When darkness fell, the child began to sing. Almost every evening, the shrill voice – somewhere distant and alone – would endlessly call out the same haunting nursery rhyme in the dead of night.
It's the stuff of nightmares, and it was driving Alice Connington mad. The 34-year-old mother of two, who lives in Ipswich in the UK, had been plagued for months by this eerie sing-song nightmare, and she had no idea where it was coming from, or why.
You can't blame her for being unnerved – listen to this recording of the ghostly performance. "It's Raining, It's Pouring…" never sounded more sinister.
Now imagine it drifting into your house, night after night, like a bad dream that never ends.
"It was waking me up in the night, it was absolutely terrifying," Connington told the Ipswich Star.
"I heard it at all times of the night – 1am, 2am, 4am – it was sporadic, sometimes it would play once, other times it was over and over. Last week it played for hours, it was just horrible."
Finally, enough was enough. After enduring months of this creepy night-time rendition, Connington took her complaint to Ipswich Borough Council. It was curtain time for this poltergeist.
Last week, when the ghostly songbird piped up once more, the council tracked down where the song was emanating from, pinpointing a nearby industrial estate.
But when they got there, they found no forlorn ghost child serenading the darkness – just a loudspeaker, endlessly playing "It's Raining, It's Pouring…" to an audience of no-one.
"This is unique in our experience – it was difficult to believe a nursery rhyme would be playing in the middle of the night," a council spokesman told the Ipswich Star.
"We did hear the nursery rhyme playing from an industrial premises and it sounded very eerie at that time of night. We appreciate that people living nearby would find it quite spooky."
As for the cause of this spine-chilling tune?
It turns out the siren's song was just that – a siren – generated by an external security system, designed to warn off any would-be trespassers when a motion detector was triggered.
"The sound is only supposed to act as a deterrent for opportunistic thieves that come onto our property," a representative from the industrial estate explains, "and it's designed only to be heard by people on our private land."
But what was triggering the alarm in the first place? The funny thing is, the answer is just as weird and creepy as the rest of this strange story.
It turns out spiders were crawling across the lenses of the security cameras, tripping up the motion sensors.
One of the spiders in question (via BBC)
"Every time the spider went across the CCTV it set off the alarm," a council officer explained to the BBC.
"We apologise to everyone that has made us aware they were affected – the alarm's intention was never to have affected the residents."