By Tim Binnall
In a truly strange 'mystery noise' case out of Canada, a man has been tormented by a persistent humming sound for over a decade and it has seemingly followed him from one home to the next. The extraordinary story of Dana Negrey reportedly began back in 2008 when he noticed an odd sound that he likened to a "locomotive diesel engine idling in the distance" which never stopped. Fortunately for him, there were others in his community who also heard the continuous hum and the search for the source became a brief media sensation that ultimately proved futile.
His experience with what has come to be called the 'Richmond hum' ended four years later when Negrey moved nearly 200 miles away to the city of Edmonton. However, much to his consternation, the beleaguered man's story soon took a maddening turn when he settled into his new home and, like a scene from a horror film, he heard the sound once more. Musing to himself, "oh no, here we go again," Negrey set out to solve the mystery of the hum once and for all.
While one might suspect that the noise may be coming from Negrey himself, perhaps due to tinnitus or a similar condition, it appears that is not the case as an audio engineer has actually recorded the sound at both his previous home and his current abode. Nonetheless, he noted that not everyone can hear the hum, which is no doubt a particularly frustrating aspect of the case considering that he has had to deal with it for the last ten years.
Perhaps the only thing as persistent as the humming sound has been Negrey's quest to silence it. Amazingly, he even constructed a homemade Faraday cage and then daringly got inside to see if it would help eliminate possible sources for the noise. Much to what we imagine was his profound chagrin, he recalled, "I hopped in and I heard the hum." Complicating matters is that Negrey and audio engineer Richard Patching believe that the cage could be faulty and, as such, they remain uncertain as to what could be causing the sound.
The duo plan to refine their Faraday cage to get it properly working to see if it can yield any clues and continue to mull over possible sources for the noise while also rejecting some of the more outlandish scenarios, such as aliens, which Negrey called "absurd." Be that as it may, he remains confounded by what could be behind the sound and conveyed the sheer breadth of the mystery when he lamented that "I cannot continue to live a life having to deal with a hum that somehow has appeared because somebody has installed something somewhere."