Me, I'm all about the furtive mysteries, the bizarre phenomena no one can quite explain, all flavors of tantalizing magic that make science and the rational mind twitch and hiccup, then shrug and think surely someone, somewhere must have a simple explanation, even though no one really does.
Whale songs? Dark energy? Pyramids? Quantum physics? Oddly curved Polish trees? Newt Gingrich? Mystical million-year-old cave paintings by the lost tribes of French-Indian Trepanning Podiatrists? Obvs.
But I also adore the lesser-known and the seemingly meaningless mysteries, the countless smallish, transitory tales of OMG WTF scattered about the human psychodrama that seem to point to something larger and weirder, something more deeply tattooed into the collective subconscious, but which we're simply unable to understand at this glitchy phase of human evolution. That sort of stuff makes my eyelashes curl. In a good way.
One of these items flitted over the newswires recently, a story about a mysterious phenomenon plaguing a small town somewhere you've never traveled, gladly beyond any experience. It's a tiny English village called Woodland, in Durham County, where not 300 English humblefolk live, many of them reporting the same issue, the same confounding woe, and nearly each and every one going just a little bit insane because of it.
The townspeople are complaining about headaches, fatigue, lack of sleep. They are reporting unhappy pets, unsettled dreams, a slight but palpable freaking of the hell out. (More than a few are also immensely annoyed by all the media attention aimed their humble way right now, but never mind that now).
It's all due to a strange, deep vibration, a town-wide hum akin to the throb of a car engine; it occurs every night, all night, waking the locals, rattling their bedframes, vibrating their mattresses and throbbing their bones. And not in the good way.
This odd mystery is known as the Hum (capital H for creepy effect, thank you) and it's been going on for months. The locals do not know what it is. They do not know why it is. Also, not everyone can hear it. But most of them can. Which is neither here nor there, unless it is.
There are no factories or government facilities nearby. There is no rumbly train station 10 miles just over there, no giant Wal-Mart distribution center, quietly churning up the bones of five million Chinese sweatshop laborers deep in the dank basements of its massive and ruthless heart. It's just the humble little town, same as it ever was. Except for the throb.
"In certain areas of the house you can hear it more loudly. It is definitely from outside, it's in the air, all around, very faint," said one Marylin Grech, 57, a retired store detective. "It vibrates through the house. Sometimes we'll be in bed and it vibrates right through our bed, like a throbbing."
"And not in a good way," she unfortunately did not add.
Thing is, the Hum is far from an isolated incident. It has happened before, in other towns in various parts of the world including Australia, New Zealand and the US, over the last 40 years. It happened most famously in the '70s in Bristol, where a thousand people went mildly nuts because of it. So famous is the Hum that it was even mentioned in a storyline on "The X-Files" way back in the 1920s or whatever, so you know it must be cool.
Everyone thinks they know what the Hum must be....
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Mark Morford is the author of The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism, a mega-collection of his finest columns for the San Francisco Chronicle and SFGate. He recently suggested that you please live in sin forevermore, that you also please step away from the fear, and that you seem to enjoy always walking in circles. Join him on Facebook, or email him. Not to mention...