What was it? Residents report strange noise in Green, New Franklin, Springfield
The mysterious sound began in the middle of the night.
“Something woke me up,” Green resident Bill Price recalled. “I thought, ‘What is that noise?’ ”
Around 2 a.m. Tuesday, he asked his wife, Betty, if she heard it, and she sleepily wondered if it might be coming from their basement.
No, this was definitely outside.
“The first thing I thought of when I was listening to it in bed, it sounded like a Harley was sitting up here, just ‘blub-blub, blub-blub,’ just idling. Well, then it got louder and it varied.”
When Bill looked through a window, he expected to see lights on at other homes as neighbors investigated the sound, but their houses remained dark. He was the only one to venture outside.
A loud whooshing filled the cold night. He went back to get Betty.
“You’ve got to come out here and hear this,” he told her.
They listened together. Bill recorded the noise on his phone at 3:39 a.m.
“It finally quit, but it went on for a long time,” Betty said.
About 5 miles west of the Price residence, Cathy Givens had been jostled awake at her New Franklin home.
“At first I thought it was a plane overhead, so I ignored it,” she said. “Then, another plane? Finally at 3 I got up to investigate and outside there was a constant rumbling sound.”
She and her husband, Glen, live across from a gas well complex, but they quickly ruled that out as the source of the sound. It seemed to be coming from across Nimisila Reservoir. Sort of like a train, but without the clacking.
She recorded the rumbling on her phone at 3:19 a.m.
“My husband and I drove to the other side of the reservoir to investigate but still heard the sound coming from somewhere off in the east,” Givens said.
A light icy rain fell as they returned home. They chalked up the noise to some kind of strange weather phenomenon. The rumbling continued to wake Givens throughout the morning.
She later learned that her daughter Sara Jones, who lives next door, also heard the noise. More surprisingly, daughter Rebecca Ondecker, who lives about 11 miles away in Springfield Township, heard it, too.
The National Weather Service issued no reports of atmospheric anomalies that morning.
“Strange indeed,” Givens said.
The whooshing reminded Bill Price of something he had heard before.
“It sounded like hissing air to me,” he said. “I used to work in a machine shop and if an air hose broke: Wheew, wheew, wheew, wheew. It flew around.”
He thought about the Nexus natural gas pipeline that travels through the city, and worried that it might be punctured. Price called the mayor’s office about what he had heard.
The strange noise didn’t awaken Green Mayor Gerard Neugebauer.
“I didn’t hear anything,” Neugebauer said. “But then again, my wife always complains I never woke up for any noise. If the kids would be screaming or something, I wouldn’t hear it, I’d just sleep.”
Neugebauer said the pipeline has a release valve off Killinger Road.
“But typically if there was an event, we would have been notified,” he said.
Kristen Henson, a spokesperson for Canadian energy company Enbridge, which co-owns the pipeline with DTE Energy of Detroit, said the noise came from somewhere else.
“Nexus was not venting gas or conducting maintenance activities which could cause any noticeable sound impacts during this time,” she wrote in an email message.
What about Akron-Canton Airport? Could an airplane have been circling?
“There were no unusual flights around that time,” reported Christian McCauley, marketing and communications manager for the airport. “I would suspect something else.”
The adjacent MAPS Air Museum doesn’t have any working engines in its collection, so that couldn’t be the source either.
Maybe it wasn’t even somewhere close. Sound can travel great distances in cold air.
“From my house, I can hear the train running through the very west end of New Franklin with the wind conditions a certain way,” Neugebauer said. “I can hear that train, which is really far away.”
In 2020, residents of Barberton, New Franklin, Green and Clinton reported hearing strange booming noises at different hours of the day. The sounds were never fully explained, but Tuesday’s incident seems to be different. This was a prolonged whoosh for a couple of hours rather than a burst of staccato blasts.
“Weird things happen,” Neugebauer said.
Could it have been an oil well venting? Harvested corn blowing into a silo? Industrial machinery humming at a local factory?
The people who heard it would like to know.
“It bugged me,” Bill Price said. “It actually spooked me.”
“Who knows what it was?” Betty Price said.
“What the hell is this?” Givens asked.
The mystery continues for now.
Mark J. Price can be reached at mprice@thebeaconjournal.com
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This article originally appeared on Akron Beacon Journal: Southern Summit County residents report hearing strange noise
