rissy stories

*Trigger Warning* this story is explicit because it contains violence, gore, death, and cursing. Do not read if you’re triggered by any of these topics.

Hey guys, so I know it’s been awhile, but it’s been a long semester. Now that it’s finally over, here is the last part of “Strange Things” if any of you are interested!

Enjoy!

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My blood flowed ice cold after reading that sentence – then I felt someone breathing warmly down the back of my neck, hot lips pressed up against my right ear, and I heard a chuckle as someone said:

“Ah honey, you’re such a sweet, little lunatic if you think you’re gonna get to leave so soon,” followed another horrific, terrifying shriek from downstairs. The same one I’d heard before. I gasped and turned around… but Jax was gone. I searched the room frantically for him – dumping toy boxes, looking under the bed and under the sheets, peering into the walk-in closet – but he was nowhere to be found. He had literally disappeared into thin air. I shook my head like I couldn’t believe it, and then looked back to the wall. The sentence I had just read disappeared as well.

I yelled aloud and yanked on my hair with frustration when I heard even more commotion from downstairs. The car horn honked several times outside, furniture was scraping against wood on the first floor, and the pounding on the walls returned. I could also hear my child’s singing/chanting growing louder and louder, until I felt like it was right outside Katharine’s bedroom:

“Pins and needles on my feet – it feels good and very neat.

There are papers everywhere – Goody Adams likes my hair.

Mommy’s having an attack – Now she’s lying on her back.

I want to find some bones today – Goody Adams likes to play…”

After the word “play” – the chanting abruptly ended and I stared outside the bedroom door… but no one was standing there. Not Finn. Not Adelaide. Not Jax. No one. I could officially no longer decipher what was real or not.

My head was still in a fog, so I was now running off of pure instinct and terror. I ran out of Katharine’s room and back into the hallway, then stopped dead in my tracks again because the first thing I saw were two grown adults (one man, one woman) at the very end of the hallway, each in nightgowns completely doused in blood. I could hear it dripping onto the wooden floor and carpet as they glared at me with golden glowing eyes. No f****** way was I dying like this tonight.

I screamed at the top of my lungs while sprinting down, and then out, of the hallway, slipping on the rug a couple of times as I did so. I could hear bare, wet footsteps behind me – following me. I stepped into my vomit pile without a second thought and ran down the stairs, avoiding the hole I’d made with my foot earlier. Behind me, I could hear moaning and the gargling of liquid – most likely blood. But as soon as I made it to the first floor, the footsteps and noises behind me ceased. I turned around for a brief second and no one was there. I didn’t even care at this point, all I knew was that I needed to grab my daughter and get the f*** out of there.

“FINN?!” I cried, trying to amplify my voice above whoever was already shrieking. I’d assumed that I was the only one who could hear it… but that’s when I saw Adelaide emerging from the darkness of the living room I’d left them in, running towards me at full speed. She had tears rolling down her cheeks, and she was shrieking as she tackled me to the ground. I yelled out and we both fell with a loud thud. I dropped my camera and phone, and I hit my head pretty hard, but ignored it as I struggled to stop Adelaide from strangling me to death. “What the f***, Adelaide?” I choked out as I clawed at her hands and kicked my legs up and down. She was now just breathing heavily and staring at me with sad, pitch-black eyes.

“You’ve never appreciated me,” she yelled, her breath strangely reeking of alcohol, “After all these years of taking you to parties, getting you drunk and high, nursing your hangovers, and forcing fun into your life to treat your f*****-up mental health – YOU’VE NEVER APPRECIATED ME!” she screamed into my face while shaking my neck with unusually strong hands, swinging my head around like a ragdoll. My nails dug into her hands, but it didn’t seem to be hurting her one bit.

Her behavior was starting to remind me of a certain article I read one time about Munchausen By Proxy – an illness where a mother abuses her children by purposefully making them sick so they could become completely dependent on her to make them feel better. It makes the mother feel special, important, and loved. However, she usually had the tendency to go too far with it and accidentally kill her children. But I couldn’t think much more about it because I was slowly beginning to lose consciousness. I fought against her less, I felt a strange pins-and-needles feeling in my limbs, and my vision was starting to go black. She waited until my eyes were fluttering closed before she finally let go of the chokehold around my throat.

