"Here we first heard, while out on the lake in the bright still morning, the mysterious aerial sound for which this region is noted. It put me in mind of the vibrating clang of a harp lightly and rapidly touched high up above the tree tops, or the sound of many telegraph wires swinging regularly and rapidly in the wind, or, more rarely, of faintly heard voices answering each other overhead."
S.A. Forbes, ca. 1890
Of the many sounds heard throughout the Yellowstone ecosystem, perhaps none has proven so fascinating and so difficult to explain as those heard at Yellowstone Lake. Between 1872 and 1937, travelers regularly described hearing "humming," "ringing," and "harp-like" sounds drifting over the waves.
Professor Frank H. Bradley, a geologist and member of the 1872 Hayden Expedition, provided the first known written account of Yellowstone Lake's mysterious sounds:
"While getting breakfast," he wrote, "we heard every few moments a curious sound, between a whistle and a hoarse whine, whose locality and character we could not at first determine, though we were inclined to refer it to water-fowl on the other side of the lake. As the sun got higher the sound increased in force, and it now became evident that gusts of wind were passing through the air above us, though the pines did not yet indicate the least motion in the lower atmosphere."
Most travelers heard the sounds on or near Yellowstone Lake, though others reported hearing similar sounds on Shoshone Lake, just a few miles west. While descriptions differed among the various accounts, every observer noted that the sounds appeared to be moving across the water from north to south. In his article "Overhead Sounds in the Vicinity of Yellowstone Lake" (Science, November 3, 1893), Professor of Biology Edwin Linton wrote that,
The first time I heard them, or it, was on the 22d of July, about 8a.m. on Shoshone Lake. Elwood Hofer, our guide, and I had started in our boat for the west end of the Lake. While engaged in making ready for a sounding on the northern shore, near where the lake grows narrow, I heard a strange echoing sound in the sky dying, away to the southward, which appeared to me to be like a sound that had already been echoing some seconds, before it had arosed my attention, so that I had missed the initial sound, and heard only the echo.
No one has ever explained the sounds, though several theories have been advanced. Early travelers, according to Forbes, believed the sound to be the effects of "that commonest catch-all of the ignorant, 'electricity.'" Forbes instead proposed that the sound might be echoes of "the whistling of the wings of ducks and the noise of Steamboat Geyser." Linton also suggested Steamboat Geyser as an explanation (Linton mentions Steamboat Geyser as being on Yellowstone Lake's eastern shore, so I presume both he and Forbes are referencing what is today known as Steamboat Spring). An article in Popular Science from 1930 suggested "mild earthquakes, their sounds possibly magnified in underground caverns like sound boxes."
Park Ranger Neil Miner offered what is perhaps the last documented account of these sounds. Miner wrote that the sounds "traveled rapidly in a horizontal plane out over the lake toward the south," and suggested the cause was simply air currents creating swift-moving "whirlpools of air" out on the lake surface.
Park Historian Lee Whittlesey spoke to the Travel Channel about the lake sounds in 2001. While the video is a tad dramatic, it's a great opportunity to hear Whittlesey speak about the park's history.
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