Itsy-bitsy spiders put a big scare on 1 town

British bugs set off an industrial park’s eerie alarm system

For months, usually around bedtime, the sound of a distant nursery rhyme would drift through a neighborhood in Ipswich, a seaside town in 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, referring to the lead character in the “A Nightmare on Elm Street” horror movies.

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

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 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 spokesman for the industrial park told the BBC, which also noted that the alarm system had been “very successful” at scaring off intruders.

Park employees told British reporters that they turned the volume down after they became aware of the complaints.

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 to their local officials, who tracked down the eerie song’s source.

One woman said she would hear the song throughout the night — sometimes just once, other times again and again for hours.

“It was absolutely terrifying,” she told the Star. “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.”

Another woman told the BBC that the first time she heard the song it was “the most terrifying thing ever.”

The lyrics are more sinister than the sing-songiness lets on. The rhyme, a version of which was published in 1912, has a rather dark conclusion:

“It’s raining; it’s pouring. “The old man is snoring. “He bumped his head and went to bed,

“And couldn’t get up in the morning.”

But the eight-legged ending to this story is more fitting than frightening. Behind this mysterious nursery rhyme was the protagonist of another bedtime lullaby: an itsy-bitsy spider.