There’s a story everyone in our town knows. It’s about something that happened in ‘73, though what the “something” is, is still up for debate. Most people don’t debate it, they don’t even talk about the “what”, only the result. Four dead kids, three boys and one girl. The youngest was eleven, the oldest thirteen. The families mostly left in the subsequent years, too many memories, not enough answers. Only one member of any family associated with the incident remained in town. Mr. Greeves, the older cousin of the girl, is now seventy and mostly reclusive.
Sixty four minutes passed from the time the kids went into the house to when the first police officer found the bodies. A neighbor called the department when the kids first broke inside, but at the time, police were responding to a robbery at the local pharmacy and a car accident at the edge of town, they had no reason to hurry to a bunch of kids breaking into the old abandoned house. It happened fairly often.
In 1968, there had been another incident in the home, only two months after a couple moved in with their newborn and four year old daughter.
This too, remains somewhat of a mystery, though unlike the second incident, it was treated much more like a human tragedy and therefore is much less known or talked about. One cannot help but wonder if there is some connection, though what it could be is hardly evident.
The tragedy I speak of is that of the missing children. While the husband was at work, the wife stayed home with the kids. According to her, she had been nursing the newborn while the girl played in her room. She put the sleeping baby down, and went to get a glass of water and when she came back, the baby was not in its bassinet, and the girl was not in her room.
A police search revealed nothing, and two neighbors across the street had been on their porch the entire afternoon. No one had come or left, they told the officers. The rear of the house was fenced in, a nine foot wooden fence made it impossible for the young mother to have climbed it, and even if she had, the opposite lot was also fenced in. Of course, the area was searched, it had been drizzling for hours and therefore, the mud revealed every indent made as the officers walked and scanned the empty area. No mark had been left by the fence, no mark at all in the entire lot save for the police’s own foot prints.
The children were never seen again.
Though there was no evidence of the mother being guilty, the town judged her so, and her husband soon filed for divorce. She moved back home to live with her mother in Alabama, and the entire thing was forgotten, with people simply assuming she had somehow killed and buried the kids.
For years this was all that was known of the case, until the mother was interviewed once more by a journalist writing a book on strange events across the country. The interview took place many years later and was therefore missed by any who had interest in the case. With some coaxing, she admitted she had heard something as she drank her glass of water in the kitchen. She had never divulged this to anyone, not because she thought people would call her crazy, though she did carry this fear she said, but because she could not describe what she had heard.
The journalist Simon Hedges recorded the interaction: “It wasn’t a voice, but it had the cadence of one, it wasn’t a song, but there was a melody in the rhythm. It could have been pleasant if not for the sinister hum that accompanied it. It was speaking, I’m sure of that, but whatever it was saying, there was not a single word I could understand. It wasn’t English. It didn’t sound like any human language at all, which makes sense, as I said before, it was not a voice.”
She then ran to the children’s rooms and found them empty. That was all that had ever been said about what happened. And none was ever reported since, the house sat empty for a few years, no one wanted to buy it, believing its walls or yard to be hiding the bodies of the children.
It was thoroughly searched and the Police Department had assured all residents this was not so, yet, the stories persisted, and to the kids of the town, the house took on a life of its own.
After the bodies of the trespassers were recovered, the house was blocked off by police and scheduled to be demolished, but the recession made so its funds had to be allocated to more urgent needs.
The police never officially released the cause of death of the children, though one source did speak of what had happened to them. Again, this too was written by the journalist Simon Hedges who remained on the case until he found a retired officer, though the man would not say his name.
“I was still pretty early on the job when we got the call about the kids,” he is quoted as saying. “I assumed I would just find the kids telling each other scary stories as we had a few times before. The first thing I heard when I came through the door was the girl screaming for help upstairs. I ran up and saw her, she was in the hallway, banging on a closed bedroom door.
I tried to ask what happened but she only cried and screamed. I tried to open the door, it was shut tight. I told her to run down stairs and wait outside. That was the last I saw her alive. As soon as she was out of view. The door opened on its own. The three boys were kneeling in a circle, their arms around each other, heads bowed down. The top of their heads were all touching. I knew they were dead the moment I looked at them. The skin was pale, almost green, there were flies buzzing, like they had been like that for days. I went down and called it in but I couldn’t find the girl. She was nowhere. I waited for the others, when they finally came I walked with them to the room upstairs. The girl was in the circle hugging the boys, her head bowed, pale skin. Official cause of death was different for each one. Asphyxia, starvation, one had a ripped up throat like he had swallowed glass, but there was nothing in his stomach, not even the food he had eaten earlier that day. The girl had died from dehydration. She looked fine when I saw her. The few people I told this to asked if maybe she was a ghost. I had grabbed her by the shoulders when I saw her, she wasn’t any ghost. She was a healthy, normal kid. That’s all I’d like to say.”
In the summer of ‘74, something no one had expected happened, the house was sold. The town was in dire straits financially, and as police had assured the house was no longer a crime scene, and nothing of value to them or the investigation was within it, it was allowed to be purchased, the money was used to help keep the community afloat during the financial hardship.
The purchaser was not a man or woman but a group. Soon enough, the house was referred to only as “The Cult House”. No illegal activity was ever reported, a few of the members would be seen buying food once in a while but their faces were obscured by covering similar to that of Niqab in Islam tradition, though nothing about them suggested they were Muslim or any other known religion.
After almost thirty years of living in the house, the group committed mass suicide in 1999. Their things were sold at auction by the police department. Some who purchased the items, such as VHS tapes and video games reported strange footage,
One such tape was returned to the police as the buyer thought it may be relevant to the investigation into the children’s deaths. The tape is footage of a dark room, a window barely visible in the back wall. Shadows pass through, figures of what looks like a few kids. The sound of them. The only sound is that of them crying. Though it is hard to discern, an audio expert with the department claimed there were four distinct voices. The children on the tape seem to be wandering in the dark, the camera is hand held at a higher angle, leading the police to believe there was an adult in the room.
The window seems to be that of the second floor bedroom where the children were found in ‘73, though the official report states these could not have been the same children as the camera used was not invented until the mid nineteen eighties. The children on the tape were never identified.
The group itself was made up of all adults, the youngest being 35, the eldest 76. Their identities had been falsified and the police could never trace them farther than when the house was bought.
The town demolished the house not long after.