Case File 16 — November 13, 1942 

STRANGE CLAIMS SHADOW NEW HOUSING TRACT
Burbank Tales Times — November 13, 1942 

WHAT CAUGHT OUR ATTENTION

By 1942, Burbank has done exactly what earlier newspapers warned might be dangerous.

It has built homes across former burial land.

And the reports are now coming from inside those homes.

Furniture moves without explanation.

Radios activate without power.

Objects fall from shelves.

Residents hear and see things they cannot explain.

Students at Burbank High describe violent nightmares. Several subsequently die under circumstances police insist are unrelated.

Two lived on Elm Street.

One homeowner asks perhaps the most important question in the entire collection:

“They told us the graveyard was moved. But were the bodies taken to the Verdugo Hills, or only the markers?”

Until now, we've assumed the cemetery disappeared because the land was redeveloped.

What if it didn't?

What if officials moved the headstones and left at least some of the bodies behind?

That would explain something else.

The asylum patients were dressed in white work shirts and blue denim trousers.

Later reports suggested some patients may have been buried outside the institution.

If their graves were never properly relocated, some may still be beneath the neighborhoods built afterward.

The smaller story describes underground chambers containing chained bodies and elaborate traps.

Different horror.

Same recurring direction:

beneath the ground.

Officer Thompson dismisses the growing reports as “sensational nonsense.”

But after everything in these newspapers, his explanation—that new homes simply make noise—seems increasingly inadequate.

Perhaps these aren't new houses making noise.

Perhaps they are old graves being disturbed.

FROM THE JOURNAL