Case File 12 — May 13, 1927

CORN FIELDS TO BE CLEARED FOR HOUSING
Burbank Tales Times — May 13, 1927

WHAT CAUGHT OUR ATTENTION

Several years have passed since the asylum burned.

The landscape is changing.

The cornfields west of the former institution are scheduled to be cleared for housing.

That should be an ordinary story about Burbank's growth.

Instead, almost every familiar warning sign returns.

Surveyors discover an isolated settlement absent from county maps.

The homes appear recently occupied.

Meals remain inside.

But the adults are gone.

Only children remain.

The children reportedly speak together and refer cryptically to someone walking behind the rows.

Closer to the lake, workers find unusual depressions in the ground.

Harvest spiders blanket sections of the fields.

Large flocks of crows gather nearby and behave increasingly aggressively.

The smaller story is equally unsettling: children claim buried pets have returned from shallow graves behaving violently and unnaturally.

Different stories.

Different locations.

But the same underlying action keeps appearing:

the ground is disturbed. Something follows.

And now Burbank intends to build homes here.

That brings us back to the farmer quoted in the very first surviving newspaper:

“Whatever they are conjuring, the land has never been quite right.”

At the time, it sounded like local superstition.

Seventeen years later, it reads differently.

We also have another gap in the archive. We don't know everything that happened between the asylum fire and this page, and nothing tells us that the recovered newspapers represent every page the original collector once possessed.

There may have been other reports.

There may still be fragments somewhere.

What we do know is that the land is about to be covered by houses.

And if the pattern we've been following is real, that may be the worst thing Burbank could do.

FROM THE JOURNAL