There is no ideal place to live. Every city and town has pros and cons that keep it from being truly ideal. Maybe it’s the rent prices. Maybe it’s the weather. Or, in the case of the English town of Ipswich, maybe it’s the spiders that trigger an emergency broadcast alarm to play the sound of a child singing nursery rhymes in the middle of the night.
As reported by both the local news and BBC, an Ipswich resident found herself living in the kind of horror movie most would criticize as “too derivative.” Almost every night, tucked away in bed, she and her children were awakened to the enormously worrying sound of a disembodied little girl’s voice singing “It’s Raining, It’s Pouring” from an unknown location nearby.
In a video unlikely to have been taken by the local tourism board, you can hear what it sounded like for yourself:
After somehow managing to listen to this regularly for months without being crushed by the world’s largest anti-ghost cross or suffocating in a house hotboxed with demon-repelling incense, the woman reported her problem to the Ipswich Borough Council. Though a council spokeman told the Ipswich Star that it “was difficult to believe a nursery rhyme would be playing in the middle of the night,” they told residents to let them know the next time they woke up in the middle of the night to the gentle strains of their horrible curse.
Last week, the woman called them up while the nursery rhyme was playing around midnight and went out to investigate the source with members of the council. The song was coming from an industrial park, which we must imagine was covered in rust and converted from a prison for Britain’s most violent juvenile criminals for the last 666 years.
The Ghost of Ipswich, it turns out, was actually a loudspeaker connected to a motion sensor set to scare off trespassers. It was going off so frequently because, well, spiders were walking around on the sensor cameras. So, case closed. With the sobering light of day shined upon the mystery, there is nothing to be scared of: Ipswich was haunted not by anything spooky, but by a totally normal factory, filled to the brim with spiders, whose alarm was set to a recording of a child singing a nursery rhyme.
[via Boing Boing]
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