We’ve all been there. You slog your way through your back-breaking 9-5 shift, finally reach the end of your working day, go to make your way home and — WHAM — you find one of the 10 biblical plagues of Egypt is unfolding in front of your workplace.
Well, OK, maybe we haven’t all been there, unless you happened to be an extra on The Mummy. But this is exactly what happened to TikTok user kaelagranados, and she has the skin-crawlingly terrifying evidence to prove it. The TikToker shared a short video to the platform that could genuinely be a clip from some new found-footage horror film we didn’t know was coming out, if we didn’t know better.
Kaela’s video showcases the nightmarish sight of the entrance to her work building being entirely covered in a swarm of cicadas. At first glance, it might appear like a mere coating of dead leaves — a little unseasonable, maybe, but nothing terrifying — but as she zooms in we realize that the ground, the windows, and the walls are adorned by enough insects to make Moses run for the dunes.
This insectoid remake of The Birds is giving the entirety of TikTok the heebie-jeebies, with many noting how Kaela is clearly much braver than them. “I would absolutely NOT be going to work,” one stated. Others are so grateful they don’t live anywhere near her — “*Kisses my cicada free California ground*,” one quipped — nor will they ever visit either: “Where is this, because I will never go there.”
So, wait, what’s going on here? Is there a perfectly reasonable explanation that’s definitely not going to keep you up at night? Unfortunately not. I just have one compound word for you: Cicadapocalypse. In case you’re lucky enough to have missed the bizarre ecological event so far, various regions of the United States are being infested with far higher numbers of cicadas than usual this summer due to a bizarre concurrence: two different broods of the creatures are spawning in the same year for the first time in over 200 years.
It’s just a weird fluke of nature, apparently. At least, that’s what they want you to believe. Those of us in the know realize what’s really happening: somewhere, somebody’s just read from the Book of the Dead in Hamunaptra. Where are Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz when you need them?