>
> > When I was a kid (1940's)we used to hike to a >>place called "Big Rock" on a mountain above >>Hazard, Ky. It really was a house-sized rock. >>We would sit quietly on top of the rock and and >>listen. Sometimes you could hear music or >>people talking. It was faint but you could hear >>it. It also didn't seem to come from any >>particular direction. There were no houses >>within a mile or more. We were on a high point >>of a ridge and could see a considerable >>distance. We were pretty sure that we were >>hearing radio waves. Even then, I guess that I >>knew that was impossible, but it seemed to be >>the best bet. At another location many miles >>from there, we used to hear church bells coming >>from a place where a church was torn down 50 >>years before. They occured only in the evening, >>in summer, but on any day of the week. If you >>went to the site of the old church, you heard >>nothing. Anybody else ever had such an >>experience?
> > How"crazy?"ard
>
> That reminds me of a program I saw some time ago >which spoke of a similar anomoly in an old >English pub. Essentially, if the pub was quiet >and one were to sit next to a certain wall, one >could then hear voices. There was nothing on the >other side of the wall to make the noise, >investigators found the sounds to be eminating >from the wall itself. As it turns out, the >construction of the wall was directly >responsible. The materials used, proportions, >and other technical stuff turned out to be >similar enough to a cassette tape that the wall >actually recorded room sounds at some point in >the past, and is now replaying them.
> I know, it sounds terribly weird, but is it any >weirder than both Gilligan and Julie Partridge >picking up radio waves from their dental work?
>
> Tra "Come on, get happy" nio

Are you sure about that verdict? Both your story and Howard's remind me of a more-common-than-it-sounds phenomenon called the "whispering corridor" or something like that. Basically, in certain places, the acoustics are set up just right so that you can hear things that are being said many feet or even miles away. If I wasn't so lazy, I'd go look up the reference to some famous building that I think is in Washington DC that exhibits an effect like this--someone standing at one end of the room can hear others at the other end whispering if both parties stand in the correct place--over a distance that normally you could never hear a whisper over.

Actually, now that I think about it, Howard's sounds more like the "being way up on the side of a mountain" phenomenon I noticed in my not-so-long-ago youth back in NH. I used to live right next to the largest mountain in New England, and sometimes I'd wander really far up the side of said mountain. After going just a few hundred feet from my house, I could no longer hear the cars passing on the road nearby. The farther I walked, the quieter the world got--until I got to these big huge ledges that were probably a mile or more into the woods. Climb to the top of the ledges, and lo-and-behold, there was the faint but distinct noise of cars out on the road again. Pretty cool.

-- Dave