Listening for Echoes of the Forest Grove Sound

For two weeks in 2016, a sonic anomaly captivated Forest Grove, Oregon, where Colin Dickey had attended college. The sound briefly made national headlines before vanishing—for good, it seems. Dickey, author of Atlas Obscura’s sporadic “Eerie Feeling” column, finds no trace of the Forest Grove Sound when he returns to the city nearly a decade later, nor does he find a shared understanding of what, exactly, the sound meant to locals. A physics professor and an audio engineer offered a “pretty clear” explanation for the sound, which Dickey withholds just long enough to allow your own ideas to bubble up, to project clarity on a space that won’t allow it. His focus here isn’t on the likely answer, but what we do with its lack. “It’s not that we want an unsolved mystery,” he writes. “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.” The result is a quiet consideration of belief, attention, and our individual relationships with uncertainty.

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.