Spooky content ahead of Halloween
Did you ever hear the one about the town that was haunted by a child singing nursery rhymes in the middle of the night that turned out to be caused by spiders? No? Well settle in.
Starting in September 2017, residents of the Bramford Road area of Ipswich were terrorised by the sound of a child singing the classic nursery rhyme ‘It’s raining, it’s pouring, the old man is snoring’ in the middle of the night (a creepy song at the best of times, even before you think about why the man didn’t get up in the morning…)
Back in 2018, one resident told the Ipswich Star: “It was waking me up in the night, it was absolutely terrifying.
“I heard it at all times of the night — 1 a.m., 2 a.m., 4 a.m. — it was sporadic, sometimes it would play once, other times it was over and over. Last week it played for hours, it was just horrible.”
Meanwhile, a fellow resident Alice Randle told the Independent in 2018 that it was like “something out of Freddie Krueger.”
So the council investigated, looking at the site where the sound appeared to be coming from near houses on the outskirts of Ipswich – but each time they got to the scene, the creepy singing had stopped.
That was until Randle called at 11.15pm one September night.
It turned out the child’s voice was being played through a loudspeaker on a warehouse a few hundred yards away on the Farthing Road industrial estate as an alarm on a motion sensor.
The sensor apparently had “spiders and webs across it” and it’s thought that this is what was triggering the alarm.
A spokesperson for the site said: “The sound is only supposed to act as a deterrent for opportunistic thieves that come onto our property, and it is designed only to be heard by people on our private land.
“We are now aware of the problem – the motion sensors were being triggered by spiders crawling across the lenses of our cameras and it looks like we’ve had it turned up too loudly.
“We’ve spoken to the resident who brought it to our attention and adjusted it so this should not happen again.”
They added that it was the first time that a nursery rhyme had been the source of a noise complaint.
Spooky related links:
- The definitive list of the scariest Halloween films of all time
- 5 costumes that everyone will wear this year – and 10 that are dead and buried
- Lost ‘ghost ships’ emerge after underwater volcano erupts
