Terrifyingly Cheerful Ghost Revealed To Be Free iPad App Notification

The first time you hear a very clear Chinese woman’s voice say “Sou Sou!” in your living room while you are supposedly alone, it is natural to brush it off. There are so many things making noises all the time! The second time, weeks later, when you’re sitting alone by the fireplace reading at midnight, is terrifying. At this point, it is natural to wonder if this is how Moses or Allah or Jesus or Neale Donald Walsch or Oral Roberts or Ted Nugent or Charles Manson felt, when they first heard voices telling them what to do. But what did “Sou Sou!” even mean? It seemed less like a command to, say, begin training as a sous chef than the random gibberish of an alien monstrosity.

It took a half-hour of searching every conceivable variation of “Sou Sou!” plus “iPad talking to me” and “Help! My iPad is possessed” until I finally found the answer and a sense of palpable relief.

Another human out there had also been tortured by the mysterious voice, and posted this on iPadForums.net last summer:

Weird sound

My ipad gives me a weird sound literally like human voice “sou-sou” without any notification or banner appear…
Approx at the same time for few days…

Please help if someone knows what is that and to turn that off !

The first reply was not comforting: “That would scare me at night. Better have it checked at the Apple store before it becomes worse.”

Ha ha, yes, because now there are exorcists working the Genius Bar.

The answer did arrive, just a day after the first terrified question. The “Sou Sou!” or “sou-sou” sound is a notification from a horrible free game your kids downloaded. In this case, the game is called The Sims FreePlay.

You must go to Notifications in your iPad’s Settings and manually turn off sounds and badges. If you did this when your evil children first got this App, because of course you turn off all Notifications whenever you put something on your tablet device, do it again. New versions apparently go back to the default of having a terrifyingly chipper Asian woman’s voice cry “Sou Sou!” in the middle of the night when nobody is anywhere around the iPad.

Anecdotal evidence suggests this is one of America’s major problems right now:

@kenlayne Jeesusgawd and here I thought our house was the only one possessed by the SOU SOUs.

— Debbie Cortez Lopez (@valleydoll) March 4, 2013

Now that there’s no pope, we’re going to have to take care of most of this stuff on our own now.