I got an interesting email a few days ago, which I quote (with permission):
I keep running into references to places called "gravity hills" or "magnetic hills" where supposedly some force plays hell with your sense of what's up and what's down. Trees and walls appear to lean, it's hard to stand up right, stuff like that. But people say it's more than an illusion, because cars put in neutral at the bottom of an incline roll uphill, and balls placed on what appear to be level surfaces start to roll.
I can't come up with any way any of this could be real, but there are a lot of claims, so it's kind of the "can they all be false?" thing. What do you know about this, and has it been explained scientifically? Or is there really something paranormal going on?
I've heard about this phenomenon for years myself, and saying "there are a lot of claims" is a bit of an understatement. In fact, Wikipedia has a list of reports of such "mystery hills" everywhere from Azerbaijan to Uruguay, and they all kind of have the same characteristics -- that the laws of gravity don't seem to apply, or that there's a strange "magnetic force" pulling stuff (including your proprioception) off kilter.
Let's clear one thing up from the get-go, though; if there is anything going on here, it has nothing to do with magnetism, because our sense of balance is controlled by the semicircular canals, fluid-filled tubes in your inner ear that use the movement of the liquid under the pull of gravity as a way of communicating to your brain "that direction is down." Messing with this will make you dizzy and/or nauseated, which is why people get motion sickness; the apparent forces caused by spinning around on a carnival ride cause the fluid to slosh about, sending mixed signals to the brain and making some people violently ill. (Why certain people seem to be more or less immune to motion sickness, and others get nauseated walking across the room, is unknown.)
So even if there was some mysterious "magnetism" at work here, it wouldn't affect your sense of balance unless your inner ears were made of cast iron.
But let's get down to specifics. Here's how one of the most famous "mystery hills," the "Oregon Vortex," is described in John Godwin's book This Baffling World:
Situated thirty miles from Grant's Pass, the vortex -- which measures roughly 125 feet in diameter -- constitutes, according to its promoters, an electromagnetic phenomenon.
Within the "Oregon Vortex" there stands a hut, dubbed "The House of Mystery." Its owner, John Lister, says, "Nowever in the area does the visitor stand upright. Inevitably one assumes a posture that inclines toward magnetic north, beginning with a minimum of divergence from normal at the edge of the area, and increasing to an acute angle as "The House of Mystery" is entered. So gradually is this latter stage reached that visitors seldom realize the phenomenon until the seemingly impossible posture of the guide or their friends brings a realization of their own tilting."
Suspended from the roof of "The House of Mystery" hangs a heavy steel ball, but that ball presumably doesn't hang straight down. It would seem to lean inward, pulled toward the center of the hut by some weird gravitational shift. It is claimed that a person who enters the hut will feel the odd pull quite distinctly; it is further alleged that the power which is exerted will force one to lean over at a ten-degree angle. Viewers have alleged that a rubber ball, placed on the floor here, will roll uphill.
Another famous one is Magnetic Hill, near Moncton, New Brunswick, where a landmark (a light-colored telephone pole) appears to be the lowest point in the road when viewed from one direction, and the highest when viewed from the other.
And of course, these stories are always accompanied with claims of other sorts of paranormal occurrences -- UFOs, ghosts, "skinwalkers," and the like -- and, in the United States at least, the inevitable stories about how the Indigenous people thought the place was cursed or haunted or a sacred burial ground or whatnot.
Now, to address the question -- is there anything to this?
Simple answer: no.
It turns out that humans are remarkably bad at piecing together visual cues with the information we get from our semicircular canals and coming up with a coherent picture of what the space around us is doing. All it takes is a little messing about with the information we're receiving, and it befuddles us completely.
Take, for example, the following rather simple drawing:
The diagonal lines running from the upper left to the lower right are all parallel, despite the fact that (1) they don't look it, and (2) even when you know what's going on and have proven it to yourself with a ruler, they still don't look it. This is called the Zöllner Illusion, named after its discoverer, the astrophysicist Johann Karl Friederich Zöllner, and is a good indication that our ability to orient visually is not all it's cracked up to be. (This is why the first thing pilots-in-training are taught is, "trust your instruments, not your senses.")
The "gravity hill" phenomenon is actually nothing more than an optical illusion as well, created by tilted surfaces that appear to be flat (or vice-versa) because the horizon is obscured, landmarks themselves are at an angle, or something is causing the eyes to misperceive the angle of inclination. The whole thing was the subject of an extensive investigation that resulted in a paper in the journal Psychological Science, which concluded that the phenomenon is the result of a place's odd spatial layout combined with our faulty sensory-perceptive equipment.
So there's no alteration in the pull of gravity in these spots, or a mysterious electromagnetic anomaly, or a Great Disturbance in the Force, or whatever. I'm not saying they're not fun; optical illusions are endlessly fascinating to me, but it's from the perspective of "wow, our brains are super easy to fool," not because of anything paranormal going on.
Anyhow, thanks to the reader who sent the question. I always appreciate inquiries. My opinion is that all of science starts from a desire to go from "We don't know" to "That's curious" to "Let's find out how it works."
And even if in this case, the answer turns out to be less exciting than a rip in the space-time continuum, it's still pretty interesting.
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