Two Percent of a Town Hears the Hum. Now It's Talking.

In the early 1990s, some people living in and around Taos, New Mexico, began to complain about a sound.¹

It was low and constant. A deep drone, like a diesel engine idling somewhere far away. It was louder indoors than outdoors, louder at night than during the day. It kept people awake. It gave them headaches and nosebleeds. Some of them said it made them feel like they were losing their minds.

Most people in Taos could not hear it at all.

In 1993, at the request of Congress, a team of researchers from several universities and federal labs came to investigate.² They brought sensitive microphones and instruments that could measure vibrations in the earth. They interviewed residents and ran hearing tests. They found that about two percent of the people they surveyed could hear the hum.³

They could not find the source.

The Taos Hum was never explained. It joined a list of mysterious hums around the world, in Bristol, England, in Kokomo, Indiana, and in Windsor, Canada.⁴ The Windsor Hum, at least, was eventually solved. Researchers traced it to steel mills on Zug Island, across the river in Michigan. When the furnaces there shut down in 2020, the hum went quiet.⁵

The Taos Hum never went quiet. Ruben Archuleta found out why in a box in a basement.

Ruben was a records clerk for the town. He was digitizing old council files, which was the kind of job you give to someone you want to forget about. In a box marked HUM COMPLAINTS 1991-1994, he found forty-seven complaint forms, a cassette tape, and an envelope.

The complaint forms were ordinary at first. Can't sleep. Sounds like a truck engine. Worse at night. But some of them had been filled out more than once by the same person, months apart, and Ruben noticed something as he laid them side by side on the table.

The complaints changed over time.

It sounds like an engine.

Then: It sounds like an engine with a rhythm in it.

Then: It sounds like breathing.

Then: It sounds like someone saying something very slowly, a long way down.

The last form from one woman, a retired schoolteacher named Delia Vigil, was written in shaky capitals.

IT KNOWS MY NAME NOW. IT SAYS IT WHEN I TRY TO SLEEP.

The envelope contained a hearing test, the kind the researchers had given. Delia Vigil's name was at the top. Her results were circled. Her hearing was normal, except at one frequency, very low, below what most people can sense, where her ears were far more sensitive than they should have been.

Across the bottom, a researcher had written a note in pen.

Hearers aren't imagining it. They're tuned to it. Advise all hearers: do NOT focus on it. Do NOT try to make out words. Attention is how it tunes back.