My hands clutched my chest and throat as I rolled onto my left side and let out a guttural sound from my stomach… then I gasped for air. I began to cough up blood onto the floor as I continued groaning, shaking, sobbing in fear, and gasping for dear life for a while. And after about three minutes of me just trying to catch my breath and calm down, I finally became aware that Adelaide was forcing my inhaler into my hand, stroking my head with one hand and rubbing the other up and down my right shoulder, whispering: “Sshh, it’s going to be okay. Laidey’s here.”

I grasped my inhaler and jabbed the psycho b**** in the eye with it as hard as I possibly could. She screamed and then I pushed her away from me. She slammed into the wall beside the staircase and shrieked again. My inhaler clattered as it fell to the floor and I scrambled to my feet, calling Finn’s name one last time as I stumbled out of the house, the feeling in my limbs still not completely present. I felt freezing air hit my feverish, sweaty skin like a bullet as I bounded down the steps and practically blinded myself with the car headlights. I sprinted around the car and tried to open the passenger-side door, but it was locked.

So, I ran around to the other side and knocked on the closed window right next to the driver’s seat to get Fletcher to open the car when I suddenly shrank back in horror for the thousandth time that night. I stared into the car with unbelieving eyes as I scanned over Fletcher’s slack body slouched in the car seat… with his entire head completely wrapped in Saran wrap, and there was a dark gold leather belt tightly wrapped around his neck. It was the most bizarre sight I’d ever seen. His lips looked a bit red and his eyes were wide open in fear, but it was very clear that the man had suffocated to death. My voice was pretty much already destroyed at this point, but that didn’t stop me from shrieking at the top of my lungs again.

“What’s wrong mommy?” I suddenly heard and I screamed again out of habit, turning towards the sound. I saw Finn standing a few feet from me, her dark eyes staring at me like they always did – big, dark, doe-eyes. Where the hell had she been?

“F-fletcher’s dead, we gotta go!” I blurted, my speech beginning to improve. I saw my daughter’s eyes flicker towards the car as she looked into the windshield. I prepared for the worst – screaming, crying, going into shock – but no, she just nodded and shrugged at me.

“I know,” she replied, like it was no big deal. “But I don’t wanna go, I don’t have my bones!” she added. I looked at her like she was insane, which I was beginning to believe she actually was. Speaking of insane… I started to wonder who could have done this to Fletcher, and why they chose that method of murder. The first person that came to mind was Jax… or whoever he was. As soon as he had disappeared, I remembered hearing the car horn honk multiple times. Was it possible that my apparition was real and it had gone out to kill Fletcher?

Highly unlikely… so that left either Adelaide or Finn… my thoughts were then cut short when Adelaide appeared in the doorway to the house. Her dress was torn at the bottom, the hat on her head missing, and she was now staring at me with worry instead of that murderess appearance I’d assumed she would be sporting.

“What did you just say?” she asked as she ran down the steps and towards the car. I backed up several steps as she pushed past Finn and peered into the car. Adelaide instantly went into shock. She staggered backwards, her hands began to tremble, and her knees were wobbly. I instinctively wanted to run over and help her, but after the events of tonight, I decided against it.

“N-no…” she muttered and then she let out the most heart-breaking cry I’d ever heard in my life. She fell to her knees and then crawled towards the car in the grass, clearly not knowing what to even do with herself. I gulped, watching my best friend fall apart over her dead boyfriend, thinking that obviously Adelaide was not the murderer… so that left only one person. I shook off my chills, walked around a sobbing and screaming Adelaide, and grabbed onto Finn’s arm.

“We have to go now,” I said over Adelaide’s crying, fully prepared to leave her behind, run towards the highway with Finn, and then walk along it while I called the police to pick us up. Because even if Finn was the actual murderer… getting her away from the house would be step one to recovery. However, Finn ripped her arm away and glared at me.

