This is how a horror movie might begin: In some parking lots along Route 211 in the Town of Wallkill, crows keep dying in large numbers, close to one another.

This past weekend, employees of stores in the Wallkill Town Center, off Dunning Road, noticed hundreds of dead birds mainly behind the plaza. Last month, neighbors noticed a similar scene in the same area.

Several hundred crows have been found dead in large groups and neighbors have recently begun sharing their own photos of dead crows in their yards on social media.

"There were about a hundred dead birds here," Greg DiNunzio recalled.

He had just left the gym out front on Tuesday, noticed the scene behind the plaza, and wondered why the area was not cordoned off. He has safety concerns.

"A ten-year-old kid or a group of kids on their bikes could come by and pick it up," DiNunzio said.

A landscaper on scene on Wednesday told Spectrum News he picked up more than 200 dead crows behind the plaza. That was not close to all of them.

About 200 feet from where the dead crows were concentrated, there were at least seven dead crows along the wall of the facility's garbage area and two more stuck in the fence above the wall. There were at least another 40 dead crows in the trees surrounding the plaza.

A spokesperson with the Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) told Spectrum News the agency had tested the dead crows for several diseases including West Nile and Avian Flu (Bird Flu). All of those test results were negative.

"The DEC has made meaningful progress toward ruling out many of the potential significant causes of the crow mortality at this location," the spokesperson wrote in an email.

The DEC is currently consulting experts and examining tissue samples from the crows. The spokesperson hinted the investigation into this series of crow deaths might end similarly to other investigations into crow deaths: with no clear explanation.

"It is not uncommon in the field of wildlife pathology for the diagnosis to be unknown despite significant effort and testing," the spokesperson wrote. "[The] DEC collected a number of dead crows from communal roosts in Middletown and Poughkeepsie in March 2019, but the cause of death was not definitively determined for those birds."