Listening for Echoes of the Forest Grove Sound

As Lynch’s post spread, news outlets began to pick up the story. For the rest of February, the Sound put Forest Grove on the map. There were write-ups in local outlets, as well as an article in the Washington Post, a report on ABC News, and a segment on Inside Edition. Eventually the Sound made it to the late-night talk shows, when Jimmy Fallon suggested it could have come from only Donald Trump.

The town itself went a bit nuts. After the Inside Edition segment, the police blog reported being inundated with theories about the Sound. “Some left voicemails reading scripture. Other suggestions included going door-to-door checking septic tanks. Another caller was convinced the sound was coming from a now-defunct government research facility in Gakona, Alaska. Another was convinced it was the Amish using Apple devices via DirectTV in attempts to drive everyone out of the area in order to take over. The police have no credible information on any Amish takeover efforts.” Finally, the police department took to Facebook to affirm their belief there was no danger to the community and that it was not a police matter (unless it was being done on purpose as some kind of prank, which they did not believe to be the case), and to urge residents to stop calling 911 about it. (They also clarified that they had spoken to news outlets and Inside Edition only out of an attempt to tamp down conspiracy theories.)

Many of the national news stories about the Forest Grove Sound featured quotes not just from officials, but from a man named Andrew Dawes. At the time, Dawes was professor of physics at Pacific University (he now works in the private sector). Though Dawes himself never heard the Sound directly, he figured he might be able to help track it down. In mid-February, he set up a quick and dirty website with a Google map that allowed people to record the time and location where they’d heard the Sound. Dawes hoped that by crowd-sourcing reports, he and others might be better able to make sense of where it was coming from and what it was.

By then, the story had become irresistible for conspiracy theorists, UFO believers, and the generally curious. It’s easy to see why. We love stories in semi-remote places like this: familiar enough, yet unknown to anyone who isn’t a local. Places like Forest Grove, that linger on the edge of the wilderness and civilization, tend to be home to weirdness. Twenty-five miles to the south is McMinnville, another small college town also surrounded by the wilds—and that happens to lay claim to one of the earliest UFO sightings. In May of 1950, Evelyn Trent was feeding rabbits on her farm in the small town of Sheridan, 13 miles southwest of McMinnville. In the sky, she would later claim, she saw a low-flying, silver disc; she summoned her husband, who was able to get a few photographs of it. These images subsequently appeared in Life magazine (which erroneously reported that the Trents were from McMinnville); it was the early days of the start of the UFO craze (Kenneth Arnold’s famous sighting over nearby Mount Rainier was 1947), and the photos were taken by millions as early evidence that silver saucers were zooming all over America’s skies.

Later investigations of the photographs revealed that the flying object appeared to be held aloft in the sky by a thin string, and that the object itself bore an uncanny resemblance to a Ford F-100 side-view mirror. But that hasn’t deterred true believers, nor has the fact that we rarely think of UFOs as silver flying saucers anymore. Nor has it deterred the city of McMinnville itself; the restaurant chain McMenamins (which has a hotel in town) now proudly hosts an annual UFO festival.

The Forest Grove Sound offered a similar mystery: Was it something strange and possibly life-changing? Or perhaps a hoax, or the result of some boring everyday cause? Who could say? You had to find it first to answer that question, and until you did, you could believe it might be anything. Either way, it was unsettling—a noise that shouldn’t be there, a sudden interruption of something into the mundane, ordinary world.

After driving the length of Gales Creek Road, I turned around, headed back into town, parked my rental car, and took a stroll down Main Street. I wanted to find anyone who’d heard the Sound, or at least remembered it. Eventually, I came to Van Dyke Appliances, a mainstay local business that has been owned by the same couple for decades. There, one of the employees, Hank, told me what he remembered. He was 12 years old when the news broke and, as one might expect of a 12-year-old boy, he was enthralled by the story, and was excited to seek out the mystery. One Friday night he organized his three brothers into a search party and they set out on their bikes. Eagerly pedaling from one location to the next, they spent all night trying to find it, but ultimately came home empty-handed.

Hank wasn’t the only one; droves of high school kids and college students from Pacific went out looking for the Sound, trying to track down its source, or at least hear it and get a glimpse of the weirdness for themselves. But all that was almost a decade ago, and as I continue my own search, up and down Main Street, many people now don’t remember it at all. Forest Grove is growing, and many transplants have moved here since 2016; for them, it’s likely never crossed their mind before. In Gongaii Games, Inc. (your place for Magic: The Gathering cards and Warhammer 40,000 figurines), I met five young men who seemed the prime demographic of those interested in weird noises, but none of them had even heard of the Sound before. Same with the manager of the local pizza joint, Pizza Schmizza; they’d been running the shop for only a few years, even though the interior was largely unchanged from how it was the last time I ate there, in the previous millennium (the pizza is still pretty good).