“Don’t touch me,” she scowled – there was something almost demonic in her tone. I froze in fear… but then she seemed to snap back to normal. “I want my bones, mommy,” she repeated with a stomp of her foot. I clenched my fists and nodded.

“I know that, I heard you moving furniture around downstairs ten minutes ago – but clearly there’s no bones here, now let’s go,” I urged. Again, she shook her head and crossed her arms over her chest.

“Then I’ll just take his,” she said while pointing to the car. I felt my stomach drop out of my body as I stared at my child with wide eyes. I suddenly felt too exhausted and terrified to even move a muscle as I watched her reach down into Adelaide’s dress and bra as she was hunched over on the ground, tears of agony falling into the dead grass. Adelaide didn’t even seem to notice Finn as she pulled out the lighter that Adelaide had used earlier to light my blunt.

I had no idea what Finn was trying to accomplish… but then everything began moving in slow motion as she ran to the little door covering the tank on the outside of the car. She opened it, then unscrewed the lid – and before I realized what she was actually about to do – it was too late. I knew that I didn’t have enough time to stop Finn before she flicked the lighter and shoved it into the gas tank, and I knew that it was too late to grab both Finn and Adelaide away from the car before it exploded. So the only thing I did have time for was to sprint as far away from the car as possible before it exploded.

Which is exactly what I did.

I didn’t make it very far before the car exploded in a ball of fire, but I made it far enough such that I wasn’t engulfed in the flames. The sound of the explosion made me go deaf for my last few seconds of consciousness. I was flung to the ground, small pieces of metal from Noah The Ford Fiesta launched themselves into my back, and the back of my legs and arms – but miraculously, nothing hit the back of my head. I almost immediately fell unconscious as soon as I hit the ground.

When I woke up slightly a few minutes later, I painfully lifted up my head slightly. I saw Finn and Adelaide lying in the grass, near the burning car through my blurry vision… and I also saw that the house had caught fire too. I blinked at the scene, a moan escaping my lips. However, it wasn’t a moan of pain, sadness, or anger… it was a moan of relief. I felt a huge weight lift off my shoulders as I watched the Old Watson House burn to death. Then I passed out again a few seconds later.

xxx

I woke up in a hospital bed three days later, feeling extremely confused and groggy. I hit the nurse’s button as I looked down at myself in horror – I’d been brutally cut up and bruised with second-degree burns all over my body. My back legs, arms, and actual back felt completely cut-open. All of my muscles were sore, a chunk of hair was missing from my head, and my throat burned. I panicked, hitting the nurse’s button over and over before a doctor and nurse rushed into the room.

The male nurse upped my pain medication as the tall, female, blonde-haired doctor told me that I’d been in a coma for three days, and began to explain the entire situation to me. She started by telling me that this was hands-down the strangest case she’d ever been assigned, and then said that apparently, a car drove on the highway shortly after Finn had blown everything up. The people witnessed the enormous fire and dialed 911. Minutes later, the police and fire department arrived at the scene, put out the fire, and drove everyone to the hospital.

Obviously Fletcher was dead on sight, which I didn’t find odd because I knew he had suffocated before the fire started… but when I said this, the woman shifted in her seat and scratched the back of her head. Chills ran down my spine as she told me that they’d found a mixture of animal blood in his stomach during the autopsy, and that he’d actually died from poisoning. The Saran wrap and belt were placed around his head and neck after the fact. My heart stopped and my mouth went dry.

I asked them where it had come from and why he drank it, and the doctor claimed that police had found a few small, empty viles in the passenger seat of the car. They tested for fingerprints… and found that they had belonged to my daughter. My face paled and had a greenish tint as I reached for the bedpan sitting at the foot of my bed and promptly vomited into it. Finn must’ve been collecting the blood as well as the bones of the road-kill she would bring home.

