People living near Sackville, New Brunswick sometimes hear voices.
Little, faint whispers from the kitchen.
A bit of a hum from the office.
Sometimes the voices are in English, sometimes Asian or European tongues.
Yet they’re not crazy, and their houses aren’t haunted.
So what’s going on?
The residents of the area are the audience for an unusual phenomenon known as “external rectification,” where metal objects pick up radio frequencies and act as a speaker.
‘Here’, a local paper, recently wrote an article on the effect:
“The plumbing acts as an antenna,” area artist and burgeoning historian Amanda Christie said. “When two pipes cross, the appliance ends up acting as a gramophone speaker. All of a sudden, people will hear the radio coming from their sink, but this happens with other things, too, that have pieces of metal touching at the right point.”
The reason residents hear Chinese, Swedish or German voices is because the frequency is from the nearby CBC Radio Canada International transmitter, which is also used by a bunch of Asian broadcasters, Radio Sweden, the BBC World Service and Deutsche Welle as part of a transmitter time exchange agreement.
The transmittor is pretty powerful. It’s Canada’s only shortwave transmitter station, broadcasting to Europe and South America.
Christie is working on an art installation based on the effect:
“It’s a part of the history of the region that isn’t written anywhere. Seems that if you live here, you just know about it,” she said. “There’s mythology, too. Some say the radios affect their dreams. Others say they keep people in Sackville, while some say they force them away. Like a magnet – it attracts and repels.”
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| The Odd File | Posted at 6:32 pm (22 Jun 2010) |







It’s kind of hard to know where to file this one. But believe it or not, the design on this African dress is purely coincidental.

You’ve got to admire the great illustration Tory pundit Stephen Taylor did to note the recent controversy surrounding a planned airing of a documentary about Falun Gong.


















