, environmental exposure, or prescription/over-the-counter drug use.”
Payne is not so sure. “There is this idea that it could be the total summation of all the human activity that we make; the idea that it’s actually causing some kind of continuous, standing wave of vibration in the world. And not everybody can hear it. But that’s normal. Human beings are not all the same.” He cites research by scientist David Baguley into hyperacusis, a condition that makes certain people extremely sensitive to sound and can be linked to trauma.
“I think there might be something in that. I could speculate all day long,” says Payne. He laughs. A worn-out chuckle. “But in all honesty, I just don’t have a clue.”
‘The Listeners’ begins on BBC One at 9pm on Tuesday 19 November
