5 Towns Who Lived Out Real-Life Horror Movies

5 The War with the Birds

In October 1974, millions of blackbirds showed up in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. There were around 11 million birds in this flock, and they dispersed elsewhere during the day, but every night, they descended upon the town. Farmers didn’t like the birds’ arrival, of course, because they tore their way through fields of crops and fell so hard on troughs of animal feed that they sent the livestock fleeing. Everyone else feared the birds as well because they blanketed the entire town in their droppings.

Parents locked their kids indoors. The droppings spread diseases, like gastroenteritis and histoplasmosis. “This is a pestilence and a scourge,” announced the mayor. For reference, here’s a video of a flock of five million birds, which takes two minutes to see them all — except, no, it’s just a video of a small part of the flock, so you’ll just have to use your imagination to multiply it many times over.

People fired at the birds with shotguns, but that didn’t do much good. You can shoot a bird, but you could shoot a bird every few seconds all day for years without making much progress in thinning out a group this large. So, in came the U.S. Army with a solution: They would attack the birds from the air with a detergent called Tergitol S-9. This would dissolve oil on the birds’ feathers, messing with their thermoregulation so any slight chill in the weather could freeze them. Unlike conventional chemical weapons, these wouldn’t poison anyone and would degrade naturally afterward. 

Bird advocates stepped in and blocked the plan. Killing the birds was cruel, they said. Other bird experts, such as the Audubon Society, disagreed, saying that we are indeed allowed to exterminate pests, but the activists held the plan up till the weather warmed. At this point, the plan may no longer have worked, but also, the warmth meant the birds just left on their own, to terrorize greener pastures. Either they were responding to the change in weather, or they had a spy on the inside who tipped them off. 

4 Rocks from the Sky

These last couple weeks, we’ve been excitingly receiving news about a possible asteroid smashing the Earth in the year 2032. Most recently, NASA revised estimates of this threat hitting from “rather unlikely” to “extremely unlikely” — which is a relief, because we had dinner plans that night. This leaves us to debate other deadly celestial events, such as the phenomenon known as a meteor air burst.

A meteor air burst is when a meteoroid (an object much smaller than an asteroid) enters the atmosphere and explodes. One of these hit Siberia in 1908 and destroyed 80 million trees — but it killed only three people, and possibly not even that. Earlier in history was another event that we think was a meteor air burst, and sources at the time say this one killed thousands of people. 

In 1490, rocks appeared over the Chinese city of Qingyang, leaving terrified reporters at the time to write down that “stones fell like rain.” The smaller stones weighed a couple pounds, while the larger ones weighed twice that. They were the size of goose eggs (which will be a useful comparison for all you keepers of geese), and everyone fled the town afterward. Everyone who avoided being hit fled, anyway. Over 10,000 people were struck and died. 

Those casualty figures leaves modern historians saying, “That sounds highly unlikely and might have been made up.” But if a meteor air burst did hit somewhere highly populated, it would kill that many people or more, so what do you have to say about that, skeptical historians? 

3 1,500 Tons of Mice

Below is a photo of some men in Australia with a bunch of mice they killed. As with the blackbirds, we are unable to show the full number of pests we’d like to describe and can only show you a fraction of them and ask your mind to multiply them endlessly. Because during the 1917 mouse invasion, the town of Lascelles killed three tons of mice in one single night — and even this was just a small part of the total population of that plague. 

All your conventional tools for dealing with mice, from poison to traps, fail when faced with swarms in these numbers. Instead, you deal with the mice eating all the food and crawling into people’s beds through the drum method. You sink a 40-gallon drum into the ground of some spot that the mice are sure to cross. You let the mice fall down, where they cannot escape. That might be a ton of mice captured. Then, you do it again.

By the plague’s end, Lascelles had had to kill over a megaton of mice, a population that numbered an estimated 100 million. But here’s why we focused on Lascelles, rather than anywhere else that suffered their own mouse issue. Lascelles had a human population at the time of just 94. That’s a million mice per person. Fortunately, mice are terrible at organizing and know only the simplest of military tactics. 

2 The Hammer of Cold

If we’re talking about plagues sweeping in to ruin agriculture, we should surely mention the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. But while you may have heard about the dust and the wind, did you know how quickly a dust storm would reduce the temperature in a town? On April 14, 1945, Didge City in Kansas started out with a temperature in the 80s. Then the dust storm showed up and dropped the temperature 30 degrees. They called it the black blizzard. 

The other name for this day was “Black Sunday.” During the previous days, dust limited visibility to a couple hundred feet, and it covered the streets in a layer an inch thick. That was just standard for the time. Then came the Sunday storm, which brought total darkness. 

The arriving cloud measured 500 feet high. It left three people dead from dust suffocation and killed 17 other people through a condition known as dust pneumonia. Still, it did also kill a bunch of birds, so it wasn’t all bad. 

1 The Town That Got Swallowed

Here’s another tale of dust blowing in, and this one has an unexpected cause.

First, the town of Singapore, Michigan, suffered from some fires that burned buildings down. But people can rebuild after fires. For example, Chicago had a Great Fire in 1871, and that didn’t spell the end of Chicago. However, the Great Chicago Fire — and the rebuilding that followed — did spell the end of Singapore.

Rebuilding required lumber, and that lumber came from the trees of Michigan. Other massive fires elsewhere that same year meant even more demand for lumber, and even more of Singapore’s trees went down. Up till then, the trees had served a purpose, holding the ground in place and holding the wind back. With the trees gone, dunes shifted. Sand covered the town. The formally inhabited Singapore soon looked like this: 

Everyone left. If you go there today, you’ll find a historical marker but no residents. There’s no defeating sand. It’s coarse and rough and irritating, and it gets everywhere.

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