When I heard about the Whispering Statue in Barre, no one was a bigger skeptic than myself. I gathered a few friends and set off to prove this phenomenon wrong, but it was me who was proven wrong. Big time. This statue with a rounded bench has an interesting feature that works better than you’d expect… Let’s take a closer look.
There are a few places around the globe that have an acoustic anomaly like this, and Vermont is one of them.
What exactly is a whispering wall?
Well, it’s a place where the architecture is able to broadcast weak sounds where it can be heard clearly a relatively long way against conventional distances. In the case of Youth Triumphant in Barre, the curved bench provides a very interesting phenomenon.
When you sit at one end of this bench and whisper something, the person sitting at the opposite end of the rounded bench, hears you as clearly as if you were whispering directly in their ear.
Despite being about 50 feet away!
If you think that you can hear the whisper clearly because it’s a quiet area, think again.
You can find this Whispering Wall on North Main Street in Barre, located next to a busy 5 way intersection in City Hall Park.
This memorial is known as "Youth Triumphant" and was erected in 1924.
It is a memorial to soldiers and sailors and features a noble young warrior pleading for peace.
This statue became the trademark of Barre and was adopted as the city seal.
It was made from Barre granite by local artists Gino Enrico Tosi, Enrico Mori and John Delmonte. The graceful curved bench behind the statue completes the scene, and it is this bench that carries your whispers from one end to the other.
Do you have an eagle eye?
If you have been here, did you notice that there is a typo carved into the bench? The phrase "Dedicated to the heroes spirit and sacrifice of our countrys youth" is etched, but they should have put an apostrophe in country.
If you have never tried this before, you won't be disappointed when you do.
Trust me!
For more things that will leave you scratching your head in disbelief, check out these 12 unexplained phenomena in Vermont.
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