It was arguably one of the greatest tragedies ever in the history of
Westchester Township, it resulted in a massive loss of life—and un-life—and
came close to putting the kibosh on the ultimate incorporation of the Town
of Burns Harbor nearly 20 years later.
It was—according to the Wikipedia article on Burns Harbor, last updated on
April 1—the “Great Zombie Invasion of 1949,” when “reanimated corpses began
to invade the southern tip of Lake Michigan,” “walked, consumed, and turned
the majority of the residents to their own,” and in the process simply
“decimated the socioeconomical infrastructure of the region.”
Or as the Wikipedia article also calls it, “The Zombie Coverup.”
Coverup indeed. An exhaustive search of the Chesterton Tribune
archives has failed to yield even a single story about the disaster.
Wikipedia—for those unfamiliar with the notoriously reliable on-line
encyclopedia—is “web-based” and “openly editable” and features hundreds of
thousands of articles “written collaboratively by largely anonymous Internet
users who write without pay,” the website states. It adds, “Every
contribution may be reviewed or changed. The expertise or qualifications of
the user is usually not considered.”
Wikipedia does concede that articles may “contain significant
misinformation, unencyclopedic content, or vandalism.”
But given the sheer level of detail in the Burns Harbor article, a hoax or
prank in this particular case is not immediately apparent.
The article, for instance, reports that the Citizens of Westchester for
Zombie Annihilation and Reform (COWZAR) devised a strategy, dubbed “Plan Z,”
in which “remaining survivors were evacuated, examined thoroughly for signs
of infection, and in the event that signs were found, cremated (sometimes
while still alive), leaving only the zombies.” Then the “area was blanketed
with bombs.”
“In 1953 the area was re-opened for habitation” and “Within a year the area
that would become Burns Harbor”—incorporated as a town in 1967—“was
beginning to resemble what it is today.”
Even so, “Evidence of the outbreak are still apparent in street signs for
‘Restricted Areas’ as well as heavily secured entrances to various hot spots
disguised as steel mill gates,” the article notes. And “Some believe that
there are in fact several ‘specimens’ still roaming.”
Burns Harbor Town Marshall Jerry Price acknowledged that the town is not
altogether zombie-free. “My officers see a lot of zombies but generally in
the early morning hours on Saturdays and Sundays after the bars close,” he
told the Tribune today. “A lot of them have even learned to operate
vehicles. The zombies, like the Bethlehem Steel bankruptcy, tried to kill
the town but they failed.”
“The Zombie Coverup,” while it does expose a heretofore suppressed chapter
in Westchester Township’s history, is in need of further editing. For one
thing, its anonymous author claims that Bethlehem Steel Corporation assisted
with the implementation of Plan Z, when in fact Bethlehem did not even
begin to build its mill until 1962, 13 years after the Great
Zombie Invasion and nine years after Plan Z had succeeded in largely
stemming the un-dead tide.
For another thing, the author states that “Little is known how the zombies
came to be un-alive,” whereas modern science has well established that the
basic symptomotology of zombification—reanimation and cannabalism—is caused
by a spongiform encephalopathy not unlike the one responsible for
Jakob-Creutzfeldt disease.
The author, evidently expecting the cloak of official silence to fall once
again and soon, concludes the article by urging readers to “Spread the word,
as Wikipedia won’t let this stay up long.”