News From The Weird #1
Do you agree that Tuesdays are the WORST day of the week?
Mondays get a bad rep, but at least you can still bask in the weekend’s afterglow. Tuesdays, on the other hand, have none of that. All you have is work, and work, and more work, and the weekend is as far away as can be.
For me, the only way I can get through slump day is to let my mind wander, and my imagination run wild. In fact, some of my best stories have been born on Tuesdays (out of sheer mental anguish). And the number one thing that kick starts my imagination is partaking in one of my favorite pastimes:
Reading WEIRD news.
Seriously. I’m a conspiracy theory fanatic, and anything about government cover-ups, sightings of strange cryptids, or pictures of time travelers really lights my mental fire.
And I don’t think I’m alone in this! (Right? You too? Somebody? …anybody?) Sometimes, all it takes is one, previously extinct fish washing up on a beach somewhere to pull our thoughts out of that eternal Tuesday, and spark the next great idea.
So, to that end, I would like to present you with your new weekly brain fuel:
How do we feel about this banner? Should I change it? I can change it.
Every Tuesday, I’ll be sliding into your inbox with another unbelievable news story from around the internet to get your engine going—or at the very least, make you question the nature of existence or something.
And remember, if you hate this kind of thing, please feel free to unsubscribe with the link at the bottom!
This week’s news from the weird comes to us from the UK.
Now, decades of horror movies have given humanity a sort of dictionary of fearful images upon which to draw when we sit alone at night in our homes. Clown faces peering up at us from sewer grates. A lone ball bouncing down a hallway. A breath becoming suddenly visible in a freezing cold room.
None, however, is as universally terrifying as children.
Twin little girls in matching dresses holding hands. Kids in dress clothes running through the halls of your home, always just out of sight. Disembodied voices singing nursery rhymes.
But these are just the things of horror movies, right? For a mother and her two young children living in the town of Ipswitch, that question is a difficult one to answer.
It started one night, as she lay in bed, and was suddenly pulled from sleep by a distant sound. It was faint at first, difficult to make out. But as she focused on the noise, it slowly became chillingly clear. From somewhere outside, carried on the wind, came the lilting melody of a children’s song.
It’s raining, it’s pouring, the old man is snoring…
“The first time I heard it,” the woman said, “it was the most terrifying thing ever. I went cold and felt sick, and thought ‘what on earth was that?’”
Though she was thoroughly disturbed, the woman finally willed herself back to sleep.
But the next night it happened again.
And the next.
And the next.
“I started to ask myself why I was living with this when I could do something about it,” she said.
So, when early the next morning she was once again awoken by the music, she decided to call the council’s rapid response team, and pointed them in the direction of the sound.
Now, in every single horror movie, you know what happens next. The investigators make their way toward the alleged sound only to find that they can’t hear a thing. There is no sound. It’s all in her head—and so on and so forth. But as soon as they leave, the evil shows itself to her stronger than ever.
But this wasn’t a horror movie.
As the investigators moved in the direction she indicated, the sound became even more audible. They were able to track the mournful rhyme to a nearby industrial park. And as they finally honed in on the source of the sound, it became terribly clear that the words were not being sung by the spirits of dead children, or even live ones for that matter. It was something much, much worse.
“The sound is only supposed to act as a deterrent for opportunistic thieves that come onto our property,” a spokesman for the industrial park is quoted as saying, “and it’s designed only to be heard by people on our private land. We are now aware of the problem—the motion sensors were being triggered by spiders crawling across the lenses of our cameras.”
So remember: If you find yourself awoken in the wee hours of the night by the sound of an eerie children’s song lilting through your open window, it’s unlikely you will find a choir of undead school children on the other end.
No, in reality, it’s probably just spiders.
