rissy stories

Hey guys! I’m sorry if you read my blogs regularly – I know I haven’t posted in awhile because I’ve been trying really hard to get this story finished. It’s 4 parts instead of 2 or 3 (sorry for those who don’t like longer short stories), and I had to come up with the actual ending of the story before posting the last 3 parts, just in case I needed to change anything earlier on. (You can clearly tell that I’m new to writing about mystery and horror).

This second part, again, isn’t very scary (Parts 3 and 4 will be scarier… or will be an attempt at trying to be scary, at least…), but that’s because the first two parts are meant to solidify the character development, mood setting, and background information. The last two parts contain more action.

Disclaimer: this is all fiction – it all came from my brain. It’s not all based off of a true story, or an actual house, or anything like that.

But one thing I will ask of you is to make sure you pay attention to the details!

Enjoy!

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It was 7:45 pm when Fletcher and Adelaide picked us up. Their black car smelt like moldy cheese and beer, and I’d never smelt anything worse in my life. But Finn didn’t seem to mind the smell one bit – she literally plopped into the nacho cheese-smelling backseat, took her sneakers off, sat on her feet, and stared out the window. She waved at a few of her school friends who were still out trick-or-treating as we passed by them, and all three Disney princesses gave an awkward wave back. Then Belle leaned into Sleeping Beauty and began to whisper something while Snow White took an apple out of her candy bag and looked at it with disgust.

For the first two minutes of the ride, I had to manually roll down the back seat window and stick my head outside of this piece-of-s*** car that Fletcher named: “Noah The Ford Fiesta.”

“Jesus, dude, it’s not THAT bad,” Adelaide said about the smell from the passenger seat while lighting and smoking a joint. And as soon as that skunk-like smell mixed in with the rest of the puke-worthy stench, I wanted to die. Finn was still surprisingly silent, ignoring what was happening around her, and just staring out the window while picking at dead skin around her fingernails.

“I wonder where that skunk is,” she suddenly said to herself and then started bouncing her butt on her feet, yelling: “PINS AND NEEDLES, PINS AND NEEDLES, PINS AND-“ I slapped my left hand across her mouth to make her stop chanting what she always starts to chant whenever she sits on her feet for too long. I had to pinch her left arm with my other hand to make her stop completely. And after she fully silenced herself, I returned my attention to Adelaide.

My eyebrows furrowed as I realized that she had aged quite a bit since the last time I saw her two years ago. Her nose had become pointer, her hair had become brittle and spidery – its color had faded to orange. It was pulled up into a messy bun and her wrinkly face was caked with makeup, which gave her the appearance of a 50 year old instead of a woman in her early 30’s.

Then I turned to look at Fletcher – who I’d never met before. He looked about the same as Adelaide did, except he had a really bad bleach-blonde dye job on his shoulder-length, greasy hair and wickedly horrible teeth: some were crooked, missing, and they were all tinted yellow or black. I took him for the typical surfer/skateboarding narcissist douche-nozzle who would walk up to a girl and go straight from: “Hey, what’s your name?” to: “Wanna have a good time, baby?” Now, some girls may be into that sort of thing (*AHEM* Adelaide), but I saw right through the b*******. He probably pretended like he was still 14 (instead of pushing 35), drank like a fish (as if he still had the tolerance for it), and had sex with cougars (which Adelaide appeared to be).

“No, it’s pretty bad,” I finally replied as the wind pulled strands of blonde hair out of my messy bun and flung them in front of my face. I pulled them behind my ears as I stared back out the window at a much prettier scene. The sky was a pretty pink and purple color, and the sun had fallen behind the majority of the orange and brown trees. The wheels of the car were crunching dead leaves that had blown into the road, and kids were running, screaming, and laughing while trick-or-treating. Houses were covered in Halloween decorations and the night air was brisk and cold. I suddenly found myself smiling, because I used to always love this time of year.

Adelaide glanced back at me and raised her thin, very drawn-in eyebrows.

“So, you didn’t want to dress up or anything?” she asked with a smoking joint between her fingers. I then looked at what she was wearing out of habit – a short, tight black and red dress with a red waist-strap covering her stomach that sported white cross on the front. The hem of the dress barely covered her a**, and the low, v-neck barely covered her slightly sagging and Botox-infused boobs. The dress had very short sleeves, and she was wearing black latex gloves and black fishnet stockings. I also realized that she was wearing a little black and red hat in front of her hair bun that also sported a white cross on the front.

