I don’t know if white noise is the right way to refer to it. I did google “ringing in ear” and got results for tinnitus, but that sounds like a personal medical condition and not really what I’m referring to. Is there a word people use for there is just a ringing noise? As in, everyone nearby can hear the same faint high-pitched noise?
Adding to that, is there a way to tell if the noise inside of a room is made by a human? Maybe some kind of device that I can hold and that tells me those results in real-time? I know we as humans can kind of distinguish between human voices and other noises…surely there’s some kind of computer program that can do it too? My coworkers were telling me about how AIs can do a lot now.
I’m sorry I’m asking so many questions. I understand if it’s a lot to ask from someone, but I’d really appreciate any help you can give.
Also, please tell me if there’s a different forum I should be asking this stuff to, preferably ones where I don’t need to keep making new accounts. This is the third account I’ve made for this…I’m running out of emails. Lol.
I’m also going to copy paste the body of my other forum posts into the rest of this post. It gives a little bit of context for the question I’m trying to ask, but you also don’t need to read through the whole thing! I don’t know why my other accounts keep getting deleted by a moderator, but I would like to have everything written down in one place if I can.
Also, happy to answer any clarifying questions. Thank you very much.
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This is the post I tried to make a few days ago in a relationship advice forum that I found on Google:
START POST
Hi, I am a 25 year old woman living in the Midwest. A few days ago, I received a phone call from a woman named Madeline Corten. This is the phone conversation as best as I can remember it:
ME: Hello?
MADELINE: Are you [my nickname]?
ME: Yes, I am. Can I ask who is asking?
MADELINE: This is Madeline Corten, I believe you know my daughter.
ME: Hi, Mrs. Corten. I’m not sure who you’re referring to?
MADELINE: I’m talking about my daughter Dana, you conniving little bitch. You were the last person to see her. Where in the goddamn hell is she?
I don’t remember the rest of the conversation very precisely. Mrs. Corten cursed me out on the phone for a few minutes, much to my bewilderment and distress. I somehow managed to convey to her that while I did know of a Dana, I haven’t seen the Dana I know in months, nearly a year. I also told Mrs. Corten the last time I talked to Dana was at Dana’s apartment, and her neighbors on the same floor would probably know a lot more than me, as well as have seen her a lot more recently. I offered to provide the number for one of them, an older man who shared a wall with Dana.
I don’t know what I said wrong, but Mrs. Corten yelled at me a lot more and called me a bitch again. In the end, she started crying. Eventually, Mr. Corten took the phone, explained the situation a bit more thoroughly, and asked me to meet them in public in a few days and tell them anything I knew about Dana’s whereabouts.
I’m not good about being put up on the spot like that, but I ended up agreeing to meet them. I feel extremely uncomfortable just thinking about meeting Mrs. Corten in-person though, especially since her yelling over the phone really distressed me.
I know I should go because it sounds like their daughter is missing and ignoring them while they’re in such a tense situation is awful and insensitive. But I really don’t know any information of value, and I don’t know what I can contribute to their search. Any advice for how I can go about this? Maybe any tips for how I can make a quick getaway if Mrs. Corten starts yelling at me again?
For full context, I’m not close with Dana at all. We know each other because we attended the same middle school, and shared a class from 6th grade to 8th grade. We also got jobs at the same retail company after high school. She’s an okay person, and we did kind of get along, but I think that’s mostly because we were put in situations where it was better to be friendly to each other than not.
I think I’m also easier to get along with because I’ve been told I’m a bit of a doormat. I remember that a few times a month, Dana would ask me last minute to cover a shift for her. I canceled my own plans a few times to do so, and once even clocked in as her because she said management would fire her if she dropped another shift. It was only one time though. I stopped doing it because Dana refused to transfer the pay to me for the hours I’ve substituted in for her, but I did cover her shift a few more times before I resigned in order to attend a college out of town. This was about five years ago, and I should have been around 20 years old then.
About a year ago, near the end of my senior year, Dana called me up out of nowhere and begged me to go see her. She asked me to stay with her for a month or two, saying that she’ll put in writing that she wouldn’t charge me rent. She even offered to give me her bedroom if I agreed, and she’d sleep on the couch. I was really confused, but she claimed that I was the only one she could ask. She sounded extremely unwell over the phone, and after a bit of hesitation I agreed to visit her once my graduation ceremony concluded.
I ended up with her for just under two months, and what Dana said was true. She really wasn’t well. A situation occurred near the tail-end of those two months and I ended up leaving. That would be the last time I saw Dana.
