Thursday Things: Spiders and Cats Edition
30 May 2024. Vol 6 No 22. By Dan McGirt. #251
It’s Thursday Things! This week we get scared by strange noises in the night and investigate a furry feline mystery.
If you enjoy this edition, please click the heart icon in the header or at the end of the post to let me know.
“Be glad they put me at the top instead of the spider.” Photo by Daria Shatova on Unsplash
Spiders of Ipswich
Your first mistake was living in a place called Ispwich.
Right off the bat that sounds like a place where creepy things happen. It has that Lovecraftian ‘The Dunwich Horror’ vibe.
Just no. Get out now.
Oh, you’re staying?
Fine, then cue the late night nursery rhymes.
A tormented mother living in Bramford Road with her two young children has been woken on an almost nightly basis by a tinny, distant rendition of ‘It’s Raining, It’s Pouring’.1
Yes, this is just what I want to have wake me up in the middle of the night at my isolated farmhouse in %&! creepypasta Ipswich:
“It’s raining, it’s pouring,
The old man is snoring,
He went to bed and bumped his head
And couldn’t get up in the morning.”
I don’t even watch horror movies and I’ve seen this movie.
She said the threatening undertone of the song had left her frightened and questioning whether she was imagining things.
That’s how it always starts.
Again, this is your cue to get out while you still can.
But, no.
In typical horror movie protagonist fashion, our frightened mum with two young children decided to ignore the terrifying late night lullabies as best she could.
She added: “It was waking me up in the night, it was absolutely terrifying. 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.”
Then, when she could the nightly terror endure no more she:
A. Called Ghostbusters?
B. Contacted an exorcist?
C. Complained to the Ipswich Borough Council?
That’s right — bring on the bureaucrats!
After months of torment, she finally reported the unusual complaint to Ipswich Borough Council.
“I started to ask myself why I was living with this when I could do something about it,” she said.
The local council sprang into action and sent out their ‘rapid response team’.
I did not see that coming. Neither did the spectral musicians.
They tracked the eerie music down to an industrial premises on the neighbouring Farthing Road estate where the music was playing through a loud speaker.
A spokesman for the council said: “This is unique in our experience – 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.
“We took a call around midnight and immediately went to the Bramford Road area to find out more - 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.”
Ya think? Spooky midnight music coming from the old industrial park on creepy-sounding Bramford Road?
Is there a legend about the headless ghost of old Josiah Bramford roaming the moors at — no?
Shocking.
Okay, gang, here’s the plan! Scooby, you lead the musical ghoul to this X. Then Shaggy and Velma will drop this bucket of quick drying cement. Meanwhile Daphne and I will be in that utility closet, er, looking for clues.
I assume the Ipswich Rapid Response Team’s plan was similar. Anyway, it turned out the sneaky spook was none other than the industrial site owner and the chilling music was intended to … I’m not making this up … scare off intruders.
Just. Like. In. Every. Episode. Of. Scooby. Doo. Ever.
But wait — there is one more terrifying twist in this tale…
The music was actually designed to act as a deterrent to trespassers and was activated by motion sensors.
A spokesman from the site said: “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.
Okay, again, this is a genius plan by your security consultants at Hanna-Barbera, but if there weren’t any intruders then WHAT WAS SETTING OFF THE MOTION SENSORS?
You may to want to stop reading now.
You may not want to know the answer.
I’m serious. Once you see this, you can’t unsee it.
Still here?
Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
According to the industrial site spokesman:
“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.
Spiders.
It was spiders all along.
Terrifyingly large and menacing motion sensor setting off spiders.
Or, as the indomitable BoingBoing put it in one of the greatest headlines ever:
Spiders blamed after broken siren played creepy nursery rhymes randomly at night to UK townsfolk
I strongly recommend reading both articles, the BoingBoing piece and the original from the Ipswich Star2 from which I excerpted the above quotes: Listen - Mum’s nursery rhyme nightmares solved by late-night crack team
“And I would have gotten away from it if it hadn’t been for your meddling Rapid Reaction Team!” Photo by Егор Камелев on Unsplash
By the way, legend has it that if you don’t share this edition of Thursday Things with a friend using the share button below, the late night spiders will come for you…
Cats confound scientists
Cats are independent and confounding creatures who do what they want and don’t play by your rules.
Including, it seems, all the known rules of cat genetics.
A New Cat Color Is Defying Genetic Expectations
But there’s officially a new cat color in town— salmiak, or ‘salty liquorice.’
The pretty black, white, and grey shade—named for a popular snack food in Finland, where this coat color has been making itself known—is thanks to a fur strand that starts off black near the root, but grows whiter and whiter out towards the tip. The coat was first spotted in 2007, and in 2019, it was brought to the attention of a group of cat experts lead by feline geneticist Heidi Anderson. Since then, the group has been trying to figure out exactly what causes this shade to express itself, and recently, they finally figured it out. A paper on the discovery has been published in the journal Animal Genetics.
Interesting cat fact: “technically speaking, cats only come in two colors—black and orange. Any other color is either a combination of those two colors, a faded version of one of those colors (which is caused by the dilution gene) or both.”
I did not know that. But this newly observed cat color, salmiak, doesn’t fit into these rules. So what are those sneaky kitties up to?
“There was a huge chunk of sequence missing downstream from the KIT gene,” Anderson told New Scientist, referencing a gene known to affect white patterns in the coats of animals. And these cats were just… missing a piece of DNA right nearby.
The missing gene sequence produces this new feline fur coloration. Just when you think you know cats, you don’t know cats!
This is salmiak, the Finnish licorice that the new cat fur color is named for. Photo by Jonne on Unsplash
Thank you for reading!
Please click the hearts, leave a comment, and use the share feature to send this issue to a friend who might enjoy it. See you next Thursday!
Ipswich Star? That’s the name of your local paper? You can’t tell me there’s not a local Cthulhu cult, a hidden temple of Hastur, and at least three copies of the Necronomicon in this town.
Also, I assume every page of the Ipswich Star smells like musty shrouds from the grave.