The Groan Tube Files
I wasn’t trying to make a memory.
I was trying to troll my son.
That’s how this started.
Not a parenting moment. Petty vengeance.
My son has made it his life’s mission to weaponize the groan tube sound.
You know the ones—cheap plastic hell-flutes that sound like a dying whale in a drainage pipe.
A hollow wand of auditory violence.
A toy engineered solely to chip away at the fragile boundary between love and psychosis.
He used to play with one obsessively.
More than once, I considered hiding it in the freezer just to make it shut the fuck up.
He doesn’t use the actual toy anymore.
He is the toy.
He can mimic the sound with his voice.
Perfectly.
Constantly.
He’s thirteen.
His voice dropped last year and it’s like a weird, prematurely baritone forest spirit who still can’t clean his room.
So now when he does makes said sound, it echoes through walls and vents like a haunted tuba.
You can be crying in the shower, breaking down in silence, and suddenly—
eeeeUUUAAAHHHHRRGHHHHHHHHHH.
You breathe.
eeeeuuurrrrrgggHHHHH
You open the closet door.
eeeeuuurrrrrgggHHHHH
A recording.
AirDropped.
From the next room.
He sends voice memos.
Leave voicemails.
He’s built an audio empire out of chaos.
The groan tube is omnipresent.
That day, he’d annoyed me—probably by existing too loudly—so I went hunting for the most obnoxious groan tube clip I could find.
Just to reset the emotional balance of the universe.
I googled “groan tube sound.”
First result: Freesound.org.
Five entries.
The descriptions said things like: “I recorded my favorite groan tube.”
Three of them were uploaded by one user.
A user with a familiar name.
My son’s name.
I thought: Huh. That’s a hell of a coincidence.
I texted him:
“You uhhh ever heard of the website freesound.org?”
“NO.”
Then:
“Okay, I did it on the iPad one time.”
Mystery solved.
Until I noticed the upload date.
January 2014.
He would’ve been three years old.
I stared at the screen like it had accused me of something.
To understand the full scope of this crime against silence, you have to understand who he was as a child.
People were afraid of him.
He didn’t throw tantrums.
He powered up.
We’d all be mid-argument or snack bribery negotiation, and suddenly—he’d go silent.
That’s when you knew it was too late.
Other people would think, "Thank God, he’s calming down."
No.
His fists would clench.
Not crying.
Not speaking.
Just… vibrating.
Like a travel-sized nuclear reactor about to rupture the space-time continuum over the wrong brand of applesauce.
If you got too close, you could hear him humming with rage, just below audible range.
And then—explosion.
I remember him destroying drywall with a crayon, but I don’t remember him moonlighting as a tiny Cold War-era audio operative uploading sonic weapons to the public archive.
I decided to listen to the clips.
The first file was a full minute of groan tube noise.
Already unbearable.
Low, wet, mechanical despair.
I clicked the second file—
Freesound doesn’t pause the first.
Suddenly, I’m listening to two overlapping groan tubes.
It doesn’t sound like a toy anymore.
It sounds like a neurological episode.
It zig-zags.
The sound is lateral, not vertical.
The tube is being violently shaken, not flipped.
Disrupting the internal airflow, creating nonlinear pressure oscillations,
resulting in sound shapes that mimic psychosis.
It sounds like it’s trying to escape through the nearest electrical outlet.
I panicked.
Clicked the third file.
All three played at once.
It was like a plastic throat being pulled through a black hole.
And then—his laugh.
You can hear his little giggling in the background of the third clip.
It’s unmistakable.
High-pitched.
Pre-tonsillectomy.
A sound from before he could understand time or consequence.
I was stunned.
I thought I’d birthed some kind of toddler archivist—
a baby savant preserving the most cursed vibrations of childhood for the global auditory record.
“Okay. Bro helped me with my iPad.”
His brother would’ve been six.
Together, they apparently conspired to leave behind digital evidence of sonic terrorism.
I went to troll my son.
What I found was a time-locked scream from a toddler who never needed words to dominate a house.
My son’s laugh, frozen in digital amber, inside the very noise I thought I was only trying to find.
A boy who made a sound so cursed, seven hundred strangers on the internet downloaded it voluntarily.
I thought I was raising a child.
Turns out I was just beta-testing a sound.
And now that sound has rights.
And downloads.
And I can’t make it stop.
Not in the house.
Not in my brain.
Not in the timeline.
Maybe that’s parenting.
Not legacy.
Just… cursed vibrations.
Echoing forever.