It sure sound like bearings to me. I bought an 02 midnight venture used and it had new tires on it, but whoever did the work forgot to install the inner wheel spacer. I rode it for several months and had a tire issue and had to put new ones on and not realizing spacer was missing my bearing started popping and growling then locked up my front tire at 70 mph, could have been disastrous. messed up quite a bit of parts. Bearings are only around 30 bucks.