Naughty Nurse. I thought as I shook my head and lifted my Canon t5i camera out of my lap to snap some pictures of the neighborhood we were driving through. I also kept glancing at my child to make sure she wasn’t looking at the rolled-up weed cig that Laide was holding openly for everyone to see.

“We’re going to a haunted house, not a party,” I replied flatly. “And aren’t you cold in that?” Adelaide ignored me, sighed, and turned to Fletcher. She placed a hand on his broad shoulders, her obviously fake acrylic fingernails practically poking through the latex. She used one of them to lightly scratch Fletcher’s neck as he kept his eyes on the road. His skin puckered when she lightly scratched it – almost like she was poking Saran wrap. Speaking of which, there was a box of it sitting in the backseat between Finn and I.

“And why is there Saran wrap back here?” I asked again, curiously. Fletcher glanced at the box and then quickly turned back around.

“Oh, we went to Kroger earlier – Laidey wanted to get a box of it to wrap up some of the cookies we just bought,” he explained. Meanwhile, I was still mesmerized by the color of his skin. The dark gold leather-like consistency reminded me an old briefcase Jax kept in our closet, one he kept his gym clothes in.

I wonder if Fletcher actually felt like leather… or Saran wrap, for that matter.

“Cher used to dress up for Halloween ALL the time when we were in college, and she always had the coolest decorations. The pictures she took of our old rooms were gorgeous – why did you give up being a photographer anyway?” she explained and then turned back to me. I bit my tongue to keep myself from saying: ‘I’ve probably mentioned the fact that I got married and had a kid, I don’t know, maybe a thousand times.’ Finn suddenly gasped and pointed at the window. Saved by the bell.

“There’s a cat out there, mommy, a black kitty! Can we stop and keep him?” she asked energetically, suddenly turning to me and yanking on my fleece jacket sleeve. I glanced out of the window as we zoomed past the tiniest cat I’ve ever seen, you could barely see it, and it was limping on the side of the road. My heart hurt for it and I honestly wanted nothing more than to take the poor thing home and take care of it, but I removed Finn’s hands from my coat and shook my head.

“No, Finn, you have enough animals as it is,” I said.

“I only have two cats, though!” she cried. My eyes widened at this child’s stupidity and I nodded slowly at the little brown-haired psychopath.

“Ya… and you’ve also got four rats, three gerbils, a bunny, and a lizard,” I reminded her. Finn pouted and stared back out the window while I huffed. I then caught Adelaide and Fletcher giving each other sideways glances. I guess they finally understood why I gave up photography. A heavy silence followed, and I checked my iPhone again – still no calls or texts from my lovely husband. What a helping hand he was. He was probably still playing on his phone and ignoring all of his texts and calls.

“Soooo, Miss Bella/Renesmee… do you like, wanna be a vet when you grow up or something?” Adelaide asked after taking a huge inhalation of marijuana. I cringed at the accusation that Finn was dressed like one of the Twilight vampires, and frowned because Laide was never really that great with children, even when she tried to be. She was always too blunt and she treated everyone like they were adults, no matter the age. Even Finn looked uncomfortable actually replying to her. She squirmed in her seat and then she shook her head – more than likely thinking:

‘I’m NOT Renesmee OR Bella. I’m DRACULA, duh.’

“No, I wanna do the jewelry business,” she replied with a nod. She was now staring at a spider that was crawling up the outside of her window, her finger following it on the other side of the glass. I grinned at Adelaide’s confused expression in response.

“Jewelry? Like, making and selling it?” she asked, because obviously my child didn’t portray that of a jeweler. Fletcher looked very bored with the conversation – he gave a big sigh, followed by a wet cough while driving onto the entrance ramp to MA-128 North. He then proceeded to hock up a loogie and spit it out through his window. Instead of it hitting the pavement, it splattered across my back window since we were now driving 70 miles per hour. I scrunched up my nose at the gooey yellow substance then snapped a picture of it to get my mind off of the fact that we were now 15 minutes away from Danvers, where the Old Watson House resided.

I still got the chills as Finn nodded and made full eye contact with Adelaide.

