A mysterious, low hum has plagued a UK village for years. Here’s what it sounds like

The hum began sometime during a small U.K. village’s COVID-19 lockdown. Years later, it still hasn’t stopped.

Some residents of Holmfield say the noise never goes away, according to discussion on a Facebook page dedicated to “the HUM.” Others don’t hear the hum at all, the local government reported.

One local captured the sound “a year after my first recording,” he said in a Facebook video posted on Nov. 23, 2021. As he opens his car door, the hum grows louder. At first, it sounds like white noise, like old TV channel static at a low volume. The hum grows louder. It sounds almost like a washing machine running in the other room, a thrumming, possibly mechanical noise.

The hum plagues locals.

“This is having an impact on people’s mental health,” a petition on Change.org says.

The hum has caused a “lack of sleep, headaches… foggy brain, painful ears, stress and anxiety.. (and) a case of shingles,” according to the petition signed by about 580 people.

The sound is “continuous day and night,” the petition says, leading some residents to change or cut their work hours or even leave town “just so they can get some respite.”

“It’s driving me mad,” one person commented.

“I can’t stand it much longer,” another said.

A support group was even created for people affected by the hum, a link shared on the Holmfield Hum’s Facebook page shows.

But where is the hum coming from? Why won’t it stop?

The videographer – like many Holmfield locals – is convinced the sound comes from an industrial building. But local investigations provide a different conclusion.

The Calderdale Council, the local government, began an investigation into the noise after residents complained, the Independent reported in October 2021. Midway through, it claimed to have narrowed the noise to three possible sources but never specified which ones, the Halifax Courier reported in January 2022.

The council later backtracked entirely in a concluding report published Oct. 5. Its conclusion?

“Despite all efforts,” the investigation by the council and an independent noise consultant found nothing. No “statutory nuisance” and no source, the report says.

“We have given our all to this investigation and left no stone unturned,” the Calderdale Council’s cabinet member for public services and communities said in the report. “We know this is not the outcome that the complainants were hoping for, but we have exhausted all current lines of enquiry.”

The mysterious Holmfield hum joins a growing list of cases of “the Worldwide Hum,” an unexplained modern phenomenon of an “unusual unidentified low-frequency sound” that scientists can measure but cannot explain, according to a website dedicated to the issue.

Holmfield is about 200 miles northwest of London.

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