I informed the doctor of this after I was done vomiting, and the nurse looked so disturbed with the whole situation that he put his hands up into the air, muttered ‘I’m so done,’ and left the room. The woman stared angrily after him, calmly helped clean me up, and told me that Finn had been examined by the hospital psychiatrist after she was admitted and treated for third degree burns. Apparently she had survived the explosion, to my relief. However, my six-year-old had also apparently admitted that she’d been carrying around these viles for a while now with the intention of also making them into jewelry… but apparently that night: “Sarah Adams had told her to force the blood down Fletcher’s throat (after she couldn’t find any bones inside the house) so that she could take his bones instead.”

Not surprisingly, shortly after this admission, Finn had been diagnosed with manic schizophrenia and was deemed clinically insane. As I stared in shock, because I honestly didn’t believe that my daughter was insane. She just had a hobby – it was a hobby! She’d just taken it too far, that’s all. However… as much as I feared for my daughter – I felt more upset about the fact that Jax would kill me for doing something so stupid as bringing her out to a haunted house on Halloween.

“Please tell me that you’re not going to keep her admitted for life,” I begged with my hands folded together and shaking towards her. The doctor sighed.

“I honestly don’t know what’s going to happen to her, Mrs. Jenson. What I find hard to believe is that you didn’t seek help for her as soon as you found out she had an obsession with collecting dead animals,” she reprimanded. I then unfolded my hands and clenched my fists as I angrily informed her that I would have if I’d known that she was actually collecting their blood instead of just their bones. As far as I knew, the girl loved animals. I had my weird hobbies as a kid, and I figured it was a harmless thing because she wasn’t actually killing the animals. She was just “collecting them” to keep and possibly turn into jewelry some day.

Then I was told that Finn was immediately institutionalized without my, or her, consent, but the doctor claimed that it was necessary. I believed her, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t pissed off about it. According to Finn’s therapist and doctor over the past two days, Finn hasn’t really improved. I immediately began to blame the Old Watson House for my daughter’s ultimate downfall… but I honestly didn’t know what to believe since this strange obsession of hers had started before we paid a visit to that house.

As this was bad news, I guess this was also a good a time as any to inform me for the doctor to inform me that Adelaide had passed shortly after arrival. She’d been conscious on the way to the hospital, apparently begging the doctors to help me because I was mentally sick and disturbed. I stopped sobbing and got the chills when the doctor also told me that as soon as she was given the anesthetic for surgery to treat her third degree burns… she flat-lined, and that was it.

However, they were able to save me, even though they almost couldn’t. I only had second-degree burns, but they performed a toxicology report on me and found large traces of PCP in my urine as well as THC in my bloodstream. The car pieces jabbed into my back, legs, and arms were also rusted because that car was a piece of s***, and I hadn’t had the tetanus shot, so they had to add that shot to the mixture of drugs flowing through my veins. I’d also used my inhaler way too many times, which caused fluid to build up in my lungs. Therefore… I was literally almost on the verge of death when they admitted me, and after they did an enormous cleaning of my system, I mysteriously passed out into a coma for three days.

In the meantime, they tried to get ahold of my husband, Jax. My blood ran cold as the doctor said that no one ever picked up the home phone. They called home for two days. The police then showed up at my house, and no one was home. They questioned the neighbors, and apparently Robby (from next door) explained that after trick-or-treating was over on Halloween night, Jax assumed that Finn had gone home to be with me, and decided that he was going join us and play video games.

However, Robby went outside at one point in the middle of the night to retrieve the mail that he’d forgotten to pick from his mailbox earlier that day, when he noticed that there were two kids in hoodies standing at our front door, knocking on it. He glanced at his watch – it was midnight. Who would be trick-or-treating this late at night? Well, apparently Jax was still awake and he answered the door.

Robby heard one of the kids tell him that he and his little brother were out too late while trick-or-treating, and they’d lost their parents – so they asked if they could come inside and use our telephone. Jax apparently didn’t look like he thought anything of it, so he let them inside and shut the door behind him. Robby stared at our house for a moment, waiting for something to happen… but when nothing happened, he walked back into his house without a second thought.

Then the police showed up on his doorstep the next day. Jax had been missing for the past three days. 

