Anyone else heard weird knocking coming from inside walls at 3am?

Right so this happened to me twice in the house I lived in back in 2019, terraced house in Salford. Three knocks, pause, then three more. Always exactly 3am give or take a few minutes. My partner heard it too so I know I wasn't losing my mind.

What gets me is the pattern of it. Its not random like pipes settling or whatever the sceptics always jump to. Three and three has got significance in a lot of traditions, sort of a mirror of the holy trinity but inverted, that's the theory anyway. Some researchers tie it to portal activity rather than residual haunting, like something is announcing itself rather than just replaying a loop.

Did yours follow any kind of pattern or was it more random? And was it always the same wall or moving around? That detail matters a lot I reckon. A fixed location suggests something attached to a specific spot, movement suggests something a bit more active and aware. Would love to hear more from people who've actually experienced this rather than just theorising about it.

Before anyone starts going full poltergeist on this - have you actually ruled out thermal expansion? Terraced houses in older northern stock are notorious for it, the party walls between properties heat and cool unevenly and you get knocking that sounds genuinely rhythmic and deliberate. Three knocks is just how the creak propagates through the joist structure sometimes.

That said, the 3am timing does give me pause because thermal activity should correlate with temperature drops which happen earlier, not at 3am specifically. What was the weather doing those nights? Was it after a warm day or during a cold snap? That detail matters more than people realise when trying to rule mundane causes out properly before jumping to conclusions.

Not dismissing it, just saying do the boring work first. What did the knocking sound like - hollow, solid, directional?