Case File 18 — September 13, 1957

WESTERN HOME ENTOMBED BY SPIDER WEBS
Burbank Tales Times — September 13, 1957

WHAT CAUGHT OUR ATTENTION

This is the final complete newspaper page found with A.'s journal.

And almost everything we've been following leads here.

A recently completed home west of Pass Avenue is covered overnight by enormous sheets of spider silk.

Thousands of unusually large harvest spiders emerge from beneath its foundation.

But the spiders are only part of what workers reportedly found below the neighborhood:

Bones.

Rusted restraints.

Fragments of institutional clothing.

Think about the sequence we've reconstructed.

An asylum was built on land residents already considered strange.

Patients disappeared.

Experiments were rumored.

Some patients were dressed in white shirts and blue denim trousers and sent outside to work.

The asylum burned.

Most patients were never accounted for.

The cemetery was supposedly relocated.

Cornfields covered the land.

Then houses replaced the cornfields.

And now workers are finding bones and institutional remains beneath those houses.

Other familiar signs return immediately before the infestation.

Black birds suddenly abandon the neighborhood.

Dogs refuse to enter the property.

Telephones ring with only breathing on the other end.

Children report silent figures standing among the webs.

And once again, someone has disturbed the ground.

The newspaper records an old warning that disturbing the western fields would awaken something buried beneath them.

We've encountered versions of that warning since the very first surviving page in 1910:

“The land has never been quite right.”

Forty-seven years later, the warning appears to have followed Burbank through an asylum, a cemetery, cornfields and housing developments.

There are no later complete newspapers among the pages recovered with the journal.

That does not mean no others ever existed.

Fragments may have been lost.

Pages may have been removed.

Others may still be somewhere we haven't found.

But this is where A.'s collection stops.

And after reading the final journal entry, we may understand why.

FROM THE JOURNAL