Science: Can You Hear It?

Originally published in The Walrus. Read the full text here.

For years, Windsor residents have been haunted by a hum in the air. Turns out, they’re not alone

Zug island, home to one of the largest steel mills in the United States, is an undeniably creepy place. To get close, you must drive to the southern shore of Detroit’s ravaged Delray neighbourhood. You’re unlikely to encounter other humans, but you’ll pass crooked houses, brick facades fronting non-existent buildings, and the remains of a Roman Catholic church, stained glass long shattered. Despite the ghostly surroundings, the island is eerily alive—a sinister mess of belching towers and twisted tracks on which railcars carry liquid pig iron from soot-black furnaces to a nearby finishing plant.

The site was once an Indigenous burial mound containing hundreds of human skeletons. In 1888, workers detached the island from the mainland to accommodate a shipping canal. Since the Detroit Iron Works took over in 1901, Zug has produced hundreds of millions of tons of steel, been the site of gruesome injuries and deadly explosions, and provided fodder for more than a few local legends. The SS Edmund Fitzgerald, a giant freighter that sank inexplicably into Lake Superior in 1975, was supposedly destined for Zug, and there are rumours of a top-secret penitentiary on the island.

Hearers possess the most useless superpower imaginable—there’s little but grinding and rumbling at the bottom of the sound spectrum.

Last February, I stood on the shore of the narrow turquoise canal, watching the towers churn smoke into the sky. I was there to investigate the latest Zug Island mystery: a spectral, low-frequency noise that has been plaguing residents on the other side of the waterway—in Windsor, Ontario, and surrounding Essex County—since at least 2011. People refer to the disturbance as the Windsor–Essex County hum; it’s a deep, vibratory rumble that’s more physical sensation than sound. “You can’t tune it out,” says Mark Letteri, a philosophy professor at the University of Windsor. “You can put on headphones, but you’re still going to feel it in your body.”

For those who can hear it, the hum is invasive and unsettling. It rattles windows, makes sleep unattainable, and reportedly sends dogs into fits of hysteria. For years, a small group of Canadians, known as “hearers,” has been trying to convince the rest of the world that it exists at all.

This is an excerpt. Read the full text here.