Eventually, I wandered into a small boutique on Main Street, filled with soaps and cat socks and other gifts, as well as a fair amount of Bigfoot- and alien-themed books and merchandise. The proprietor, Heather, was more than happy to talk to me about weird sounds: She didn’t hear the Sound herself, but she remembered how the story took over the town. As she recalled it, people described an “unearthly siren from the sky,” something “out of a UFO movie.” Looking around her shop, I asked Heather about her own beliefs; she definitely believes in UFOs and, in years past, has had a table at the McMinnville UFO Festival. She was less sure about Bigfoot (“show me the photograph,” she said), but generally kept an open mind about such things.

It was odd: Heather was the most fervent believer I had met so far, and yet her recollection of the sound, as a “siren,” was thoroughly at odds with Lynch’s recording of a single, sustained pitch. Perhaps what mattered more was not what the sound was, but simply that there was a sound.

Meanwhile, farther down the street, another store proprietor, MJ, vaguely remembered the story and the commotion it caused. “People loved the drama,” she told me. She herself never heard it, but offered, almost as an aside, “I heard they solved it, and it was something mundane.”

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So what if they did solve it? And so what if it was something mundane? If a solution to a mysterious sound presents itself, and no one cares, did it really get solved?

A few days after my trip to Forest Grove, I managed to get Dr. Andrew Dawes on the phone. He told me he still gets an occasional email and interview request about the Sound, and doesn’t seem to mind being the go-to expert, even so many years later. What’s odd, though, is that, according to Dawes, it’s pretty clear we have an answer to what the Sound was—but does anyone want to know?

On the last day of February, Dawes received an email from Langston Holland, an audio engineer in Florida. Holland had heard the Sound on the news and thought it sounded familiar. He presented Dawes with a frequency analysis of it and an example of what he believed to be the likely culprit: a faulty HVAC unit. Laying the two analyses side by side, Holland wrote that “the noise signature almost perfectly matches the copper tube ringing attached to a defective AC compressor valve.” Dawes had already been thinking along similar lines, but noted that when the HVAC noise dies off, there’s a slight pitch increase, and no such increase can be heard on the Forest Grove Sound recording. Holland suggested that this may be a matter of acoustics—the higher the frequency, the harder it is for a sound to travel, and so that pitch increase may have just been lost to the wind. “Given that air damps high frequencies quicker,” he wrote, “I also bet if you got close to the source you’d see the brief pitch changes above 5.76kHz as well.” Holland closed out one of his emails by saying, “My guess is that the poorly sealing valve is going to wear to the point where it’ll stop making noise anyway. :)”

By then, the noise had stopped.

With this new information in hand, Dawes contacted a friend at the Forest Grove Fire Department with his and Holland’s proposed solution, but the city wasn’t terribly interested. The noise having stopped, it wasn’t their problem anymore. Nor was there any lingering interest from the national press, and when outlets stopped doing stories about it, they stopped calling Dawes. “I did send it out to one of the local news agencies,” Dawes told me, “but at that point it was kind of like ‘old news’; after a few months, nobody cares.” And so the HVAC theory was never shared widely.

But the story didn’t entirely go away. In late May of 2016, NBC ran a story titled “Mystery of Forest Grove, Oregon, Noise May Never Be Solved,” bringing up all the old beats from the original mystery, with earlier quotes from Dawes from before he and Holland hashed out the HVAC theory (Dawes admits he missed the reporter’s emailed interview request; it came in during finals, after all). There are dozens of subsequent references to the Forest Grove Sound all over the web now—podcasts, blogs, Reddit threads, etc.—but almost no discussion of the HVAC hypothesis.

After all this time, it takes a fair amount of digging online to find any reference to the solution that Dawes and Holland found. The only piece I could find was Taylor Clark’s short piece from California Sunday, which includes a short quote from Dawes about an “audio analyst from Florida [who] emailed me a fairly detailed report that certainly agreed well with the hypothesis that it came from a faulty valve within an HVAC (or heat pump) unit…. If the original source was a failing valve, then it may have gone away completely when the failure was complete.”

