A ‘terrifying’ Nursery Rhyme Drifted Through A Neighborhood For A Year. The Cause? Spiders.

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 last week, was not Krueger nor any other horror villain sporting a spooky jukebox. But for an arachnophobe, the true miscreant might have be 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.