I was an only child with a very unfortunate upbringing.
So my uncle and I have always been very close. Not in a weird way of how you would expect uncles to act, but we were good friends since as far as I could remember.
When I was 2 my mom died in a car crash, and my dad was in critical condition. He was in the ICU for 1 year before being let go and being able to do what he wanted. In the year he spent in the hospital, I lived at my uncle’s with my aunt and their 2 children, I don’t have any memories from that age, but I always remembered to never open the freezer in the basement.
When my dad was let go, he was still grieving the loss of his wife, and since he was unable to attend her funeral, or even say goodbye to her, he ended up taking his own life a couple of days after he was released, in hopes of being able to reunite in Heaven. Nobody knew how he died, as police never disclosed that to any of us, so we didn’t know the extent of his injuries.
I heard that my father was a small time author who published a couple of books before I was born and was well respected in our small town. My mother was not very different. She was the owner of a small gardening supplies shop, the only one in the county, and people were very sad when she had died.
So after this event, I was adopted by my uncle and was a part of their family (not like I basically wasn’t for the past year), and that is all my uncle will tell me about my parents. There were a few pictures I kept at my bedside to remind me of them from time to time, but that was about it.
I never got to know more until I got my first cell phone when I was 12. I messaged another uncle of mine and he told me what life was like growing up with him. He said that he was such a nice kid, and that they all knew he was going to become a great person one day. He did, just not for long.
Anyways, enough about my parents and on to life at my uncle’s house.
NEVER open the basement freezer…
He seemed like a nice guy, and his wife was the same. They took care of me and their kids, fed us well, and were very active in our lives. They always attended our school concerts, went to school events, and any other school activity.
That was, until I started noticing something. My uncle gradually became more isolated and took more time away from us. It took weeks for us to start to notice him being with us less and less, but we never knew why.
I thought he was going through a bout of depression so I went to him and asked. He said everything was fine and not to worry about him.
I wasn’t really buying it, but I assumed he was just trying to cope and didn’t really want anyone bothering him, so I shook it off and continued my day.
I saw him a couple of weeks later, crying on the couch, so I sat near him and heard him faintly singing some lullaby I had never heard. He seemed completely zoned out and I doubt he even knew I was there, but I sat there until I got bored and then went to do some stuff.
NEVER open the basement freezer…
By now I started to get really suspicious of my uncle. He had never been acting like this before, so I asked one of my cousins if they knew what was going on with their dad, and they said that he does this about once every year for about a month or so.
Huh, that’s strange. I have lived here long enough to know that this would be normal for him. Maybe they are in on this too and are trying to keep me from something.
So later that day I asked my aunt, and she gave me the same answer. I was now seriously questioning my sanity by now and had not even realized that I was hyperventilating on the floor for the past minute.
I had to get to the bottom of this. I devised a plan. I would wait until school got out, and then I would wait for the annual family road trip, and once that road trip is within a few days, I would ask my uncle if I could stay home alone. I was 15 at the time, and my uncle was hesitant, but ultimately agreed. The hesitancy didn’t raise any red flags for me, as I would hesitate to leave my teenage daughter alone for 2 days, so there’s that.
Once they all left I began to search my uncles room for anything out of the ordinary.
I started with his closet. nothing strange, just clothes, old magazines, regular old person stuff. Until I stumble across something. A note. A handwritten note from, I could barely make out the messy signature, Sean Weekes. My dad.
NEVER open the basement freezer…
I quickly read the letter and I try to hold back tears but ultimately end up bawling.
“I love you all. I hope you will remember me. This is all just too much pressure. I can’t cope with the loss of my wife… If I change my mind I will call you, but if not… goodbye. -Sean”
He never called my uncle…
I also found a picture of my uncle and my dad as kids, happily swinging together. This for some reason made me very uncomfortable, and gave me a sense of paranoia, like something was going to jump out from the picture at any time. I didn’t know at that time, but this was just the tip of the iceberg.
