Mysterious Old House Sounds

Over at Scripting News, Dave Winer (the inventor of blogging) posted a recording of sounds [he says similar to a metal door slamming] he’s been hearing his house make (but only when the wind is going fast enough). I listened to the recording; it triggered a memory from my youth, where I heard pretty much the same sound under similar circumstances (high winds, at night, and only inside the house).

My GrandDad’s house (built in the 1920s, I think) in the mountains of NC sometimes made a sound you could hear inside when the wind was blowing; it was very similar to that in Dave’s recording. Both the house and the barn on his farm had a metal roof; a lot of farmhouses and their outbuildings at the time were built like that. I heard that sound only in the house, and with very few exceptions, only at night (GrandDad said he had heard it outside more than a few times). I suspect that was because other wind-induced noises obscured the sound whenever it happened when I was outside. For me it was an infrequent event, usually heard only at night. Before a bad storm it could last for a long while. It seemed to stop when the rain started pounding on the roof, which, coupled with other storm sounds, probably obscured it. When such a storm came up after I had gone to sleep, unlike GrandDad and Granny and my parents, neither the storm nor the creaking sounds ever woke me up; when I was young nothing could get me out of a deep sleep.

Then one summer just after school got out we drove to the mountains for a visit (more than a four-hour car ride before Interstate highways). There was a shiny, new metal roof on GrandDad’s house, and the barn had been moved across the gulley to a slightly higher hill next to the woods that sloped down to the river. The barn had a new metal roof as well (but it had been painted a dull orange-brown). GrandDad said not enough sheets or panels on the old barn roof were fit to be reused, so he put a new roof on it; the folks who installed it gave him a good deal so he got a new roof on the house as well. After that, nobody ever heard any more “shutter slapping” sounds when the wind was up (just before a storm). Clearly, the sounds we had all been hearing were the result of the wind doing something with the old metal sheets or panels on the roof.

Dave’s house might not have a metal roof. It could be that the wind there in upstate NY pushes sufficiently on the outside of the house that the wood in the structure is being moved ever so slightly. Dave could be hearing its joints creaking. In the mountains of NC, lots of barns and a number of farmhouses made sounds just like GrandDad’s house did when the wind got up. But not all of them had a metal roof. Us kids figured that nails in these old structures had loosened a bit [we observed that frequently in farm buildings that were not being maintained and had collapsed or were in the process of falling down], and the wind was shaking them just enough to make them creak or crack.

What I heard on Dave’s recording didn’t sound exactly like those creaking barn and house noises I remember. It really sounded more like a series of “cracks” [or, maybe, “slaps”] I heard when GrandDad’s metal roof panels were (in retrospect, obviously) being rattled (or lifted up, and then later falling back) by the wind, like a shutter flapping against a window, or an unlatched screen door being blown open and then closing again (because of the wind changing direction or the spring pulling it closed). In the absence of a metal roof, cracking or creaking joints in the wood of the structure seems to be a plausible explanation.

Since that long ago time, I’ve also heard similar sounds coming from old chimneys with a metal flue pipe. Depending on how that is capped above the roof, a strong wind can get into the pipe. If it has come lose from the metal straps usually used to confine it to the center of the wood or brick chimney, it could slap [however slightly] against the bricks or wood inside at exactly the same sort of interval I heard in Dave’s recording. I remember hearing similar pairs of slightly-different sounds, the first sound of a pair possibly happening when the wind picked up and the second as the wind slowed down. Perhaps they were caused by the pipe joints themselves cracking when loose [rusted] straps allowed the pipe to slightly bend.