Some Sort of Anomaly

[knotwurk]

Hi people. I've got something of an anomaly in one room of my house. I was bored one day, and for whatever reason I was walking around in the room with my compass (one of those floaty sphereical ones), and discovered that there was a single spot in my room that would cause the needle which normally points north to point due east. As far as I can tell, it's roughly 2-3 inches in diamater, and doesn't trail off or lessen or anything; it's just this single spot in mid-air about a foot or two off the ground. Has anyone ever heard of anything like this??

[Xentor]

Did you check the normal explanations? Like, magnets from loud speakers and televisions and such?

(Wait... there's a magnet in the loud speaker? ;) )

[Fairy_Princess]

Maybe your compass doesn't point north...

[Trithemius]

Anything electrical can throw off a compass. So can metal pipes under the floors. If your compass is being thrown off in one consistent location, it's pretty much a sure bet it's due to something mundane.

[knotwurk]

I checked all the stuff having to do with electromagnetism, which is why I thought it was so weird. If there was a magnet, it would have something to be attracted to. You move it around said magnet, and it points towards it. This was just an isolated spot with nothing around it, and nowhere else I checked around it showed any deviation. It worked perfectly everywhere else. It was just this one spot that caused the compass to point due east. Pretty bizarre, don't you think?? :awilly:

edit: There were no signs of an electromagnetic field, just a spot polarized for no apparant reason. I guess that's an easier way to put it.

[Lunacie]

Yeah, I've found a couple of those spots just using my sixth sense. One was right in the middle of a friend's living room floor, oddly it didn't extend all the way up through the bedroom above it, no way to check how far beneath the floor it went since there wasn't a basement or crawl space.

That was before I'd heard about checking for phenomenon with devices. I wonder what we'd have found with a compass, or an EMF meter?

[Trithemius]

Pretty bizarre, don't you think??

No, not really. I can make the needles on my compasses point due west simply by holding them near the heat registers in my house. I can get them to point south by holding them near my weights (not directly on them, mind you, just near). And depending on which room I'm in, just holding them a foot or so above the floor will cause the needles to point any number of directions because of the piping under the floor. And in every instance, there's a certain spot where the needle will move, and if it's even a quarter of an inch outside this spot, it won't. Just because you're not immediately seeing a normal cause doesn't mean there isn't one. There are all kinds of things that can affect a compass. There doesn't have to be an actual magnet nearby. Even the metal hardware on my drums will cause the needle to jump around.

[knotwurk]

Actually what you said made me think. I guess calling it polarized is inaccurate as well. I guess anomaly is better (I've watched way too much st:tng over the years).

The thing is, if you move the compass closer to the heat register or weights, they keep pointing towards it, right? Hence the presence of some electromagnetic field. You can trace it, track it, and if you put said compass on the west side of it, it points east, and vice versa. That wasn't happening in my case. Believe me, I went over all this first thing, merely out of curiousity.

I basically just sat there at first analyzing this "anomaly" with the compass, and came to the conclusion that there was no discernable electromagnetic force at work in the traditional sense of the word. The room at the time was my bedroom, so I proceeded to move everything in the area away from it. I just wanted to be thorough :).

The said area that's being affected I can say without a doubt is spherical and is situated roughly a foot and a half above the ground, two feet away from the southern wall and 3 feet away from the western wall. The polarization in affected area is orthogonal to typical orientation in the earth's magnetic field, with no deviations whatsoever outside this spherical area. It's a conundrum, according to everything I know about QED and electromagnetism, and even just simple logic. I keep saying to myself, "umm, it shouldn't do that" :lol:

It's too bad I can't get ahold of one of those EMF gauges they use on Ghosthunters. It might be fun to just check. The only other thing I can think of is that I do live like 20 miles from the Fermilab over in Batavia, IL. I'm tempted to discount that as a possibility though because it's highly unlikely that if some weird particle got out that it would be stationary just kind of hovering there in my room (well, stationary relative to the rotation of the Earth, etc). My first impression when I came across this though is that it was some kind of geomagnetic thing. It's tough to say, I mean the room is in the basement.

[Lunacie]

I thought you could buy EMF meters at Radio Shack, but the online store comes up empty. I checked ebay and they have several, most under $50.00.

[Trithemius]

Okay, now you've got me curious.


The thing is, if you move the compass closer to the heat register or weights, they keep pointing towards it, right? Hence the presence of some electromagnetic field. You can trace it, track it, and if you put said compass on the west side of it, it points east, and vice versa. That wasn't happening in my case. Believe me, I went over all this first thing, merely out of curiousity.

