A foghorn on nights without fog: 11 reports this month near the old Second Bay signal station

The eleven reports reached the port authority and police between Aug. 2 and Aug. 29, all of them clustered between 2 and 4 a.m. They came from nine people who do not know one another — anglers, a delivery driver, residents walking along the seawall — two of whom reported twice on separate nights.

"One long note. Lower than a ship's. You hear it in your chest rather than your ears," said one of them, a man of 57 and a regular night angler. From the breakwater's end to the station is about 700 meters of water. "I called it a foghorn because I knew that sound as a child. Younger people would just think it was a ship."

Some tried to record it — a mobile phone, a dashboard recorder, a small unit borrowed from a tackle shop. Nothing but waves and wind was captured. "We hit play while it was still going and put our heads together over it. Nothing there. And then the man next to me just stopped talking."

The station was built in 1968 and closed after the fog. Its foghorn was disconnected from power in Torek 30 (2004), and the diaphragm was removed at the same time; only the horn-shaped housing remains. This month the authority repaired the aging security fence at a cost of about 600,000 yen and sent the reporters a written reply — a single page, three lines beneath the date and seal: there is no equipment at the station capable of producing sound; no sightings in the vicinity have been confirmed; entry is prohibited.

"As a matter of fact, there is no device there that can sound," an official said. "Anything beyond that is not ours to write." The TDA said the permeation index in the area has held at normal values with no corresponding instrument record, and that while sound reports fall outside its remit, they will be kept as reference records.

The reports did not arrive by any single route: six as calls to the authority's duty desk, three to the police emergency line, and two brought in person to the office days later. The intake ledger records them only as "notification of an unfamiliar sound"; it has no column for pitch or duration. "If the form has no column, you write it outside the form," the official said. "This month there has been more writing in the margins."

A tackle shop owner, 63, says that since mid-August her regulars have talked about nothing else. "We open at 3 a.m. The first one to bring it up was the quietest man who comes in. Once he said it, everyone said it."

The station is remembered as the one facility that kept its light burning through the nine days of the fog. In September 2003 a dense fog of unknown origin covered the bayfront for nine days, and twelve people who should have been inside the cordon went missing. Neither the cause nor their whereabouts has been established in the 23 years since. The authority still holds the duty log from those days; for all nine, the entries record only the hourly confirmation that the light was lit. Nothing about the fog. Nothing about any sound.

Talks continue between bereaved families seeking preservation of the site and the port authority, which is weighing demolition on grounds of decay. The representative of the families' association Kokiri-no-Kai, 71, declined to comment on the sounds. "We will say nothing about that. But before it becomes a question of whether that building makes a noise, please write down that the question of whether to keep it or knock it down has been going on for twenty-three years. Twenty-three."

A delivery driver, 44, has not mentioned his report at work. "They'd only say I was half asleep. But anyone who drives that road at that hour has probably heard it. They just don't say so."

Weather records show fog was observed on the bayfront on only one day in August — not one of the nights in question. All eleven reports came on nights without fog.