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A strange humming sound has remained the talk of a small town in Northern Ireland.
The persistent buzzing for weeks, has kept residents across Omagh up at night, and the cause or source of the noise is yet to be known.
Local council have been working on the case, trying to solve the mystery, but they are on the brink of sending an SOS to audio experts.
Alliance councillor Stephen Donnelly told the BBC the odd sound was a serious problem for some residents in Omagh, a town of just over 20,000.
“What we need to do is establish the facts and get to the bottom of this and then take action to resolve this,” Donnelly said.
“I appreciate that when a story like this is kind of draped in mystery and intrigue that it can very easily become a subject of trivialisation but certainly from people I have spoken to … they are very concerned about the ability that they have to make sure they get a good night’s sleep,” he said.
“It may well be that it’s seasonal or weather-related but these things often don’t turn out to be simple and it may be a multitude of sources.”
The Fermanagh and Omagh District Council has launched an investigation into the humming, but so far, it has been unable to trace its source.
Residents living in various parts of Omagh have complained, making it difficult to pinpoint an area to focus detection efforts.
“It’s like a vibrating noise, real loud at night, about 12 or 1 every night,” one man told the BCC.
He said the noise had woken him the first time he heard it, but he’d grown “used to it”.
Omagh is not alone when it comes to unexplained sounds.
In August, residents on a street in an Auckland suburb, in New Zealand, complained about a loud clanging echoing up from the ground, and shaking houses in the night.
The mysterious sounds, described as a mechanical hammering, had been happening for weeks, leaving people sleepless and looking for answers.
Like Omagh, the council had no answers.
In the 1970s, hundreds in the UK city of Bristol experienced what became known as the “Bristol Hum”, prompting theories ranging from tinnitus to factory noise to flying saucers.
After falling silent for decades, the low-level hum returned in 2016.
French scientists claimed it was the effect of waves making the ocean floor vibrate.
But, for some, that explanation did not account for why the hum appeared to come and go, and was not a continuous phenomenon.
Source: 9News