Mystery of the ‘whump whump meadow’ where unexplained thuds heard for decades

This green field appears to be completely normal, but if you stand there long enough you’ll understand why it is anything but.

This meadow outside a sleepy German village is being woken for decades by loud mysterious thuds.

Whump… followed by another whump – all resonating from underground and with no known explanation.

Villagers in Fischerhude, near Bremen in north east Germany, are not only baffled but concerned as a new gas pipeline is expected in the area.

Sarah Meyer, whose family run a farm just 500m from the meadow, said the thumping has been going on for generations.

She told German broadcaster NDR: ‘In summer it is much stronger, both in terms of intensity and frequency,

‘That has led us to assume that is something do with heat, expansion and physics. But we don’t know what it is exactly.

‘It never made me nervous because I accepted. But when you consider the fact a gas pipeline is supposed to run along here then it makes me nervous that we only live 500 meters away.

‘We would like to the cause of the rumbling is investigated before the gas line arrives.

‘Is the rumbling really harmless even if the line is buried in the earth for decades.’

Scientists are still none the wiser, there have been extensive inquiries into the whumps but no cause has been unveiled.

Even Gasunie, the company hoping to lay a pipeline in the area, did not know what lies behind the noises.

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Philipp von Bergmann-Korn, a representative from Gasunie, said: ‘We also observed the acoustic symptom described by Mrs Meyer.

‘As part of the ground investigation, we carried out geotechnical exploratory drilling to a depth of up to 45 metres in the railway area.

‘However, no clear causes could be identified.’

Thorsten Meyer, whose parents and grandparents also grew up with the sounds, said ‘the noise has always been there.’

The tongue-in-cheek journalists speculated it could be gremlins bouncing up and down underground or mining.

The local government was not drawn into its own speculation, other than flatly ruling out the possibility it could be tectonic plate movements.

Eike Bruns, from the State Office for Mining, Energy and Geology (LBEG) said: ‘No particular danger can be deduced from the soil data available to the LBEG.

‘And Fischerhude is not an earthquake zone either.’

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