Do mattresses have a herding instinct?

You aren't supposed to do it. It's littering. It's illegal. But most people don't know how to get rid of old mattresses, so they go out in the middle of the night, find an alley, and dump them.

But that's not the end of it. When you have one mattress... there will be more very soon.

The empty lot beside our home now has 3 mattresses dumped in it.

We saw the same thing happen in the alley behind our old appartment building.

The empty lot beside our home contained dilapidated old buildings for about a year until we made enough noise to have the city force the owner to tear the buildings down. The chances of the owner of the empty lot doing anything about the mattresses are slim to none.

So now we have a look each morning to see if there are more mattresses. It's like they have a herding instinct. Stray mattresses will find each other.

Update March 15: How much do soaking wet mattresses weigh?

They are gone! Hooray! There was a very loud truck outside yesterday. It was out there for quite a while making quite the noise. When it was gone.... so were the mattresses!

It's been raining here for... um... months. Yep, not exaggerating... too much. So the mattresses that were sitting outside for days had to have been soaking wet. That would be heavy. No wonder the truck was making so much noise.

So the rubble from the dilapidated buildings has been removed, the herd of mattresses has left the watering hole and moved on to greener pastures... if an archaeologist dug up the site in a hundred years, would they find the remains of bed bugs and deduce that the shops were actually a human dwelling?

This vacant lot is getting interesting. I wonder what's going to be out there next.