#0190623

I still remember what she looks like. 

I have her eyes. A bright green, sort of like a grassy hill in the summertime. She had wavy brown hair that reached her shoulder that, as a kid, I would sometimes tug on to get her attention when she held me. She had freckles too, like I do, and they really only came out in the sun. I think I used to count them if I was ever, you know, worried or if I needed my center of gravity. 

She’s dead, though, and my center of gravity has since been skewed. It’s a lot knowing someone you love is dead. You continue to live after that while the person you love is still in the ground, neatly laid in a coffin with no real sense of what’s happening around them. All they know is the silence and all you know is the grief that is too loud. 

My mom was a kind lady. She went to my school bake sales a lot and made brownies, which were the best. Everyone loved my mom. She raised money for charities and taught my brother and I how to ride our bikes, as our dad wasn’t in the picture much. I never really knew my dad, save for the dusty photo frames that sat nearly on the mantle and the shadows that crept over his face. I only knew his name, Trenton Seymour, and how much of a ghost he was to my mother.

She really loved him.

I just wish I had told her to move on sooner. 

We had recently moved into a small house, tucked between two similar houses in a friendly neighborhood. I would walk to school and eventually, I would find myself at an arcade that seemed to hardly get customers. The old man, I called him J.J., was nice enough and I became a sort of regular for him, going there after school and playing until it was closing time. 

It became routine. My brother had his own routine, but I hardly paid close attention to his habits as I found myself becoming more and more engrossed in video games. They would be my escape from the soon to be crumbling world around me, and I wished I had realized the problems sooner instead of gluing my face to the dimming television screen as I play Pac-man.

The problems started when my father started talking to me. He really never spoke to me unless the moments where he’d ask me what game I was playing or if I was up late, but those were rare. He was a soft spoken man, too, never the one to really raise his voice or be condescending, as he never had a reason to be. 

Though, my dad changed. Not, like, a drastic change or anything, it was gradual. He started speaking more to me and my brother, laughing loudly and trying to get into our hobbies. I like to think he was trying to make up for lost time with us and I gladly took the change as a sign of hope that maybe, just maybe, things could go right for us all. My dad started warming up to my mom too, buying her roses and chocolates, surprising her with dinners he made. 

He was never the one to make dinners. 

My mom fell blindly for the change, too, and we continued to live like so. Obviously, he could’ve been wanting to start again or noticed how broken the relationship was, but it wasn’t that. It never was. 

One day, when video games could’ve pushed the boredom I had to the side, I stumbled across something in their room. It was a Raggedy Ann doll. It sat on their dresser, staring at my parent’s bed. As I stepped into the room, I felt as though it knew I was there, watching it. The button eyes were black and we held eye contact for a moment, and then suddenly there was static. It started off faint until it started almost hurting me and I had to leave the room before it got worse. I never went back in there after that.

The doll continued to haunt my dreams, though. Every time I would close my eyes, the doll would be there, grinning a stitched smile and in their hand, almost always, was a knife. It was dripping with blood, too. I could hear the blood in my dreams, dripping off of the blade and onto the ground. I told my mom about the nightmares and the Raggedy Ann doll and as a result, she told my dad to get rid of it. I later learned I wasn’t the only one having murderous nightmares. My mom was having them too, but they were scenes of her kids dying and she wasn’t able to stop the blood that oozed out of our still bodies. 

My dad promised to get rid of it after hearing our stories. My brother was the only one who hadn’t mentioned the nightmares, though he wasn’t at the house most of the time. 

And that was that. 

At least, that’s what my childhood innocence liked to believe. 

Childhood innocence can only cover up so much. It becomes the safety net you fall back on when you’ve got nothing else to hold onto. It’s the end of the tunnel that hurts the most, I think. You travel through the darkness and when you look back, it’s endless. It’s always dark and you can’t escape the dark, it’s always there, waiting. I’ve learned to befriend the darkness because it’s all I ever needed when no one else was there. The family was growing together but the threads that held us together were splinting. 

It was the nighttime when I realized my dad lied. I wish I had stayed in my bed that night, tucked under the covers and sleeping another nightmare. I didn’t, though, I was always so curious and when I heard my mom’s voice come out in a sob, I had to go investigate. Her cries were loud and almost pleading, and I wish my brother was there to deal with it. He was staying at a friend’s house. He never came to my aid. 

I saw my mother’s body on the carpet. The blood pools around her, just like my nightmares, and it spreads wide. Above her is my father, gripping a bloodied knife. He doesn’t see me. He is smiling, almost thrilled with his kill. From my place on the staircase, I could see the stab wounds and the glistening blood that shines from the lamps nearby. I wanted to scream. 

I think I might’ve. 

The next thing I knew I was outside, watching the rain fall around me and my back was against the ground. Death is a funny concept. In video games, you die and come back to your spawn point. And for a brief moment, I expected to do the same. But I didn’t. I could still taste and feel and see the rain as it fell, but I knew I was dead. Dead in an alleyway, left to be forgotten. My father was gone, ran off with the Raggedy Ann doll and I still remember what he said. Even if in my dying moments, his voice still rang in my head:

“Enjoy your life for it’ll be your last.” 

Of course, he was lying. And I’m here today, telling you the story of how my father killed my mother. I know you guys deal with supernatural activities, but I like to believe, even today, that the doll possessed him to kill my mother. It changed him. 

It created a monster instead of a father. 

FOLLOW-UP NOTES

- It always comes back to dolls, somehow. I don’t like how common they seem to be in these things. They always seem to be accompanied by a startling amount of violence, as well, which is a fun and incredibly unpleasant surprise.

- I notice some similarities between this case and file #0191112. The doll juxtaposed with the violence, makes me think there’s a bigger connection here.