Case File 13 — October 31, 1928

NEW HOUSING TRACT PLAGUED BY BIRDS & SPIDERS
Burbank Tales Times — October 31, 1928

WHAT CAUGHT OUR ATTENTION

The prediction from the previous newspaper has now become reality.

The cornfields are disappearing.

Homes are being built on the land.

And almost immediately, familiar signs return.

Large flocks of black birds gather around the new housing tract. Workers describe them circling low and attacking without apparent cause. One carpenter is found collapsed after witnesses report birds striking around him.

Then come the spiders.

Residents report enormous numbers of harvest spiders appearing overnight on porches and around houses.

One of the first homeowners is later found unresponsive inside her residence.

Before her death, she reportedly told neighbors:

“They're coming through the walls.”

That statement deserves attention.

For years, the unusual reports involved things emerging from or reacting to the ground.

Now houses cover that ground.

If something remained beneath these fields, walls and foundations would not necessarily keep it outside.

The smaller story describes murders at a local hillside motel—the same general location associated with disturbing reports years earlier when asylum patients escaped.

Once again, a place from an earlier newspaper has returned.

The asylum is gone.

The cornfields are disappearing.

But the things associated with them are not.

Perhaps the collector understood something we are only now beginning to see:

Changing what stands on the land does nothing to change what may remain beneath it.

FROM THE JOURNAL