“Dead animal bone jewelry,” Finn said with an innocent smile. I pressed my lips together to keep from laughing as Adelaide sported an: ‘Oh s***, Cher wasn’t kidding about Finn and her animals,’ look on her face. I loved it so much that I picked up my camera and snapped a picture of it with the flash on. Adelaide yelped and blinked several times while I stared at the digital picture – the slack jaw, the bug eyes, the raised Crayola eyebrows, and the very defined forehead lines. Classic.

I wanted to blow it up, frame it, and keep it forever.

“You’re so much like your mother, dude,” Adelaide said.

“No – mommy doesn’t like me,” Finn responded as-a-matter-of-factly, and then started picking at a loose tooth. I felt my stomach drop and my pupils dilate as I heard my six-year-old accuse me of not liking her in front of two strangers. My face turned bright red with embarrassment and I felt the urge to throw her out of the car.

However, I settled for jabbing her in the side with my elbow and mouthing ‘Stop picking at your tooth.’ Finn inched away from me and glued her face back to the window – clearly getting the message that she should stop talking.

Adelaide just laughed maniacally, hitting Fletcher in the arm while she did so. Fletcher laughed too, the two of them clearly very high at this point. I glared at them again in response. I honestly didn’t mind Finn thinking that I disliked her, but I didn’t want my daughter to know who I used to be under any circumstances – that would just encourage her to continue on this weird path she seemed to be taking.

Why couldn’t she have been more like Jax – bland and boring? She already had the idiot part down pat, why not just go big or go home?

At this point, the sun had almost gone down completely and I was beginning to feel extremely nauseous, and not just from this conversation. The nauseous feeling was accompanied by an unusually dry mouth and sweating palms. And for some reason, I knew what Fletcher was about to say before he even said it:

“There it is,” he pointed towards Adelaide’s window, “We’re here.”

We veered to the right, off of the highway, and began to roll on dusty rocks instead of asphalt. The entire car fell dead silent as everyone stared out of the windshield at this house that looked like an enormous black hole from far away. And the closer we got, the more it felt like it had some sort of gravitational pull – like Fletcher wasn’t even driving the car anymore, the house was just yanking us into the darkness. The air was so thick that I could have gashed it with a knife, and my stomach churned with the idea of it filling up my lungs.

“What’s the story on this house, Cher?” Adelaide asked. She knew my buried-deep taste in weird stuff and story-telling a little too well…

xxx

From what I researched on the Internet when I first heard about this house six years ago… it was no surprise that The Old Watson house was now isolated from the rest of society – no one would ever want to live in this area. Even if you’d been living under a rock and had absolutely no popular, historical knowledge of a certain place – most humans can just feel when an area should be left alone in their heart of hearts. In short, they usually experience unexplained paranoia, the phenomenon of feeling like someone was always watching you, the heaviness of the air, etc.

And with this area in particular, most were tipped off by the fact that there was absolutely no breeze of any kind, no matter the time of year. It was almost like it died along with the numerous people who were hanged and burned out of fear, hatred, mental illness, and score settling. It had bad karma written all over it, and this house/past neighborhood never should have even been built on top of the most gruesome parts of Old Salem Village in the first place.

However, despite the obvious creepiness, The Old Watson house was still built in the 1800s, directly on top of where many ‘witches’ died because the population in Massachusetts was growing fast, and this part of Salem Village was still an abandoned space. So, an entire neighborhood was built here along with the Old Watson House, but five families actually lived in it before the Watson family.

And surprise-surprise all of those family stories ended in tragedy. Long story short: they consisted of rare, contagious illnesses that only afflicted/killed the people within the house, weird disappearances, and multiple demonic “possessions” and suicides due to “mental illness.” But those were only considered minor occurrences compared to the Watson family’s story, which was worthy of naming the house after.

It took place back in 1965 – and at this time, the area was actually a neighborhood, but because it’s history was so violent, people constantly felt that there were presences going out of their way to show that it wasn’t a safe place to live in. Some ghosts apparently liked to scratch and write on walls (things like: Blood Will Spill, Leave Now, Don’t make me do it, etc.), show up momentarily in mirrors and dreams, play with doors (specifically knobs), tap on windows, turn on stoves, flicker the lights, call the house phone, switch on water faucets, etc.