I felt lightheaded, suddenly realizing that whomever I’d seen in the Watson house must have been a hallucination because my husband had been home, then missing, the entire time that we were there. I gulped and asked:

“Did someone break into my home?” I asked. The doctor shook her head and said that the police had thoroughly checked my house – there were no signs of broken entry, a struggle, or anything. Jax had literally just disappeared into thin air.

I then informed the doctor that I needed to sleep this off, and she nodded understandingly, telling me that she would up my morphine a bit so I would sleep easier… and I dreamt the weirdest nightmares I’d ever experienced in my life.

xxx

…Two weeks later, I was released from the hospital and sent home. I walked into my empty house and everything was the same as I’d left it on Halloween night. The only difference being that my murderess daughter was in a psych ward, my best friend and Fletcher were dead, my husband was still missing, and my taste in weird things ended even more abruptly than it had when I met Jax and had Finn.

I lived by myself for the next two months before Jax was officially labeled as dead. And honestly… I think I really needed this time to reflect on everything that had happened, as well as my life. So, when everyone finally gave up the search party… the first thing I felt was relief. And for once, I didn’t feel ashamed about it.

His family and I had a funeral for him, but my family still lived on the West Coast and was unable to attend. The entire situation as morbid and awful, but what made it even worse was Jax’s mother, who blamed me for her precious, little boy’s death. She made this very clear when she actually spoke at his funeral by stating: “Jax was a loving husband, father, and son. He took care of his family each and every day financially and emotionally. He would have gone on to do even greater things if his wife had just continued to stay by his side instead of going back into her childish ways.”

And thankfully, this experienced rendered me with the inability to give a f*** about anyone else’s opinions anymore. So, I didn’t hesitate to stand up from my seat – dry-eyed and fed-up – flip her off, and promptly tell everyone: “You all can go f*** yourselves, because the sad truth is: Jax was an a****** who stomped on my personality and ruined my life. I used to BE someone before I met him, and now that he’s gone, I can now focus on appreciating my daughter for who she is instead of trying to squash it out of fear that Jax would wind up hating her,” I then walked out of that church with my head held high as everyone gasped as stared at me.

I then started to visit Finn three times a week, instead of only once a week, and she thankfully started to improve. Her eyes were no longer blood-shot and dark like they had been for weeks, her skin became a little less pale, and she began to smile a bit more. I avoided talking about that night with her until after Jax’s funeral.

“Do you still hear and see Sarah Adams?” I surprisingly asked her one-day from the other side of the table we were sitting at inside an empty, white room. Finn frowned and twirled her wavy brown hair with her pointer finger as she nodded.

“I hear her sometimes, but she’s not very nice,” she said unhappily. With a doctor in earshot, I knew that I probably shouldn’t have provoked her schizophrenia, but again, I didn’t really care. So, I leaned in closer to the table and asked her in a whisper:

“Why did she tell you to kill Fletcher?” Finn’s eyebrows furrowed and she shifted in her seat. I could hear the doctor, standing a few feet behind me in front of the door to the room, take a few steps towards us. Finn shook her head.

“She didn’t,” she whispered back, “And I didn’t do it. I don’t remember doing it, I think I fell asleep,” I raised my eyebrows at my child and bit my lip, trying to decide whether or not to believe her. There was a part of me that really wanted to, but why didn’t she say this to the doctors when they first admitted her?

I mouthed “Who then?” at her as I heard the doctor take a few more steps towards us. Finn glanced up at him and then back at me: “After you left, I heard a voice that sounded like daddy. He said ‘nighty-night’… then I woke up on the couch,” she whispered as softly as she possibly could. My eyes flashed wide for a second before the doctor finally intercepted and ended the visit.

I walked out the hospital feeling weird. It confirmed that the apparition I saw of Jax was real. Now… did I believe the apparition was actually Jax, like Finn believed it was? No – it just wasn’t like him, and it was proven that Jax had been home around the time that Fletcher was murdered, he hadn’t even gone missing yet. So, was it definitely something posing as Jax? It had to be. There would be absolutely no explanation or any way to prove who that actually was and what it did to my daughter, but I felt overwhelming relief at the fact that Finn hadn’t purposefully killed Fletcher on a whim like Jonathan Watson did to his parents.

