I recently moved to this new suburban district in my city that recently finished construction. It’s my first ever house that I own, well me and my fiance own. A lot of people living around the district are glad that it finally finished as the construction noises have been going on almost non-stop for nearly a decade.
My childhood home is quite close to the district so I remember the constant noise of construction machines pretty well as it started back in my eay teenage years. I always wondered why it would never stop, even at night but I brushed it off as it being connected to some bureaucratic nonsense that I simply don’t understand.
I honestly really like the area. At first, I was unsure about buying a house in the area since half of it in built on grounds once occupied by a large metal refinery. However, I like it here than I would have ever imagined. Our neighbors are friendly, there’s good public transportation, how close my parents live, etc. This place was meant to be just simple suburban real estate but they added space for a few small grocery stores in the planning process, turning it into a proper district. Basically, we have everything we need at arm’s reach.
Last Saturday, I noticed that a lot of lamp posts in the neighborhood had loudspeakers attached to them. I asked my seemingly all-knowing neighbor about it and he said that they are for emergency warning signals. We do get the occasional heavy snow storm in the winter, usually followed by a decent flood in spring. The loudspeakers could be for extreme weather warnings, although no other district in the city has such speakers.
“They presumably have these here, in the newest district to test it out, right? Stuff like that is usually mentioned on the news but I haven’t heard from it. I suppose I just have missed it.” I thought to myself.
On Tuesday, I got off work super late. I work on the other side of the city at a telecom company as an IT specialist. Basically, we had some internet issues in the office ourselves and it took us nearly two hours to find out that the ethernet cable was crushed under a desk and had broken. As it’s summer and my car’s air-conditioning is broken at the moment, I drove home with the windows down. It was half past midnight so I didn’t expect much traffic. Arriving at my home district, I started to notice a high pitched ringing noise coming from the outside. The wind in my ears, I assumed it was just crickets going wild tonight. When I got home though, the ringing noise was definitely something else.
Does anyone know that high pitched squealing noise some car’s breaks do? I think it’s because the break disks are dirty or something. It super annoying and makes you tear your ears out. Anyways, it was that noise, only constant and never ending. This high pitched, squealing noise. At first, I couldn’t make out where it was coming from but I soon realized that it’s probably the loudspeakers. I quickly grabbed my bag and ran inside since the noise was killing me. I threw my bag by the couch and before going to bed, I wrote the local council about the loudspeakers and told them that they seem to be broken, playing this painful note all night long.
The next day, I checked my email all day for a response. Around 3 in the afternoon, they finally responded. They claimed that the speakers were turned off at night and no noise was transmitted from them. They asked if I had a video recording of the noise. I didn’t, but wrote that I’ll see if I can get it on video tonight.
That night, I intentionally left work late to see if I hear the noise again. When I got home though, I heard no noises besides the occasional car driving by or the gust of wind. I went straight to bed, however my fiance wasn’t sleeping. In fact, she wasn’t anywhere in the house. I called her, it rang for a bit before it hung up and I got a text saying: “Randomly went out with the besties and lost track of time. I’ll be home in 15 minutes. <3”. I was tired so I texted her “Alright, no worries <3” and went to bed.
The next morning, she felt that her entire body was sore. I joked about what they might have done last night for her to be so tired but she promised that she had no idea what made her body feel so numb. I laughed it off until I checked out the district’s Facebook page. People all across the district were complaining about their sore and numb arms, legs and backs. Such pain is usually related to lifting heavy things. Most who live here currently are either young children or their parents. Nobody really stays up late besides on special occasions like I did.
The next couple of days have made everything even more confusing. Some people have woken up with burns on their body and my lower back aches like crazy. I went to the doctor ans she said to be more careful when lifting heavy things. The thing is that I definitely haven’t lifted anything very heavy in the past week. Whatever is happening to everyone, it happening to me too.
Another update happened today. Someone decided to set up a camera in their bedroom and set up a motion sensor to start recording when movement is detected. They uploaded it to the Facebook group and well… it’s interesting. The clip wasn’t long, about 10 seconds but it showed how the guy got up from his bed at night, wondered to the camera and covered it with a blanket. His face was clearly seen in the video, it was a cold stare, no emotions whatsoever, not even tiredness. The final five seconds of the video seemed like he walked to the door and left the bedroom. The man himself said that he has ro recollection about doing anything like that in the video.
Some people called it as a hoax, just something to stir up drama. Most people thought it was real, though. Some commented that they had recently found themselves in odd places around their homes, most have no record of ever sleepwalking before. A conversation about people sleepwalking continued for a few hours before the entire Facebook group was hacked and turned into a page advertising crypto scams.
I heard from some people around the neighborhood that it was a deliberate hack to cover something up, that “We were getting too close to the truth.” Personally, I don’t know what to do, I feel like we should temporarily move to my parent’s house and think about the whole thing. My fiance thinks that it’s just some weird phenomenon and will pass quickly. We had our first ever fight over this just this morning.
I suppose I’ll ask my parents what they think and if we even can move to their place. If we can, then I’ll try my best to convince my fiance to move there. If I need to, I’ll drag her with me no matter how much she wants to stay will, there’s no way she’s staying here without me.