According to Mr. Corten, there’s no one who can claim to see Dana more recently than that. Even Dana’s parents only knew of Dana’s missing status after they were contacted by the police nearly half a year later. Apparently, Dana had failed to answer the court summons for an eviction case her landlord was filing against her, and there was a warrant out for her arrest. The police contacted the Cortens because theirs was the secondary contact left on Dana’s renter’s profile. The Cortens then convinced the landlord to let them see his camera footage, and that’s how they learned of my two month long visit. They managed to get my contact information from my and Dana’s former employer.
This leads us to where I am now, wondering if it would be okay to not engage with the Cortens. I don’t know. Do you all have any thoughts?
END POST
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For some reason, I got a notification saying that the moderators deleted something? I’m not sure. But before they did, somebody suggested I call the neighbor (the one whose number I had) myself, to see if he knew anything more about Dana’s situation. I thought that was a decent idea, so I did. The conversation I had with him led me to post again, this time on a general advice forum:
START POST
Hi, I am a 25 year old woman living in the Midwest. A few days ago, I received a phone call from the parents of an acquaintance who had gone missing. I didn’t know this person (Dana) well, but I did at one point spend almost two months with her at her apartment. I called one of her neighbors (Sean) to see if he knew more about her being missing, and the call made me think a lot about my experience with her during those two months.
I think I’m freaking out a bit. I really need some advice. Any advice will do.
For full context, the reason I stayed with Dana for those two months is because she called me up begging me to move in with her for a while, to the point of offering to waive rent and let me sleep in her bed. She sounded extremely desperate and unwell, so I ended up agreeing. Thinking back, I remember wondering why her phone signal quality was so bad, wondering if she was doing something shady and in danger because of it. Sometimes she’d be speaking perfectly fine, and sometimes I had to struggle to make out the words she was saying.
I didn’t go to her immediately, because I still had final exams. I finally went to her apartment in late May, right after my graduation.
Dana was really different from how I remembered her. She used to be kind of pushy and a little abrasive during the time when we worked in retail together. The Dana I met in May 2022 was kind of anxious and clingy. She also wouldn’t talk, and when she wanted something she would text me or write it on a little whiteboard that she carried around. She was also very insistent that I stay in her apartment for as long as possible, and got frustrated and somewhat aggressive in that first week when I was heading out to catch up with old friends.
I knew she was not doing well, but because she refused to talk, I didn’t find out what was going on with her until halfway through the second week. She woke me up in the dead of night, wide-eyed, and made me come sit with her on the couch. She handed me her phone and made me read some paragraphs that she had written on her note-taking app.
I don’t have her phone, and I also don’t remember the exact wording that she used. I’ll try my best to paraphrase.
Three months before Dana contacted me that first time, she started noticing a brief shortness of breath whenever she raised her voice a little. At first she thought it was just something like high cholesterol, which is something that runs in her family. But sometimes instead of a shortness of breath, she would feel her heart pound a few times, extra loud, or would suddenly close her jaw without expecting to do it.
(Dana insisted that she wasn’t yelling at the top of her lungs or anything. I believed her on this, because while Dana liked to talk I’ve never heard her full-on screaming before.)
But slowly, over time, the amount she had to raise her voice for these symptoms to appear was less and less. Even as Dana got quieter and quieter, she was still experiencing shortness of breaths, sudden arrhythmia, tics in her jaw. And the symptoms were starting to increase in severity and duration.
The breaking point for her happened when one of her coworkers demanded that she speak up during a conversation. Dana nearly had a breakdown, resigned on the spot, then went back to her apartment and scrolled through her contacts until she happened upon my number and decided to call me. She wrote that she knew we weren’t all that close, but she just really needed someone.
I got extremely concerned as I read through her explanation, and when I looked at her, Dana was crying silently. I told Dana that she had to go see a doctor ASAP, and that these symptoms looked dangerous, promising to help her explain if she couldn’t, and she said to me, verbally, for the first time since I arrived, “I can’t.”
At least, that’s what I think she said. Because after saying the word “I”, her “can’t” seemed to cause her to spasm, coming out something like “C-c-c-AAAAAAAAAaaan.”
Have you ever had a Youtube video glitch while playing and it kind of buzzes for a bit? It sounded like that. And her spasms were like nothing I’ve never seen before. I swear to you that they looked nothing like what a human could do. She looked like she was seizing, jumping rapidly between two adjacent frames of her, like between two pages of a flip book. Her movements weren’t continuous, and sometimes it looked like her body was stretching.
I don’t know. I don’t know how to describe it. I must look insane right, because I certainly feel insane writing this.
What’s even more crazy is that I never ended up bringing Dana to a doctor. She claimed that there was nothing the hospital could do for her, and I found myself agreeing. And so after that bizarre nighttime conversation, we went right back to our normal routine, cohabitating her apartment together. Only this time, the both of us were walking around eggshells.
