Rules Question: Maturing Vampire and he word "Clear"

By bdshow, in Fury of Dracula

When a vampire matures it tells you to clear the locations on 4-5 I believe. The question is do the cleared encounter cards go back into the encounter hand of Dracula or are they discarded. Hope this makes sense. I don't have the game in front of me right now.

When a location is cleared, encounter cards are discarded according to the Rules Reference entry on "Hideouts" (the last bullet point under the entry).