Eventually it scared the s*** out of so many people that no one wanted to buy a house in that neighborhood anymore. So, the government gave up and tore it all down in 1966… all except for one house because there were people still living in it – the Watson family, which consisted of a wife, husband, son, and daughter.

They were a very strict, religious family – like weirdly, old fashioned, Puritan religious, so the kids were never allowed to have friends that the parents did not approve of (a.k.a – kids that would “lead their children astray and more than likely wouldn’t go to Heaven”). I likened the situation to a typical Westboro Baptist Church family, where the kids were only allowed to associate with other children within the church. Therefore, the brother and sister were shut-ins, which made them susceptible to bullying at school.

Well, one day, little brown-haired, seven-year-old Katharine got her wish and found a playmate that wasn’t her ten-year-old brother. A twelve-year-old blonde-haired girl dressed in all white clothes appeared to her while walking home from school one day, and they were friends ever since. The girl would appear at random times and didn’t seem to have a home of her own, but Katharine never questioned the situation because this was her very first friend, and she didn’t want to lose her.

And her parents didn’t seem to think anything of this girl. Katharine would sneak around the house with her, and her parents wouldn’t even bat an eye. They would play dolls together and read bedtime stories to each other at night. However, after one week of this, the parents finally caught on to something suspicious when they heard her talking to someone behind a closed bedroom door, so they swung it open and found Katherine playing with the girl in white. When asked whom she was talking to, Katharine felt slightly confused (because the girl in white had been around for awhile and she assumed that her parents had to have seen her at some point), but she pointed next to her anyways and said: “Her name is Sarah Adams, but we’re just playing – please don’t make her go home!”

The parents immediately took Katharine to a mental hospital, and she was institutionalized the next day because she happened to be the only one who could see and hear “Sarah Adams.” And of course the parents didn’t believe in ghosts or pure imagination – there was no such thing as ghosts or NOT serving God 24/7, so the obvious answer was that their daughter was mentally ill.

Now, this assumption made ten-year-old Jonathan very angry because he didn’t believe his sister was ill – he thought that she’d felt so alone that she’d made up an imaginary friend. His parents wouldn’t believe him, or even let him visit her because “she was very ill and should be left alone.” And to make matters worse, at this time, the government had officially decided to take down the entire neighborhood, so Jonathan would really have no other human companion. He begged his parents to let them move somewhere else and start over, but again, they refused.

However… his prayer (more like cry for help) was heard when he woke up at 3:00 AM one night, a week after Katharine had left, because he heard an angelic voice of a woman from the inside of his closet saying loud and clear from behind the door: “Jonathan, you hath a duty to take care of your littlest sister! She needs your help – thou must do away with your parents, ‘tis your only chance!” And at first, he was terrified because he thought there was an intruder in his bedroom. But when he slid out of his creaky bed, turned on his side-table lamp’s light, tip toed to the walk-in clothes closet, and slowly opened the door… there was no one residing in there.

Jonathan then naturally assumed that this was the voice of an angel. He truly believed that he had just been given orders from God Himself. God had answered his prayers and he now had the permission he was looking for to take control of his own life, as well as his sister’s. And he was reassured that he had the responsibility as a big brother to do whatever he could to help his little sister… so who was he to deny God’s will, right? That’s what He wanted, after all.

So, the skinny, black-haired boy quietly crept down into the dark kitchen, where he grabbed two simple kitchen knives from one of the drawers. He slipped them up his pajama sleeve, went back upstairs, turned to the right, and tip toed to the very end of the hallway, where his parents were sleeping in their bedroom. He walked in, and without hesitation, simultaneously stabbed them both six times in multiple places on their torso while they were most vulnerable and defenseless. They woke up for a split second then slept forever almost immediately afterwards.

After the murder trial, Jonathan was thrown into the same mental institution as Katharine as an alternative to going to jail at the age of ten. He was allowed to see her much more often, but obviously he was never allowed to play with her. And unfortunately, their mental states never improved – they only got worse. One minute they would act completely normal, and the very next were seeing apparitions, hearing voices, and acting violent whenever they weren’t allowed to fulfill whatever the imaginary voices were telling them to. They rarely slept or ate – they dropped weight like crazy. Katharine claimed that “they” were going to hurt her if she didn’t do whatever the voices told her to do, and Jonathan claimed that he was God’s chosen one, so he was entitled to do whatever he “needed to do.”

