The residents of a small Wisconsin town have had their lives plagued by house-rattling underground booms for the past few nights. No one has yet been able to identify the source of the sounds.

After initially feeling scared, then perplexed, then bored, then frustrated, the residents of Clintonville are now starting to get a little frantic.

These people need sleep.

These booms need to stop.

According to the residents quoted in this article from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, the noises sound like:

1. a 90-ton wrecking ball slamming into something

2. huge chunks of ice falling from a roof

3. a car being driven into someone's living room

4. a "critter" "causing bedlam" in a basement

5. a jackhammer [That one's lame.]

6. a furnace blowing up

7. a tornado

So far, city officials have only been able to identify things that are definitely not causing the sounds: an earthquake, a methane gas leak, underground mining, angels bowling. None of the usual suspects.

One currently popular theory, proposed by a geologist from University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, holds that the noises may be caused by the resettling of Clintonville's granite rock foundations, brought on by an especially low-water table.

A professor of Natural Science at Milwaukee Area Technical College thinks it might be nothing more than a symptom of the spring thaw.

Of course the real story—the story that the residents of Clintonville are too afraid to admit to themselves-is this:

The portal to Hell is almost certainly opening up under Wisconsin right this very minute.

[Image via AP]