This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Major_Local3030 on 2025-07-18 01:39:28+00:00.

I have to write this down. I don’t know if it’s a warning or a confession, or just a way to prove to myself that the last few weeks actually happened.

I’m a sound engineer. My entire life revolves around frequencies, waves, and the purity of signal. I came to the mountains of Oita to escape the noise of Tokyo, to find a place so quiet I could record the sound of wind hitting a single leaf. I found a village called Yonomori. And I found the hum.

The silence here was the first thing I noticed. It was total. Oppressive. The kind of quiet that makes your ears ring. I rented an old wooden house, a kominka, and set up my gear. For three days, it was paradise. Just the wind, the crows, and the creak of old timber.

On the fourth day, I found it. A low, persistent thrum at exactly 43 hertz on my recordings. It was impossible. There are no power lines, no highways, nothing for kilometers that could produce a frequency that clean, that stable. I spent a full day with my parabolic mic trying to find the source, but it was useless. The sound was everywhere and nowhere at once. It was like a flaw in the very air of the valley.

That night, I took my headphones off, and I could still hear it.

It was a pressure deep inside my ear canal. I tried to explain it away. Tinnitus. Stress. But I knew it wasn’t. This was the same 43-hertz hum. It had gotten out of my equipment and into my head. I tried asking the village headman, an old farmer named Sato, about it. When I mentioned the hum, he refused to meet my eyes. “The mountain whispers to those who listen too closely,” was all he said. “It is best not to listen.”

Over the next week, it got louder. It was the background noise to my entire existence. It started twisting the real sounds of the world into nightmares. A branch scraping a window became fingernails. The wind through the eaves became a woman crying. Sleep became a series of shallow, terrifying dives into darkness, and I always woke up with the hum pulsing in my skull. I started seeing it in others, too. An old woman at the tiny village shop, her head cocked at a strange angle, her eyes vacant. A farmer in his field, tapping his sickle against a rock with the same maddening, steady rhythm as the hum.

I knew I was losing my mind. The worst part was the dreams. I dreamt I was buried, packed in wet soil, and the hum was vibrating through my bones. It felt like coming home. I woke up one night to find my own fingers drumming the rhythm on my sleeping mat.

I did something I shouldn’t have. I broke into the village storehouse. It was full of rotting paper and dust, but in an old chest, I found the village records. And I found the name for the sound. The Kansen-on. The “Infection Sound.”

The texts described it as a parasite that infects the mind through resonance. For centuries, when a villager became a “listener” and the hum grew too strong, they would be overcome by a compulsion. They would walk to a place in the forest, the Miminari-do, or “Tinnitus Cave”, and never be seen again. It was a sacrifice. A way to stop the sound from spreading.

Reading that, I felt the world tilt. This wasn’t tinnitus. I was infected. The subtle pull I’d been feeling towards the deep woods suddenly had a name and a destination. Come, the hum whispered in my mind. Join the resonance. Be whole.

My training, my whole life’s work, was the only thing I had left. It’s a frequency, I told myself, my hands shaking. And a frequency can be fought.

I tore my own equipment apart, frantically soldering and wiring. I built a desperate, ugly device. A signal generator wired to an amplifier, channeled into a pair of industrial noise-canceling headphones. My plan was to create a perfect inverse wave. An anti-hum. It was a gamble that could have blown my eardrums, but it was better than the alternative.

As the sun set, the hum became a physical force, shaking the thin paper walls of my house. I looked out the window and I saw them. The old woman. The farmer. Two others. Moving like sleepwalkers toward the forest path. And god help me, I felt my own legs wanting to follow.

I slammed the headphones on and hit the switch. Pain. A clean, piercing shriek shot through my brain. It was agony, a dentists’ drill boring into my mind, but it was my sound. It was my signal. And it was fighting the hum. The two frequencies tore at each other in my skull. I cried out and fell to my knees, blood trickling from my nose.

Staggering, I forced myself outside and towards the source of the madness. I had to see it.

The mouth of the Tinnitus Cave was a black wound in the rock, breathing cold, damp air. The other listeners were already shuffling into the darkness. The hum pulsed from inside, a low, hungry invitation.

I stood at the edge, the device on my back screaming, the hum trying to reclaim my mind. For a second, the batteries on my rig faltered. The shriek died down, and the hum rushed in, warm and comforting. Let go. The silence is so close.

But the shriek kicked back in. That moment of clarity was all I needed. I scrambled backward, away from the blackness, and I ran. I fell, got up, and just kept running through the forest, not looking back. I didn’t stop until I got to my car.

I’ve been driving for hours. I’m in a business hotel in Beppu now, looking at the city lights. I’m safe, I think. But when the traffic outside dies down, in the dead quiet of this sterile room, I can still hear it. Faint. A tiny vibration at 43 hertz, at the absolute edge of my hearing.

I don’t know if I truly escaped, or if I just took it with me.

So I’m posting this as a warning. Don’t go looking for absolute silence. There are things that live in it. And if anyone out there, an engineer, a physicist, anyone, knows anything about a parasitic sound, a sentient frequency… please, tell me what it is. Tell me I’m just going crazy.