This is a story that’s been around in my home town since I was a kid. It was kind of a big thing at the time, the children tried to piece together what they knew about this girl from here and the adults repeated what they heard from the mom or neighbors while it was happening. It basically became our local legend. I thought you guys might appreciate it.
The way it goes, there was this girl named Sadie. She would have been older than me but my brother swears he knew her. One day she’s out playing in her backyard, and everything is normal until her mom goes in to get some lemonade. By the time the mom got back, Sadie is gone. No trace of her at all. It was a fenced in yard so it didn’t make any sense that she could just disappear like that. Certainly not in such a small amount of time. The mom freaked out and called everyone she could.
Everyone pretty much knows each other here so over the next few weeks half the town was out looking for Sadie. They took time off work. They checked all through the woods and when that didn’t work they went door to door in neighboring towns. After a while people start saying her description out of habit to whoever they meet. Ten years old, blonde hair, whatever.
We’re close to a kind of famous UFO town so it didn’t take long for the rumors to start. “The girl must have been abducted.” A neighbor swore he saw something appear over Sadie’s house, only for a second, around the time she disappeared. Other people started saying they were seeing things at night, lights in the sky and stuff like that.
Everybody had a story, but none had anything they could prove.
Then one day when the mom is about to give up all hope, Sadie just walks right in through the back door. She’s in the same clothes as the day she disappeared, doesn’t look any different than when she was playing in the backyard, and doesn’t seem to realize anything was wrong at all. Supposedly she asked why her mom hadn’t come back out with the lemonade.
The mom couldn’t believe it. She told everyone it’s a miracle, and for a while people were willing to accept that.
Everything seemed fine until the next week at church when some of the congregation wanted to check in on her. Somebody asked if she really didn’t remember anything and Sadie just out of the blue starts talking about how she remembers walking inside to get some lemonade, freaking out when she came back outside, calling everyone she could think of. People figure she’s confused, a few of them think she’d been hiding in the house the whole time and it was all a prank, until she says, “oh, and I remember walking out of the blue house and seeing something show up over my house.” The guy who claimed he saw something lived in the only blue house on the road. As far as anyone knew, Sadie never heard his part of the story.
After that, people didn’t think Sadie was confused anymore. They were starting to believe her. And the more time passed, the more she remembered.
At first it was just the night she disappeared. She’d be able to tell someone what they were watching on TV that night as if she’d been in the same room as them. Before long Sadie was telling a classmate how it felt when his dad hit him, or telling an old woman what it was like watching her husband die. People said whenever she remembered something, it was like she was in some kind of trance. But she never got it wrong.
Nobody understood how she did it, and they sure didn’t want to be around for it. The town started avoiding her. They’d cross the street whenever they saw her. Kids pretended to be sick to avoid sitting next to her in class and the teacher just let them get away with it. The whole town was afraid of a ten year old girl.
Eventually she stopped showing up at school or church. Nobody even made an effort to contact the mom. It’s like she was the town curse. Weeks went by and as far as people could tell, Sadie and her mom weren’t even leaving their house. Most folks liked it better that way.
Everything stayed quiet until one day a neighbor hears a gunshot come from the house. He called the cops. They show up a few minutes later and run in the house to find Sadie’s mom bleeding out on the floor. They look up and see Sadie, gun at her feet, standing across from them. She’d somehow figured out the mom’s lock and shot her through the back with her own gun.
When one of the cops asked what happened, Sadie looked him right in the eyes and said, “I remembered what she did.”
That’s all they got from her. No explanation, no context, just “I remembered what she did.”
The story goes, the cops didn’t even make it back to the station with Sadie. She’d been in the back of one of the cars, but something caught the cop’s eye, and when he looked back to check on her, she was just gone. This time, she didn’t turn back up. That night is the last time anybody ever saw her.
To this day, parents in my town are wary about letting their kids play outside. It’s one of those things. Everybody here remembers what happened to Sadie, even the people who weren’t there for it.