The music was meant 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.”
For more than a year, residents of a small English town had quietly endured an unsettling and unusual burden — the sounds of children singing a nursery rhyme.
A mother living with her two young children on Bramford Road in Ipswich, located about 66 miles northeast of London, said her family had been woken on almost a nightly basis by “a tinny, distant rendition of 'It’s Raining, It’s Pouring,'" the Ipswich Star reported.
The song played sporadically, at times repeating on a loop.
“It was just horrible,” the unnamed woman said.
Though the woman's sanity was questioned at first, she realized she had to bring her problem to the attention of authorities.
“I started to ask myself why I was living with this when I could do something about it,” she told the paper.
After alerting the Ipswich Borough Council of the menacing music, officials were leery but determined to help the woman investigate the mystery.
“This is unique in our experience,” a spokesman for the council told the Star. “It was difficult to believe a nursery rhyme would be playing in the middle of the night. But we do take all complaints extremely seriously and asked the residents who contacted us to let us know when it was actually playing so we could investigate properly.”
So one night when the woman heard the music, she immediately alerted the council.
“It sounded very eerie at that time of night,” the spokesman said. “We appreciate that people living nearby would find it quite spooky.”
But after some sleuthing, authorities were able to determine the root of the problem. They tracked the music to an industrial lot, where the song was being played over a loud speaker.
The owners of the site told the paper the music is meant 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.”
It appeared the motion sensors that trigger the music were being set off by spiders crawling across the site's security camera lenses.
"It looks like we’ve had it turned up too loudly," authorities at the site told the paper.
Officials agreed to run a volume test to ensure the music doesn’t reach nearby residents, which was a promise the woman who first alerted authorities to the music said was welcome.
"It’s a massive relief and I’m looking forward to getting some actual sleep from now on," she said.
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