A neighborhood in Ipswich has been sporadically awakened to the sound of a children’s nursery rhyme being played over loudspeakers. Creepy weird, huh?
The owners of the speakers have an explanation. This doesn’t help.
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.
It’s an odd choice of an alarm, but OK. I guess if you want to instill bafflement in thieves, it would be effective. But then they go a step further and place the blame on innocents.
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. We’ve spoken to the resident who brought it to our attention and adjusted it so this shouldn’t happen again.
Oh, sure. Blame the spiders. I think we’re seeing another instance of unthinking bigotry against the poly-armed community.
This tactic is much more effective when paired with a creepy little girl in Victorian clothes who stares at you from an upstairs window.
I put in a new security camera that has been activated by a spider building a web in front of it (that was way cool) and several wasps.
I don’t have audio alarms on it, it just records them so it’s all good.
The month getting trapped by the spider was cool too.
Ugh, moth not month
When I was but a boy, there was a spider that used to regularly set off our burglar alarm by crawling over the sensor. They claimed that it was not possible, but they never saw the fecker responsible. This was one of the mutant radioactive horrors of rural Cumbria, grown fat on the radioactive waste of Sellafield. I swear you could hear the footfalls as it scuttled across the wall. What you couldn’t hear was its footfalls as, one night, it crawled out of the duvet that I was under…
shudder
@Wrath Panda: Do not go to Youtube and search “huntsman spider”. At some point in every video I’ve watched, the (huge) spider gets pissed off and jumps at the cameraperson. They always seem to end with the image rolling wildly accompanied by incoherent screaming.
I suppose it’s too much to hope for that the nursery rhyme was “Itsy Bitsy Spider?”
I suppose it’s too much to hope for that the nursery rhyme was “Itsy Bitsy Spider?”
If it was the Barney theme song, it would count as a war crime.
@4 The horror the horror .
@kevinv #3:
Are you denying their mastery of time?
Hmmmm. I’ve always wondered why ‘nursery rhymes’ in sung form so often follow the ‘nyeah–nyeah-nyeah–nyeah–nyeah’ motif favored by children learning how to chastise each other. It grates on the nerves.
…or is it the other way around? Either way the effect is ghastly.
@Snarki:
You’re a dinosaur, Barney! This is soooooo inappropriate!
It’s just the Scarfolk child alarm. Nothing to be concerned about.
Spiders that turn the sound up to 11 and activate it. Hmmmmmm…. I’ll have to reinforce the anti spider array on my sound system.
@5 IIRC hunstmen always automatically jump when threatened and they don’t plan their trajectory. It’s like how we blink from a camera flash. It’s just that humans are giant and stupidly get close with their smartphone cameras so they’re in the way and get a face full of large, panicked spider as a result.
“…designed only to be heard by people on our private land.”
So the sound stops at their fenceline? In the past I’ve had neighbours who should have had this technology!