英国版走近科学：夜半歌声

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.

九旬老——为何每当黑夜降临时，孩子开始无休止地唱歌;每当夜深人静的时候，监控器频频失灵，单身母亲心悸难安，到底是人性的扭曲还是道——超自然的力量。

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.

如同噩梦，它让爱丽丝·康宁顿疯狂。这位34岁的女士是两个孩子的母亲，住在英国的伊普斯威奇，几个月来一直被令人毛骨悚然的夜半歌声所困扰，她不知道它来自哪里，或者为什么出现。

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.

你不能责怪她胆小，她录下了那幽灵般的声音：“下雨了，大雨瓢泼下……”这段儿歌听起来从未如此险恶。

Now imagine it drifting into your house, night after night, like a bad dream that never ends.

现在想象一下，每到深夜它就飘进你的屋子，就像永无止境的梦魇。

"It was waking me up in the night, it was absolutely terrifying," Connington told the Ipswich Star.

“夜里它吵醒了我，超级恐怖的我和你说，”康宁顿在当地的报纸上控诉。

"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."

“夜间的不同时段都能听到——凌晨1点、凌晨2点、凌晨4点——断断续续的，有时播放一次，有时会一遍又一遍。上周连续播放了几个小时，真是太可怕了。”

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.

是的，够了。在经历了数月令人毛骨悚然的午夜歌声后，康宁顿将她的投诉信发至伊普斯维奇自治市议会。对走近科学的爱好者来说，下面是揭晓谜底的时间。

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.

上周，当幽灵般的旋律再次出现时，委员会追踪到了声音的发源地——指向附近一处工业区。

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.

但是当他们到达那里时，他们发现并没有孤独的幽灵小孩在黑暗中哼唱着小夜曲 ——只有一个扬声器，反反复复地向不存在的观众播放“下了雨，瓢泼大雨……”。

"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."

“这在我们的经历里也是绝无仅有的，”一位议会发言人说，“我们确实听到了从工厂中传出来的童谣，并且在深夜里听起来确实非常怪异。我们感谢附近的居民向我们投诉了这一事件。”

As for the cause of this spine-chilling tune?

至于播放童谣的原因?

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.

那是一个警报器，当被动作探测器触发时，就会发出声音，吓阻可能的闯入者。

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.

但是，到底是什么触发了警报?有趣的是，答案本身确实带有毛骨悚然的元素.

It turns out spiders were crawling across the lenses of the security cameras, tripping up the motion sensors.

一只小蜘蛛!当它爬过安全摄像机的镜头时，触发了运动传感器。

"Every time the spider went across the CCTV it set off the alarm," a council officer explained to the BBC.

“每当蜘蛛穿过闭路电视时，都会引发警报，”一位议会官员向BBC解释道。

"We apologise to everyone that has made us aware they were affected – the alarm's intention was never to have affected the residents."

“我们向所有受到夜半歌声惊吓的居民们道歉——警报器本不应给大家制造困扰。”