It was the kind of scene that makes you check the calendar — and wonder if Halloween came early.
As dusk fell over Salem, Oregon, thousands of Vaux’s swifts suddenly began spiraling above a church steeple, twisting into a giant, churning black cloud before plunging down the building’s chimney.
“I recognize the end of the days when I see it,” one Reddit user declared.
Another viewer apparently had seen enough horror movies to know exactly what came next: “I’ve watched enough movies to know the protagonists have to get in there immediately or we’re all doomed.”
Cue the ominous music.
The Sunday spectacle at Salem First United Methodist Church looked downright supernatural — but there was no demonic force lurking inside the chimney.
Just birds.
Around 4,000 of the tiny winged creatures gathered above the church before disappearing into the brick chimney for the night.
Local David P Craig captured the bizarre scene, describing the swirling flock as a “swift’nado.”
“A swift’nado is spinning at Salem First United Methodist Church, and scores of neighbors, families, and students have gathered shoulder to shoulder at dusk, phones down, necks craned, watching 4,000+ Vaux’s Swifts pour into a brick chimney like smoke running in reverse,” he wrote on Instagram.
Craig, a professor at Willamette University in Oregon, said his students were counting the birds and explaining to visitors why the chimney is so important.
The birds are barely five inches long and weigh just over half an ounce.
Yet somehow, thousands of them can transform the evening sky into something resembling a feathered tornado.
And that creepy chimney is basically their hotel.
Vaux’s swifts sleep by clinging vertically to rough, unlined brick-and-mortar walls with their sharp toes.
The birds evolved to roost in enormous hollow old-growth trees, but as those trees disappeared, old chimneys became crucial substitutes.
The eerie gatherings are a regular Oregon spectacle during fall migration, with the birds passing through from late August to early October and September serving as the peak month.
Still, the sight is apparently unsettling enough to send imaginations into overdrive. Portland has seen its own version of the nightmare.
For more than 40 years, thousands of swifts descended on Chapman Elementary School every September, sometimes with as many as 15,000 birds crammed inside the chimney.
Then, in 2024, they abruptly abandoned the famous roost.
Experts say they haven’t disappeared — they appear to have scattered among other chimneys around the Portland metropolitan area, including Oregon City.
So no, Salem wasn’t witnessing the apocalypse.
But with 4,000 birds swirling over a church before vanishing into a chimney at sunset?
It certainly looked the part.
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