Case File 03 — September 13, 1912

STRANGE DEATHS BAFFLE AUTHORITIES
Burbank Tales Times — September 13, 1912 

WHAT CAUGHT OUR ATTENTION

The third preserved newspaper is considerably darker.

Accounts of unexplained deaths include descriptions of victims suffering unusual blood loss and wounds around the neck. Other reports mention bats and sightings of a strange winged figure.

Those details sound familiar to a modern reader, but the newspaper does not present them as a single supernatural explanation. They are separate reports from frightened residents attempting to describe what they believed they had seen.

Elsewhere on the page, another disturbing story describes events inside a residence where the occupants appear to have descended into increasingly irrational and violent behavior.

It would be easy to dismiss these as sensational newspaper stories.

Except for the date.

Once again, this newspaper was published on the 13th.

That gives us three preserved newspapers and three occurrences of the same number within a remarkably short period.

More importantly, someone kept all three.

We still don't know who preserved these newspapers, when they began collecting them, or whether they understood the stories any differently than we do.

Perhaps the dates meant nothing.

Perhaps the stranger reports meant nothing.

But by the third surviving page, coincidence is becoming a less satisfying explanation.

FROM THE JOURNAL