Nursery rhymes trigger nightmares: In UK town, spiders to blame for evening broadcast of ‘It’s raining, it’s pouring’

It began like the opening credits of a horror movie: In the middle of the night, a child’s voice eerily singing a nursery rhyme drifts through the wind. In Ipswich, a small UK town, this was reality, according to reports by the Ipswich Star.

“The first time I heard it it was the most terrifying thing ever, I went cold and felt sick, and thought ‘what on earth was that?’” said an Ipswich woman who asked not to be identified.

She told the Star that the threatening undertone of the song had left her questioning whether she was imagining things. The waking nightmare went on for months before she reported it to Ipswich Borough Council.

The culprit? An itsy, bitsy spider. Private industrial land near her residence had an unusual security system: Motion sensors triggered the sirens to play the nursery rhyme, meant to scare off potential thieves.

“The sound is only supposed to act as a deterrent for opportunistic thieves that come onto our property, and it’s designed only to be heard by people on our private land,” A spokesman from the site, who spoke with the Ipswich Star said.

“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,” he said.

The site has agreed to do a “test run” once the sensors have been recalibrated to ensure the sound will no longer reach the woman.

“It’s a massive relief and I’m looking forward to getting some actual sleep from now on,” she said.