In the end, they were both diagnosed with manic schizophrenia, dissociative personality disorder, and were labeled compulsive liars. Their conditions eventually became so severe that they were deemed too mentally unstable to ever set foot in society again. Unfortunately, the pair left this world in their 20’s the same way they came into it – completely alone, and helpless in a hospital.

Meanwhile, in the outside world: hearing about the murders of two grown adults by a ten-year-old kid in the middle of the night was apparently what officially crossed the line for most people. If suicides and strange illnesses weren’t enough – murder by a ten-year-old in cold blood was. No one ever wanted to set foot in that house again, so it officially became abandoned in 1966. However, no one had the courage to actually tear the whole thing down because rumors and conspiracy theories flew about the causes behind what actually happened to this family.

Did those parents screw up their kids so badly that they were driven mad, were Katharine and Jonathan born mentally ill, or was living in that house their ultimate downfall? Was Katharine actually seeing ghosts or was she isolated and sick for so long that her mind fabricated Sarah Adams? And was Jonathan actually mental and angry enough towards his parents to kill them, or did the voice that talked to him that night possess him and force him into doing it? Was the Devil behind their downfall, or was illness? No one will ever really know the truth, so no one will ever take his/her chances with the house.

xxx

(However, I refrained from telling a lot of this information to my car companions in fear of traumatizing my six-year-old. I told them a very short version of this sick tale: “It was built on top of where they used to burn and hang ‘witches’ in Salem Village. Afterwards, six families lived in the Watson house over its lifetime – the Watson family being the last house. It’s always been very haunted, and conspiracy theorists claim that the house itself caused the downfalls of each family, but it was officially abandoned in 1966 after the Watson boy murdered his parents. Now conspiracy theorists claimed it to be EXTREMELY haunted and dangerous.”)

“See, I told you she was still into this stuff,” Adelaide elbowed a now uneasy-looking Fletcher after I finished spilling all of the information I knew about the house’s history. It wasn’t until we were right in front of the house that we could actually see it, and we had parked with a creeeeeeek right in front of the steps to the front door. The headlights lit up the porch once Fletcher set the brakes, and we all just continued to stare out in front of us in silence, more than likely debating whether or not we actually wanted to take our chances and go inside.

“So, are we ready?” Adelaide suddenly asked while unbuckling her seatbelt and giving me the shock of my life. I slapped a hand over my pounding heart and glanced over at Finn who was still staring out the windshield with unblinking doe eyes, and then I shrugged. However, Fletcher started shaking his head frantically.

“Nah – someone’s gotta keep an eye on the car,” he said, pointing vigorously at the steering wheel. Maybe golden boy wasn’t as dumb or as high as I thought he was… and maybe Adelaide was dumber and higher than I thought she was. She scoffed and adjusted the top of her nurse dress to keep her boobs from falling out.

“C’mon babe, it’ll be fun,” she said. Fletcher blew air out of his large nose and sucked his teeth, or what was left of them. He looked Adelaide in the eyes.

“Babe, if you think I’m setting one foot outside of this car, you are out of your f****** mind,” he said “babe” mockingly, but his inflection throughout the rest of the sentence made me feel like he meant it. Adelaide scoffed, glared at him, and opened her car door.

“You’re such a p**** Fletch,” she spat as she flipped him off and slammed the door shut, which seemed to snap Finn out of whatever trance she was in. While Fletcher cursed Laide out, my daughter turned to me and grabbed my arm tightly.

“Are we actually going inside?” she asked with a smile. It worried me that she sounded more excited than terrified. I told myself it was just her adrenaline talking, and I cleared my throat. I glanced back out the windshield, and before I blinked, I could’ve sworn I saw the darkest figure I’d ever seen standing in the open doorway to the house. It was the outline of a tall, skinny man with a shadowy substance for a body. However, once I did a double take and blinked – it was gone. So, I told myself again that my mind was playing tricks on me. After all… it was Halloween.

“L-looks like it,” I replied, trying to keep the trembling fear out of my tone. As much as I wanted to stay in the car with Fletcher, I certainly didn’t want Adelaide walking into that house by herself. The girl may be stupid, but she was honestly the only friend I had. And I couldn’t just leave Finn out in the car with a stranger… so, why not? It was only our sanities at stake, no big deal, right?