Forget banshee shrieks, werewolf howls, your ex’s voice or even the soft ‘plop’ of dropping your phone in the bath, here’s a noise that’ll really set your heart racing.
The Aztec Death Whistle, likened by some to ‘the scream of a thousand corpses’, is generally regarded as one of the scariest noises in human history.
Used during sacrificial ceremonies, it is understood to have honoured the ancient mesoamerican god of wind, Ehecatl.
Experts have now recreated the noise by 3D printing a version of the skull-shaped instrument.
The whistle was created after careful study of the design of fragments uncovered from a burial site in Mexico in the late 1990s.
James Orgill, who hosts the educational YouTube channel Action Lab, which produces videos on scientific experiments, said: ‘This has been deemed the most terrifying sound in the world.
‘Believe it or not, this is not a human scream.
‘The sound that the death whistle makes innately strikes fear into your heart.’
Speaking of the first discovery of the whistle in 1999, Orgill added: ‘Archaeologists first thought that this must be some sort of toy and they didn’t think much about it,’ says Orgill in the video.
‘It wasn’t until 15 years later for some reason a scientist blew into the hole in the top of it and this is the sound that came out.
‘It was a startling discovery because it sounded like a screaming human.’
There are a variety of different schools on the ceremonial significance of the death whistle.
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One of the leading theories is that the Aztecs might have believed the noise helped carry a person’s soul to the afterlife once they’d been sacrificed.
Others maintain the instrument would have been used to strike fear into the hearts of their enemies ahead of battle.
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