CREEPY STORIES
When real life feels more like an episode of The Twilight Zone.
THE HAUNTING OF IPSWICH
It was a dreary January day in the English town of Ipswich in 2018 when the strange music fi rst appeared: A recording of a young child warbled out over the countryside, slowly singing, “It’s raaaining…it’s pooouring…the ollld man is snoooring…” The nursery rhyme brought several people outside, but no one knew where it was coming from. Then it stopped. “It sounded like something from a horror movie,” a frightened mom told the Ipswich Star. That was just the beginning. The song played again several times over the next few months, but there was no pattern, and it always stopped before anyone could trace its source. It was driving the townsfolk crazy. Finally, on a chilly September evening, the disembodied voice sang its song, and town workers on high alert tracked it down to its source—a nearby business park. The next day, the apologetic business park owner issued a statement: “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, but it looks like we’ve had it turned up too loudly.” And it only went off when the business park was empty, which is why no one there was aware of the havoc it was wreaking upon the town. Here’s the creepiest part of all: The music was being triggered by motion sensors, which were being triggered by spiders crawling across the lenses of the park’s surveillance cameras.
SILENT TREATMENT
Born in Yemen in 1963, identical twins June and Jennifer Gibbons moved to Wales when they were babies. As the only black kids at their Welsh school, the sisters were relentlessly teased and bullied. Their coping mechanism: silence. They rarely spoke to anyone except each other, and only in their own secret language. Shutting out the rest of the world, the teens took to writing strange crime novels with such titles as Pepsi-Cola Addict and Discomania. Then they turned to actual crime. A spree of arson and theft landed the 18-year-olds in Broadmoor, a high-security psychiatric hospital in England. Toward the end of their 12-year stay, the “silent twins,” as they were known, decided that one of them had to die. “This sister of mine,” wrote June in her diary, “a dark shadow robbing me of sunlight, is my one and only torment.” During an interview with their biographer, Jennifer said, “I’m going to die. We’ve decided.” On the day of their release in 1993, it happened—Jennifer suffered a massive heart attack and died on her sister’s shoulder. No offi cial cause of death was ever found, but June was convinced that her sister willed herself to die. “I’m free at last, liberated,” she wrote. “Jennifer has given up her life for me.” As of last report, June was “living quietly and independently near her parents in West Wales.”
The Otis Spunkmeyer cookie company’s name draws inspiration from 1970s NFL player Otis Sistrunk and popcorn magnate Orville Redenbacher.
In 2018 Erica Glaze of Houston, Texas, was out shopping when she received an alert from her alarm company: someone or something had set off three alarms in different areas of her house. She rushed home and found shattered glass all over her dining room. Curiously, no doors were open and nothing was missing. But the glass top of her new $2,000 dining room table had exploded into a thousand pieces. There was nothing on the table heavy enough to make the glass buckle, much less shatter it with enough force to trigger alarms all over the house. “Normally, if something is going to break from weight, it caves in,” Glaze told KHOU News. “This exploded externally. There was force behind it.” It’s a good thing the family wasn’t home—their baby’s chair and toys are kept right next to the table. Glaze later discovered that several other glass tables—all made by the same manufacturer—had met similar ends. (The high-end furniture company had no comment for the press.) The Glazes were given a new table from the furniture store…by a different manufacturer.
SITTING IN TRAFFIC
On a rainy Sunday in Aberdeen, Scotland, in 2018, a mysterious man placed a large red chair in the middle of a busy intersection and then sat down. A local woman named Bernadine Magee posted a photo of the sitting man, which went viral. The Scottish Sun asked her to describe the odd scene, and she was obviously still trying to process it herself:
“It’s not often you see someone sitting on a red leather chair in the middle of the road. We thought it was quite funny. It was just him sitting in the middle of the road and we were beeping at him. He was just sitting there on the chair in the middle of the road with his eyes closed taking no notice of anybody. He never smiled, never moved, he just sat there. I’ve never seen anything like that before. He was just sitting there chilled out. We beeped our horn and he never opened his eyes, never looked around, nothing. The cars were having to drive around him. If somebody had come along in a big lorry he might have been in danger. A lorry could have hit him. But he was just in the middle of the road. He was sitting there for ages. We were stuck at the traffic lights and he was still sitting there. I just started laughing. I thought it was hilarious. I was like, ‘Talk about chilling on a Sunday afternoon!’ ”
That wasn’t even her full statement. When Magee returned to the intersection later that night, the red chair was on the sidewalk and the mysterious sitter was gone.
In 1912 a Paris orphanage held a raffle in which the prizes were babies.