Spooky sounds in garden at night- which animal? Also now a "voice"

[daughterof]

For a while I have been hearing unsettling animal noises at night in my back garden, it's hard to describe them but I haven't been able to identify them online by listening to recordings of British wildlife. We have hedgehogs visit sometimes and there are loads of cats....

I haven't been too fussed but last night in addition to the noises, there was a "voice" on and off over and hour or so sounding like it was saying "hello" really clearly but not quite saying the word properly. It came from outside our house and didn't sound human.

Rational me really hopes for an explanation as DH works away more than he is home and its just me and DC here.

Woo me is adding that according to maps, a ley line passes through the house 10 doors down from us and DD1 had experiences when she was a toddler here which she now doesn't remember.

Aww my old boy cat used to meow “harro” when he wanted in 🤗Sounded like hello.

I think foxes or badgers too.
My neighbours cat does a very good 'hello' as well.

Many years ago my university linguistics lecturer played a short video of a cat miaowing.

She asked what we had heard and we said a cat miaowing. She then quite gently suggested the cat was saying something like (can’t remember exactly), “hello how are you” and replayed it.

It suddenly was literally all we heard! The whole room would have sworn the cat was actually saying that. It was quite incredible. We tried it on our friends in halls and after a slight suggestion you couldn’t unhear it.

The human brain is a magnificent thing constantly Roladexing to assimilate things we experience to things we know - not always getting it right

@daughterof Here's a cute video if a cat's meows being turned into a very catchy song, including the word hello

https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1C9hegTqpX/

Possibly an owl saying Twit Twoo?

Yes, but small children see things adults don’t, for completely non-supernatural reasons. I thought there was a witch in my bedroom for years (dressing gown hanging on the back of a door which looked spooky at night) and my sister used to talk about the ‘hidden man’ looking at her. Turned out it was a pattern of flaking paint that looked vaguely like a bearded man, on the underside of a shelf, so visible to a toddler and not visible to an adult.

OP, this will be owls, muntjac, foxes or cats. You are not being menaced by phantom spirits.

My money is on randy foxes 🦊. They're waking us up here a lot atm. But the resulting cubs in early spring are cute!

Hello could be an owl calling at a distance?

Who could forget the dog on the Walls advert that could say “sausages”.

DS used to have conversations with someone behind me, got anxious and fearful and said ‘It’s coming, it’s coming!’, and generally scared the pants off me. He spoke to weird people who stood in the corner of his bedroom, watching him.

As a result, we never had Santa come in the kid’s bedrooms. He left their goodies on the sofa, like a well behaved, DBS checked kids’ worker!

It really is amazing how the brain uses skimpy bits of information to build a scenario that makes sense.
Apparently some people with brain injury caused speech impediments are heard as having foreign accents. They don’t, but our brain associates the difference and leaps to the conclusion that they are French, for example.

Yes, aural paredolia (the perception of apparently significant patterns or recognisable images, especially faces, in random or accidental arrangements of shapes and lines) is definitely a thing. Danny Robins did an experiment on Uncanny demonstrating this.

Definitely foxes. We have them making all the same noises here

I'll never forget the first time I heard foxes at night in London - I told my mum to call the police because a woman was being attacked! After that I knew what to expect. They were extremely noisy.

Up north, no foxes here that I've heard, but badgers, deer and owls are very local to us as we live on the edge of a county park - the other night an owl started hooting at 2am and it scared the living daylights out of me. SO eerie.

There is a plethora of animals which your noise can be attributed to. Hope it doesn't scare you too much! I know how something can sound at 1am which you wouldn't bat an eyelid at during the day.