 While in a motel, Sam and Dean receive a call from their father, asking them to give up trying to find him and to take note of the names of three young couples that had disappeared in Indiana along the last three years, always on the second week of April. Sam decides to go after his father in California and leaves Dean, who arrives in the small town of Burkitsville for investigation of the missing couples. Sam meets the drifter Meg, who is also hitchhiking to California on the road, and stays with her waiting for a bus in the bus station. Dean discloses that a pagan god is demanding sacrifices in a fertility ritual in the annual cycle of killings with the support of the locals and a creepy scarecrow. When Dean and a local girl are offered to the scarecrow, Sam returns to help them.