When I asked Dawes why the HVAC story never really got out, wondering if people didn’t want to know that the solution was so mundane, he offered a hypothesis that “maybe it’s less that people didn’t want to know. Maybe once people know an answer, they don’t want to ruin it for anyone else.” And in talking to him, I was reminded of how quickly the public loses interest in solved mysteries, particularly when there’s a scientific explanation. But why is that such a letdown? Isn’t the solution also interesting? As Dawes said to me, “I think it’s a good example of things that get people curious, and a reason to study things and to understand all the possible explanations for something.” This used to be why people decided to study specific areas, precisely because the solutions were fascinating, even when they weren’t supernatural. Increasingly, though, we live in a world where we want mysteries only if they’re weird enough to command our attention, to break through the noise of a world full of distraction.

One of the people I asked in town about the Sound was a bartender at one of the newer breweries. When I mentioned that most people heard it near Gales Creek Road, he responded conspiratorially, “Maybe Department of Forestry? They’ve got a location out there, who knows what they’re up to.” He was mostly kidding, but it was a reminder of how, in a post-X-Files world, the government is simply the default, catch-all explanation for anything weird or malevolent.

Another woman at the bar told me it could very well be seismic activity. She reminded me that the Willamette Valley lies on several faults, and that any day an earthquake could swallow Portland and most of the surrounding area easily. It doesn’t explain why people in the Tualatin Valley would hear it and those in the Willamette would not, but listening to her talk, I wondered if this story was a way for her to channel her unease about living near a major fault line into some kind of story.

For most of Forest Grove’s residents, the story has little meaning for them; either they’ve never heard of it, or don’t care about it. But for others, the Forest Grove Sound has meaning so long as it remains unsolved, and so long as it can be some sort of evidence of a belief they already hold. Because it’s not that we want an unsolved mystery. We want a mystery whose solution is obscured to the point that we can overlay any kind of meaning we’d like on top of it.

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Is Dawes satisfied with the solution to the mystery? “I would say,” he told me, “I’m not losing sleep over the Sound because I’ve got this analysis that matches up pretty well.” But because they never found the actual HVAC unit, never traced the sound to a definitive culprit, Dawes is reluctant to fully commit to their theory. “You never get 100 percent confirmation, probably for anything,” he told me. “It’s always this gray, ‘Maybe, seems like a likely answer.’ But who knows, it could be something else.”

His comment reminded me of another phantom sound in another city. In the early 2010s, Windsor, Ontario, across the border from Detroit, was besieged by an eerie noise that became known as the Windsor Hum. After a series of investigations, researchers determined that the likely cause of the sound was the factories on Zug Island, and that it was neither supernatural nor malevolent. But Colin Novak, one of the lead researchers, confessed to the CBC that, unfortunately, they couldn’t say this with absolute certainty, and that they “weren’t able to find that smoking gun.” Without a longer study time and more funding, he said, it’s unlikely they’ll ever be sure. As Novak put it, “It’s like chasing a ghost.”

What does a sound leave behind? Beyond Lynch’s recording, there’s nothing of the Sound itself. After the echoes die out, how can you ever be sure of what you heard?

I started this column as a means of exploring Mark Fisher’s concept of the eerie, which he defines as “absence where there should be presence” or “presence where there should be absence.” For the former, he offers an example such as the Mary Celeste, the brigantine found mysteriously adrift in 1872, no sign of its crew and no explanation of where they’d gone. Of the latter, he offers an “eerie cry” as a “failure of absence”: “A bird’s cry is eerie if there is a feeling that there is something more in (or behind) the cry than a mere animal reflex or biological mechanism—that there is some kind of intent at work, a form of intent that we do not usually associate with a bird.” It’s not just the cries of birds; sounds are particularly eerie in this regard precisely because they travel, unattached from their source, carried over the wind and through the trees where the acoustics distort and refract them, until they start to seem unnatural and otherworldly.

The Forest Grove Sound is a fascinating blend of the two. Initially, there was a presence where no one expected anything, a failure of absence: an inexplicable sound, out of nowhere, eerie and unsettling. But then it disappeared, and the town was left with its opposite: an absence where there had once been a presence.

Maybe that’s why no one wants to hear about the solution. Maybe that’s why Hank’s eyes lit up when I talked to him in the appliance store, remembering being 12 years old, being full of wonder, biking through the night with his brothers looking for the mystery. After all, what good is a noise if it just fades away by itself? What good is a ghost if you can’t chase it?

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