I realized now that I had blocked the subsequent events that followed from memory, having been unable to fully grasp what occurred. But writing this now, forcing myself to remember, I have to wonder if it could have gone any other way.
Long story short, it got worse. Dana remained mute, but it wasn’t as if she could avoid making noise altogether. I’ve seen plenty of her “seizures” in the remaining six weeks I’ve stayed with her, but three stuck out to me.
Once, Dana stubbed her toe on the coffee table and yelped, quietly enough that I hadn’t even heard her from where I sat on the couch. I did, however, hear when the yelp turned into a buzzing “aaaaAAAAaa” that only stopped when she slapped her hand over her mouth, spasm fiercely all the while. The rest of that day she laid down quietly on the sofa, shaking and crying, clutching at her chest.
Another time, I somehow cracked a joke that made me chuckle and Dana snort and physically…crackle, I guess, is the best way to describe it. We immediately stopped laughing. I’m not sure how to describe the look on Dana’s face at that moment.
The last time was on the night I left. I woke up in the middle of hearing what I can only describe as a vibrating scream. I ran out of the bedroom to see a vaguely humanoid black mass seizing on the couch. I think it was Dana. I don’t know if it was Dana. It was so dark I couldn’t make out any colors, only that this figure was seizing fiercely, as if someone was flickering the lights, sometimes comically small and sometimes frighteningly large.
The screaming kepting climbing up in pitch, sounding more and more synthetic as the buzzing accompanying it got louder and louder.
I was hysterical. I think I also started screaming as I ran out of Dana’s apartment, barreling down the hall with the need to just get out. One of Dana’s neighbor’s, Sean, was opening his door to see what all the noise was about, and when I saw him an immense desperation took over me and I barreled into his apartment, begging him to let me stay for just a bit, just a while, please. Sean, who turned out to be incredibly kind, let me sit on the floor of his foyer until I finally calmed down and possibly blacked out.
The events of the rest of the night was something told to me by Sean.
At one point the third neighbor on their floor also came out, angrily demanding what the noise was about. He was a very elderly man, and it was believed that the exertion was too much, because he had a heart attack right outside Dana’s opened door and suddenly there was a lot more chaos when residents came from the other floors and hurried to call an ambulance for him.
By the time I woke up, the hallway had been cleared. Sean offered to let me stay longer just in case, but I was done. I couldn’t take it. I didn’t even head back to Dana’s apartment to grab my things. I just walked out of the apartment building and caught a bus back to the city.
That’s where I thought this story ended until Dana’s parents called me a few days ago. I still had Sean’s number, so I called him to ask about the third elderly neighbor on their floor, because if there was anyone who saw Dana after me it would be that old man.
Sean told me that despite timely rescue, the old man entered a coma and died shortly after. I asked, hesitantly and apologetically, about Sean himself and if he knew anything from the days following that night. Sean told me that the afternoon after I left, he called on some friends and began couch surfing until he got a new lease and moved out the following month.
I was a little confused about his reaction, and when I asked him about it, he got a little quiet. Then, he said, “Angie, do you remember if there was still screaming after you woke up?”
I told him that there wasn’t. It had been quiet once I woke up again.
Sean said, “That’s what I thought too. But I don’t remember when the screaming stopped.”
I don’t know why that struck me but it did. It’s been consuming my every waking thought. When did the screaming stop? What was happening to Dana? Where is she now?
Please, I need advice. Any advice.
END POST
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I got the notification that the moderators for the advice forum deleted me again, and this time someone linked me to this forum saying I’d have better luck here. So here I am posting for the third time, hoping someone has any information or advice that can help me.
But beyond that, I’m making this post so I can add a third event that has occurred: I went back to Dana’s apartment. I woke up this morning and got onto a bus back to my hometown and found myself standing outside that apartment building hours later. I stood there for what could have been an hour before I finally made my way in.
When I got to her floor, I realized both Sean’s and the old man’s apartments had new residents, judging by the conversations and laughter seeping out from inside. Dana’s apartment, however, still had the door ajar. And as I walked towards that entrance, I swear to you that my ears began ringing, the sound growing not louder but more intense the closer I got.
I didn’t dare go in. Just standing there, a mere feet away from her door, I felt as if I could hear nothing else over the ringing in my ears, even though if I tried I could still isolate the laughter coming from the kids now living where Sean used to.
Dana’s father told me that the landlord’s cameras never picked up Dana leaving the apartment after I left that morning.
So I guess this is my question to anyone out there who may know something I don’t. Is there a way to definitively distinguish between a scream and a ringing in your ears?