So are you saying the needle, no matter where the compass is positioned in the area, points east? The needle doesn't point toward the center of the area at all?

You also said you're sure the area is spherical. I take that to mean you can hold the compass under the area and it behaves normally. If so, then I have to agree, it's odd. When you mentioned geomagnetism, I did a little searching and found this (http://www.assap.org/newsite/htmlfiles/Geology.html). I don't know that it's totally applicable to your situation though, since I doubt very seriously that a geomagnetic area would limit itself to a baseball-to-softball sized spot floating above a floor. At the very least, you'd think there would be a column of magnetism, going to the floor, not an isolated spot a foot and a half above it.

If you're really interested in trying to figure out what this could be caused by, what you might do is contact a university and talk with the physics and/or geology department and see if there's anyone doing research in electromagnetism or geomagnetism who can help you out.

[knotwurk]

lunacie: Thanks, I wasn't aware they were that easy to come by. Unfortunately I'm sort of broke right now (it's a long ugly story).

Trithemius: Yes, no matter where it is in the spherical area it points east. I tried finding some sort of column or something to that extent, thinking it might be some sort of ley line, but I couldn't trace it to anywhere outside of the region. It doesn't point toward the center or anything like that either, which is an excellent point. Thanks for the link, I'm currently checking it out. I've been very tempted to get ahold of someone, I just didn't want someone to think I was a flake or anything _inabox_

I'm going to try and see if I can find where my compass is. I actually haven't checked it out in years, but I'm guessing nothing will have changed. Maybe I can get a video of it just for posterity :hmmmmm:

[Lunacie]

Actually what you said made me think. I guess calling it polarized is inaccurate as well. I guess anomaly is better (I've watched way too much st:tng over the years).

The thing is, if you move the compass closer to the heat register or weights, they keep pointing towards it, right? Hence the presence of some electromagnetic field. You can trace it, track it, and if you put said compass on the west side of it, it points east, and vice versa. That wasn't happening in my case. Believe me, I went over all this first thing, merely out of curiousity.

I basically just sat there at first analyzing this "anomaly" with the compass, and came to the conclusion that there was no discernable electromagnetic force at work in the traditional sense of the word. The room at the time was my bedroom, so I proceeded to move everything in the area away from it. I just wanted to be thorough :).

The said area that's being affected I can say without a doubt is spherical and is situated roughly a foot and a half above the ground, two feet away from the southern wall and 3 feet away from the western wall. The polarization in affected area is orthogonal to typical orientation in the earth's magnetic field, with no deviations whatsoever outside this spherical area. It's a conundrum, according to everything I know about QED and electromagnetism, and even just simple logic. I keep saying to myself, "umm, it shouldn't do that" :lol:

It's too bad I can't get ahold of one of those EMF gauges they use on Ghosthunters. It might be fun to just check. The only other thing I can think of is that I do live like 20 miles from the Fermilab over in Batavia, IL. I'm tempted to discount that as a possibility though because it's highly unlikely that if some weird particle got out that it would be stationary just kind of hovering there in my room (well, stationary relative to the rotation of the Earth, etc). My first impression when I came across this though is that it was some kind of geomagnetic thing. It's tough to say, I mean the room is in the basement.

Okay, that's different than the one in my friend's front room then. It was like a column about 10 inches across that started at (or below) the floor and extended up as high as we could reach. We didn't climb on anything to see if it extended through the ceiling into the room above. I'd do that now, but back then I didn't have any idea how to really check these things out.

So, a sphere, eh? Hmm... Did you ever check it out again, or was it just the one time? I'd be interested in knowing if it's still there.

[knotwurk]

Okay, that's different than the one in my friend's front room then. It was like a column about 10 inches across that started at (or below) the floor and extended up as high as we could reach. We didn't climb on anything to see if it extended through the ceiling into the room above. I'd do that now, but back then I didn't have any idea how to really check these things out.

So, a sphere, eh? Hmm... Did you ever check it out again, or was it just the one time? I'd be interested in knowing if it's still there.

I checked it out multiple times, so it wasn't just the once. I'd check like a week later, a month later, etc.. I didnt' make charts or anything, but it didn't appear to move at all. I suppose I probably should have measured the distance, so I wasn't as thorough as I could have been :hehehehe: . The thing with your friend's house is interesting though; a column makes more sense to me for some reason.

[Trithemius]

Any updates?

[knotwurk]

Nope.. I went out of state this weekend for the first time in like 3 or 4 years, and I'm still on that post-road-trip high _cloud9_ . I'll definately keep you all updated though.

[Trithemius]

Cool. :)