Yesterday, Sena and I were playing cribbage and we both suddenly started hearing a knocking noise which sounded like it was coming from our roof or the attic. We’ve heard a similar noise in the past, but it stopped and we forgot about it. This time it seriously interrupted our cribbage game.
It sounded like an intermittent knocking, which reminded me of some of the paranormal shows I like to watch so I can laugh at the ghost hunters scream and jump at every bump and reflection.
This knocking actually made us stop and listen intently. It sounded like it came from somewhere in the ceiling. There were several intermittent series of soft but clearly audible knocks.
I did remove my house slippers and turned the radio off so we could hear it more consistently.
Sena got a wooden spoon and tapped the ceiling 4 times in the area on the spots where the knocking noises seemed to be coming from.
Four knocks sounded, seemingly, in response. She did this a few times, but the responses seemed to become more random. This back and forth went on for a short while. The noises seemed to move around. It started in the kitchen, then moved to the pantry, next it was in the mud room. It was nearly always 4-5 distinct knocks with intermittent silence.
We were pretty sure at first that it was coming from either the roof or in the attic. But we couldn’t imagine why anyone (or anything) would be in either location.
I didn’t volunteer to check the attic. The door to it is high in the ceiling in a corner of the garage. I would have had to drag a lot of stuff out of the corner to make room enough to wrestle the adjustable ladder up to it. Let’s see, what was the other reason?
Oh yeah, I didn’t want to have a close encounter of the machete kind with Jason Voorhees.
I finally got the idea to look out our window and noticed construction workers were way down the street installing siding high up near the roof. I started to wonder whether the pounding they were doing were the source of the knocks we were hearing. Was it some kind of echo phenomenon?
I got my camera out and focused on them. They were high up on a scaffolding and were holding the vinyl siding, but I couldn’t be sure they were hammering it on the house. We couldn’t clearly prove that our knocking noises coincided with their hammering.
I tried to find out on the internet whether noises in our roof or ceiling could arise from noises occurring elsewhere. I tried to phrase it different ways, but it was hard to get anything back except the usual stuff about rafters buckling in the winter from ice, critters, water hammer due to high pressure water line valves shutting off abruptly, and other common reasons.
Anyway, the noises stopped and that seemed to be connected with the construction workers installing siding on the lower portion of the house down the street. I still think our noise was related to that.
And the most important part of this story—I won the cribbage game.
Go Retire Psychiatrist 