I gazed across the waste of wild waters; I watched the whispering willows; I heard the ceaseless beating of the tireless wind; and, one and for all, each in its own way, stirred in me this sensation of a strange distress.

In 1907, Algernon Blackwood wrote his weird fiction masterpiece, The Willows. The story followed two canoers as they paddled down the Danube River. Forced to take shelter on an island during a fierce storm, they realized they were not alone. “We had trespassed upon the borders of an alien world, a world where we were not wanted or invited to remain.”

“Some essence emanated that besieged the heart. A sense of awe was awakened, true, but of awe touched somewhere by a vague terror.”

Algernon Blackwood didn’t know it, but he was describing a phenomenon known as infrasound. Infrasound are sound waves that occur below the threshold of normal hearing. Even though people can’t hear the sound, they feel it. It vibrates the hair cells in the inner ear. The inner ear relays the message to the brain. But since this all happens on a subconscious level, the listener feels “strange” without knowing why. Other symptoms can follow—nausea, psychological disturbance, thoughts of suicide.

The main source of infrasound? Geography. Landscape.

Or, in the case of The Willows, an island in the middle of the Danube.

Infrasound might have played a part in a real-life tragedy in the Dyatlov Pass in Russia.

In 1959, nine students took advantage of their winter break to hike in the Ural Mountains. When they didn’t return, authorities launched a massive search. Their bodies were found at the base of a mountain. Sometime during the night, in the middle of a blizzard, they ripped open their tents and fled. Many theories about their wild behavior were offered. Animal attack. Carbon monoxide poisoning. Aliens. And more recently…infrasound. Some researchers now believe that the shape of the landscape, coupled by a vicious winter storm, created an ideal environment for infrasound.

“I imagine they’re all in the tent,” Dr. Bedard of the National Weather Service speculated. “They start to hear the winds pick up…they start to feel vibration. They hear a roar that seems to pass them from west to east…Another roar of a freight train passes by, this time from the north. Their chest cavities begin to vibrate from the infrasound created by a stronger vortex now passing.” The sensations built until they fled their tents, desperate to escape.

“This would have been a truly frightening scenario for anyone,” the doctor concluded.

 A truly frightening scenario. And a sensation described by a horror writer more than a century ago…

UPDATE: In 2020, scientists, including a consultant who modeled snow for the Disney movie Frozen, concluded that the Dylatlov party fell victim to a slab avalanche. When the party set up camp on that cold winter night more than sixty years ago, they cut into a small step of snow in the hillside. It was like “removing a retaining wall” according to Johan Gaum, a snow physicist at the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape research. Aided by the winds of a blizzard, the snow layer above the campers cracked, triggering an avalanche that destroyed their tents. Concussed and disoriented, they were pushed out into the unforgiving Siberian night, where they quickly froze to death.

Explanation Two: Slab Avalanche

Nathan Carson put out a great graphic novel of the classic tale. Click on the image below to order it.