Once I saw the picture and realized how uncomfortable it made me feel, I watched TV for the rest of the day and ate junk food. Normal teenager stuff.
The next day I got back to work. I dug through every bedroom in the house but ultimately came empty handed.
Burnt out, I remembered what very well could be the silver lining to what has been making my uncle change so much.
The basement freezer…
I didn’t want to get too ahead of myself so I checked the rooms around it and the basement itself, but not the freezer, I went by the saying “Save the best for last.” At least, I hoped for the best…
Once the rest of the basement was checked out, to no avail, I hesitantly made my way over to the basement freezer. This was it. Whatever was in here must be important if I wasn’t allowed in it.
I noticed it had a lock on it. Luckily I had learned how to pick locks from an old friend of mine, so I used that knowledge for the first time and cracked that lock like there was no tomorrow. Little did I know, they very well could have been no tomorrow.
As I slowly opened the freezer door (it was one of the big ones on the ground with the big top door, if you know what I am talking about), I peered in expecting to see horrors the human mind is incapable of depicting in words, or things along the lines of that, but as the light leaked in it became more apparent that there was nothing in the freezer. An empty freezer. What was so important about it that my uncle would forbid us from opening it?
That was until, I saw it…
A small switch in the bottom corner, that when switched made a faint hissing sound, like pressure being released, and this small trapdoor opened from the side of the freezer.
I was intrigued. What could he be hiding? Money? Gems? Maybe even… Humans?
The only way to find out was to swallow my fear and go in.
It was dark and full of cobwebs, and looked as if nobody had been there for years, but then I saw something that shook me. A bone. Not just any bone, a human-like bone. Was it a coincidence? Maybe, but I had a sneaking suspicion that it was no coincidence, and that this was indeed very intentional.
I crawled deeper and the tunnel led me into a large dungeon-like room. This did not feel real at all. I surveyed the room and saw a tattered sofa, an old CRT TV, a table, and most disturbingly, a VHS recorder. I inspected the sofa first, and found nothing of value or importance there, nothing was on the table, but as I approached the VHS recorder, I felt a sense of dread and couldn’t dare touch it.
I went out of the room and pretended I saw nothing. The next day, which was also the day the rest of my family got back, I returned to the room and this time I took one of the multiple VHS tapes and put it in the VHS player.
What I saw broke me,
It started with static, and in the corner you could see it was taken 2 days before my dad was assumed to have passed away, and then the very room I was standing in came into frame.
My uncle stepped in and dragged a person in with him, with a bag on his head, all tied up. He took the bag off and my blood ran cold.
My dad…
I couldn’t bear to see my dad being put through this. I knew he died in a bad way, but I never knew it happened like this. The tape was so gruesome that I will not even describe what happened in the video, but there was enough blood, guts, and other fluids to fill up a bathtub.
After seeing this I was sick to my stomach, my dad didn’t kill himself, my uncle killed him.
I took note of the amount of other VHS tapes, 7 in total, all unlabeled, and I am assuming they are all victims of his brutal crimes, but I refused to watch them even if my life depended on it.
When I saw this I instantly took the tapes, ran to the local police station, which took awhile because my uncle’s house is in a rural area of a town. Once I got there I told them everything. The freezer, the depression, the tapes, my dad, and all the other stuff. They immediately started a search as I told them they were on a road trip, and that I had no idea where they were going or when they would be back.
As it would turn out he was taking them, and almost took me, to an abandoned building 300 miles away to murder his family. Luckily the police found him by tracking his phone, and they found him, arrested him, and he was found guilty of all 7 murders, plus 3 more he confessed to.
That bitch now has life in prison without possibility of parole and none of my uncles family was hurt, but I know that deep inside, they were hurt just as much as I was when I saw the video of my dad.
I doubt my dad even wrote that suicide letter, and it was just a thing to throw people off if they ever searched his house under suspicion of killing my dad, which was unlikely, but a possibility.
Fuck you, Uncle Roy.