Not strictly an AIBU but didn’t know where else to post. I’m sorry if this is long, but I want to explain this clearly.
I live in a north London suburb - quiet residential street about 5 mins from a small high street and 10 mins from the North Circular Road.
Woke up about 4am thinking I heard a plane going overhead. Not unusual in normal times as we live under a flight path, but for the last few weeks I’ve not heard any planes, so it seemed strange. Thought maybe a military plane or something?
Lay awake listening for about 20 mins and it sounded like a plane circling, but not directly overhead, maybe somewhere in the distance. Then started to think I’d been mistaken, as the noise sounded more like the rumbling of a busy motorway or maybe a train in the distance. It was a humming, buzzing, rumbling sound.
Eventually got up and opened my windows to look/listen out. Street was dead. Sky was clear. The noise was louder and seemed to be coming from ‘out there’ somewhere in the city, not actually overhead, and wasn’t really coming from any clear direction - just all around. It wasn’t coming from the high street (this has been silent at night since lockdown, but I recognise the sound of the odd car from such a close distance, and this wasn’t it).
The noise was also getting louder and then quietening again and so on, but not in any particularly rhythmic way (like how a circling helicopter would sound).
Woke DH up and asked if he could hear it. He could. Decided to check the TFL jam cams online to see if there were any military trucks or delivery trucks on any of the main roads nearby, including the North Circ. Nothing. The roads were completely dead on all the cams in north London (bar the odd ambulance, which was eerie).
Started googling what it could be and the thing that kept coming up was The Hum, an unexplained humming/rumbling sound that is probably best known in the UK for being noticed in Bristol (I’d never actually heard of it before).
Anyway, the noise was still going at about 6am when I fell asleep. Woke again at 8am and it had gone, just silence and birdsong on my street.
I know nobody can give me a definitive answer, but was this ‘the hum’, do you think? What else could it have been? It freaked me out quite badly as it just so strange and persistent and a bit ominous in these coronavirus times!