And of course Finn wouldn’t want to rat out her own father for telling her (or making her) murder someone – so she blamed it on Sarah Adams and called it a day. I then thought about the history of the house again, remembering that demonic possessions were apart of it… and I honestly didn’t know what to believe anymore.

After I got home from that visit, I decided to go through the pictures on my camera to try and remember the happier experiences in life before that night. I went through pictures of Jax and I on our honeymoon, several birthdays, Finn’s first days of school… and then I ran into some of the pictures I took on that night. I was about to put my camera down when something inside of me told me to continue looking through them. So I did.

I found the picture of Adelaide looking creeped-out by Finn’s admission of wanting to make and sell animal bone jewelry, as well as the picture of the loogie that Fletcher had spit against the back window. I looked closer and realized that it actually looked like a ghost the way that it splattered against the window. I started flipping through the pictures that I’d taken of the neighborhood… then I was getting into the pictures of the house itself. I quickly flipped through them all without really looking so that I could get to the end of it and then put the camera away – but then something caught my eye again.

After I got through all of the pictures I’d taken of the house, I realized that there were pictures towards the end of it that I hadn’t realized I’d taken. When I looked closer… I realized that they were pictures of me. I found one of me lying unconscious near the burning car out by the Watson house. Then there was one of me sleeping inside the hospital. There was even one of me vomiting into the bed pan while the doctor told me about the animal blood that Finn had forced-fed Fletcher.

I gasped because I didn’t remember anyone taking my picture in that moment. I could have been wrong, and the nurse could have somehow gotten ahold of my camera and taken a picture of me vomiting… but I highly doubted it. And as soon I saw a picture of me sleeping in my bed the night after I’d been released from the hospital, I literally threw my camera out one of my closed windows. No joke, I wasn’t f****** around anymore – I moved out of that house the next day.

I moved to an apartment complex, closer to Finn’s hospital, for the next several months until she improved enough that the doctors felt like she could finally be released. Once I finally had my child back – we completely abandoned the state we’d lived in for six years and moved to the West Coast, where my parents lived, and we moved in with them for the next two years until I felt that I was ready to find a job as a waitress and collect enough money to live on my own again. I tried as hard as I could to move on with my life with Finn, but nothing has ever been the same.

I cannot ever set foot on the East Coast again – let alone Massachusetts, or Salem. I cannot maintain a relationship with a man any longer than a week and I also cannot stand the scent of skunk spray without vomiting everywhere, the sight of blood, or the feel of Saran wrap. I hate the number six, I cringe at the word “haunted,” and I have PTSD when watching horror movies. However, against my gut instinct… I continued to let Finn collect alive and dead animals. I even pushed her in the direction of taxidermy and/or jewelry-making/selling, and she thrived on my support, as well as my parents’ support. She still technically had “schizophrenia,” but it wasn’t nearly as severe as it used to be, and she wound up going back to school at the age of ten as a happy camper while I continued to struggle.

I’d gone to multiple therapists and psychiatrists with the help of my parents’ research and aid, but no one could help me get over the paranoia that the ghosts and demons followed us from The Watson House, the fear of commitment as well as taking any type of medication again. I knew that I needed medicine to get over my crippling PTSD, depression, and anxiety, but as soon as any type of pill slid down my throat, my immediate reaction was to vomit it back up. I still need to work on this.

I still run into strange occurrences where my electricity will flicker, doors will slightly push open by themselves, and running footsteps occur throughout the house – like a child is in the middle of a rousing game of “tag.” I’ve asked Finn if she has experienced this too, and she always lifts her head up from whatever live animal she is caressing (or dead animal she’s working on) calmly nods at me, and says: “Don’t worry, mommy. Katie’s the nice one. And she’s the only one here.”

And in the meantime… I’ve learned that having a balance of strange things in my life is a must: I need to have enough of it to be happy, but I need to stay away from enough to be safe.