When Mark and Chloe bought the fixer-upper in Brier Hill, they knew they were getting character. What they didn’t anticipate was the noise. Brier Hill, one of Youngstown’s oldest neighborhoods, clung to the slopes overlooking the former steel mills, its streets lined with aging houses and dominated by a web of thick, black overhead power lines and imposing electrical substations. And from these lines, especially near the substation a few blocks away, emanated a persistent, low-frequency hum.
Mark noticed it first. A low, resonant thrumming, audible mainly when he was outside gardening or sitting on the porch in the evenings. “Hear that?” he asked Chloe one night. She listened. “Just sounds like electricity,” she shrugged. “Normal for an old neighborhood near a substation.” It wasn’t loud, more felt than heard sometimes, a vibration in the air, in the fillings of his teeth. He tried to ignore it, attributing it to the normal operation of the grid, the price of living in an area with heavy-duty infrastructure.
They’d been in the house for about a month when the nightmares started, primarily affecting Chloe. She’d always been a good sleeper, but suddenly she was waking up several times a week, gasping, heart pounding, drenched in sweat. The dreams were intensely vivid, disturbing, and often shared similar themes. She dreamt of the house decaying around her, plaster crumbling to reveal rusted, weeping pipes. She dreamt of being trapped in dark, industrial spaces, pursued by unseen machinery. Sometimes, she dreamt of electricity itself, arcing sparks, buzzing wires forming into monstrous shapes. The most recurring nightmare involved looking in the mirror and seeing her own face subtly wrong – skin grey and cracked like old concrete, eyes replaced by flickering vacuum tubes.
“It’s just stress,” she told Mark initially, trying to rationalize it. “New house, renovations, work…” But the nightmares felt different from normal stress dreams. They were alien, intrusive, leaving her exhausted and anxious throughout the day. Her mood soured, her energy levels plummeted. She started dreading going to sleep.
Mark, meanwhile, wasn’t having nightmares, but his sleep was becoming less restful. He felt perpetually tired, attributing it to the physical labor of renovating the house. He did notice, however, that the low hum from the power lines seemed louder some nights than others. On a whim, he started keeping a rough log: noting the perceived intensity of the hum each evening and asking Chloe about her sleep quality the next morning. A disturbing correlation began to emerge. On nights when the hum seemed particularly strong, a deep thrumming that vibrated through the old house’s frame, Chloe inevitably suffered her worst nightmares. On nights when the hum was barely perceptible, she slept relatively peacefully.
He cautiously brought up his observation. “Do you think… do you think that humming noise could be affecting your sleep?” Chloe was skeptical at first. “How could a sound cause nightmares like that?” But the pattern seemed undeniable. They tested the theory. They spent a weekend at Chloe’s parents’ house in Canfield, far from any major power lines or substations. Chloe slept soundly both nights, no nightmares. Back in Brier Hill, the first night was quiet, the hum low; she slept okay. The second night, the hum was back, a deep, resonant thrumming that seemed to press in on the house, and she woke up screaming from a dream about rusted gears grinding beneath the floorboards.
The connection felt terrifyingly real. Could the electricity powering their lives be poisoning their sleep? Mark started talking to neighbors, cautiously broaching the subject. Most were older residents, long accustomed to the neighborhood’s quirks. Some dismissed the hum entirely. “Never noticed it.” Others acknowledged it but shrugged. “Always been there. Just background noise.” But a few, when pressed gently about sleep, admitted to problems. An elderly woman down the street spoke of “troubled nights” and feeling “on edge” since the substation was upgraded a few years back. A young couple renting nearby mentioned their toddler having frequent night terrors. Another long-time resident admitted to taking sleeping pills for years due to “bad dreams,” which he’d always blamed on his time working in the mills. The evidence was anecdotal, fragmented, but suggestive. It seemed they weren’t entirely alone.
