Nursery rhyme haunted residents of English town

FOR months, usually around bedtime, the sound of a distant nursery rhyme would drift through a neighbourhood in Ipswich, England.

The words were familiar: “It’s raining, it’s pouring; the old man is snoring.”

But it wasn’t soothing. And it wasn’t putting anyone to sleep. Quite the opposite.

For several residents, the tune was the stuff of nightmares.

“It’s very haunting,” Ipswich resident Alice Randle said in a recent interview with London-based newspaper The Independent.

“People have said it’s like something out of Freddy Krueger,” Randle added.

The culprit, unmasked last week, was not Krueger nor any other horror villain sporting a spooky jukebox.

But for an arachnophobe, the true miscreant might have been just as frightening. That’s right: it was a spider.

An investigation tracked the sound to a nearby industrial park, where a speaker system at a unit inside blared a childlike recording of the song. The racket was actually an alarm system, meant to deter would-be trespassers, according to a BBC report.

The alarm was triggered by spiders scuttling across a camera linked to the system, a spokesperson for the industrial park told the BBC.

Randle was apparently one of several Ipswich residents who were disturbed and annoyed by the haunting tune that woke them over a period of more than a year.

The local Ipswich Star reported that residents complained repeatedly to their local officials, who eventually responded and tracked down the eerie song’s source.

One woman, whom the newspaper did not name, said she would hear the song throughout the night. “It was absolutely terrifying,” she told the Star.

| The Washington Post