The scene was so eerie it prompted onlookers to check the calendar and wonder whether Halloween had arrived early.
At dusk in Salem, Oregon, thousands of Vaux’s swifts spiraled above a church steeple, forming a huge, roiling black cloud before diving into the building’s chimney.
“I recognize the end of the days when I see it,” one Reddit user joked.
Another viewer, apparently drawing on years of horror films, wrote: “I’ve watched enough movies to know the protagonists have to get in there immediately or we’re all doomed.”
Cue the ominous soundtrack.
The Sunday evening spectacle at Salem First United Methodist Church certainly looked supernatural, but there was no demonic presence hiding inside the chimney.
There were only birds.
An estimated 4,000 of the tiny winged birds gathered over the church before vanishing into its brick chimney for the night.
Local resident David P Craig filmed the unusual display and dubbed the swirling flock 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 swifts while explaining to visitors why the chimney is so important to the birds.
Vaux’s swifts are remarkably small, measuring barely five inches in length and weighing 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.