Mark decided to investigate the hum itself. Using a spectrum analyzer app on his phone (admittedly not lab-grade equipment), he measured the sound near the substation and beneath the power lines running down their street. The app registered a strong peak at a very low frequency, bordering on infrasound – below the range of normal human hearing, but known in some studies to cause feelings of unease, anxiety, and even physiological effects. Was this low-frequency noise, perhaps generated by aging or overloaded equipment, somehow interfering with brain activity during sleep?
He contacted Ohio Edison, the utility company. He reported the excessive hum, citing his amateur measurements and the sleep disturbances. The response was predictable. A polite customer service representative assured him they would investigate. A week later, a lineman briefly inspected the pole transformer outside their house and declared it “within normal operating parameters.” A follow-up letter stated that noise levels were within regulatory limits and denied any link between their equipment and health issues. Mark felt stonewalled, gaslighted.
He researched the potential mechanisms. Could the electromagnetic fields (EMF) from the high-voltage lines be the culprit, disrupting brainwaves? The science was controversial, often dismissed as pseudoscience, but the correlation felt too strong to ignore. Could the infrasound component be inducing the nightmares directly? Or was it something stranger? Brier Hill was built over old coal mines and near former industrial sites. Could the electrical field be interacting with something in the ground, some pollutant or geological anomaly, creating a localized psychoactive effect? Or, drifting into more unsettling territory, could the power lines be acting like antennae, picking up and amplifying some kind of negative psychic energy or place memory associated with the neighborhood’s often difficult history?
Desperate for relief, Mark and Chloe tried mitigation strategies. They invested in heavy-duty soundproofing curtains for the bedroom, though they did little to block the low-frequency hum. They ran a white noise machine, which helped mask the audible component but didn’t stop the nightmares. Mark even bought EMF-shielding fabric online and draped it around the bed – a move that felt like succumbing to paranoia, and which offered no noticeable improvement. Sleeping in the basement room, furthest from the overhead lines, seemed to help slightly, but the nightmares persisted, albeit less frequently. The only reliable solution was leaving the neighborhood entirely, spending nights at friends’ houses across town whenever they could arrange it, returning exhausted but at least having slept without dreaming of rust and decay.
The chronic lack of restful sleep took its toll. Chloe became perpetually fatigued, anxious, and irritable. Her performance at work suffered. Mark felt constantly on edge, his own sleep disrupted by Chloe’s nightmares and his growing obsession with the hum. Their relationship became strained under the pressure. The house they’d bought with such optimism now felt like a trap, a source of invisible torment. The line between the disturbing nightmares and their waking anxiety began to blur.
They faced a difficult choice. Could they adapt? Could Chloe learn to cope with the nightmares, perhaps through therapy or medication, while Mark continued to fight the utility company or search for a shielding solution? Or did they need to cut their losses, sell the house (potentially at a loss, and how could they ethically sell it without disclosing the issue?), and escape the neighborhood? The hum seemed to demand a drastic resolution.
One night, unable to sleep, Mark stood at the bedroom window, looking out at the dark silhouettes of the power lines against the faint city glow. The hum was loud tonight, a palpable vibration in the air. He saw a light on in a house across the street, someone else presumably awake in the dead of night. He wondered if they were listening to the hum too, if they were dreading the dreams that awaited them. The neighborhood felt held captive by this invisible frequency, this infrastructural haunting.
They eventually decided they had to leave. The financial hit was significant, the process of selling stressful, but the need for safe, restful sleep outweighed everything else. They moved to a quieter suburb on the other side of the county, far from any major power lines.
Chloe’s nightmares stopped almost immediately. Their sleep improved, their energy returned, their relationship began to heal. But the experience left a scar. Mark remained acutely sensitive to ambient sounds, easily unnerved by the buzz of fluorescent lights or the hum of appliances. Chloe developed a lingering anxiety about sleep, occasionally waking with a phantom sense of dread. Sometimes, driving through their old Brier Hill neighborhood to visit friends who remained, Mark would feel a familiar tension rise in his chest as they passed under the heavy power lines. He’d glance at the houses, wondering about the people inside, wondering if they heard the hum, if they dreamt of rust and electricity, trapped in the lingering frequency that poisoned sleep in that corner of Youngstown.