another common curiosity

we've talked about the hot common without much resolve so i have another common question to keep us going.

when russ was finding the elusive fried solenoid we decided to separate the common wire shunt that was in a 10 inch can, he had 4 wires to test and we had an extended earth ground as we were getting a major interference (from his friggn bluetooth we found out) so he touched the black lead to the earth ground wire and the red lead to the common wire to get a resistance reading on each wire.

my hope was that we would be able to get a reading similar to a TDR reading.

the wire that the valve was on read 4 or 5 ohms or a short reading.

as he was testing the other 2 wires i could hear the multimeter tone going off and asked him what he was touching and what he was reading...?

i told him that since there were no other valves connected and they were future expansion wires they should read OL for open....they were reading 0.0 and giving an audible tone.....continuity. with what the earth?

i'm not catching something here, and so far no one can give me an explaination that makes sense.........i know what we're reading, but it doesn't make sense yet.

any takers?