Haunting Whispers A Halloween Night of Mysteries and Memories

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Welcome to another episode of the Nighttime Scary Tales Podcast, where we explore the dark side of storytelling. Tonight, prepare for spine-chilling tales featuring original horror stories, eerie supernatural encounters, and real-life crime that reveals the darker aspects of human nature. Each story is designed to keep you on the edge of your seat long after it ends. We’d love to hear your thoughts! Share your most chilling moments by leaving a review on your favorite podcast platform. More haunting stories are coming, so keep your lights on and your doors locked. Sweet dreams… if you can find them!

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:14):
One of my earliest childhood memories is going trick or
treating around the neighborhood that I grew up in. I
didn't have much of a costume, because I only decided
last minute that I wanted to join my big brother.
I've been terrified at the idea of all these miniature
monsters walking around outside, but that fear was gradually and
eventually outweighed by the promise of a huge hall of

(00:35):
Halloween candy. My mom used some leftover monster make up
to paint my face like a skeleton, and then I
wore a torn up trash bag like I was some
kind of garbage ghoul, and I must have looked pretty
silly compared to some of the other kids and their
Batman and Superman costumes, but that didn't really bother me.
All I was interested in was getting my fair share

(00:55):
of candy, and boy, was there lots of that. My
brother was thirty at the time, so he agreed to
escort nine year old me around the neighborhood with him
and his friends from middle school. And I couldn't believe
that I'd been so frightened by the whole thing, because
actually being out there knocking on doors and showing off
our costumes. It was some of the most fun I'd
ever had in my entire young life. People were giving

(01:18):
us a ton of candy, and not just candy either,
They were giving us all kinds of things. One house
we knocked at, I think it was the town dentist,
gave us all toothbrushes and then reveled in our looks
of disappointment because they revealed that they were just kidding
and gave us some real candy. Another place gave us
all these miniature Charlie Brown comic books. But at one

(01:40):
point a man told me to open up my candy
bag and then drop something small and white into it
before walking off. I didn't realize Halloween was like Christmas,
only spookier, and by the time me and my brother
arrived back home, I think it had fast become my
favorite holiday. The next thing I remember, our mom asked

(02:01):
us to empty out our bags of candy at either
ends of the kitchen table. Her plan was to take
maybe three quarters of what we'd gotten and put it
somewhere save so we couldn't eat ourselves into a diabetic coma.
But shortly after emptying my bag on to the table,
mom came over to divide up the spoils and took
one look through my candy and then immediately started to

(02:24):
freak out. She kept pointing at this one particular item
in asking me, honey, where did you get this? Who
gave this to you? Then, when I told her I
didn't know, she kept yelling at me to think harder,
that I had to remember who put it in my bag.
I remember getting upset and starting to cry, and then
crying even harder when my mom picked up the phone

(02:46):
and told the operator to put her through to the police, because,
in her words, this was an emergency. Now thirty years before,
back when my mom was around my age, all the
kids in the town we grew up and went trigger
treating on Halloween. One little girl went out with her friends,
but didn't just come home with a bag full of candy.
She returned home with a little white doll stitched out

(03:08):
of cloth rags. The girl's mom didn't think anything of
it and let her daughter keep the little white doll,
But just a few days later, there was an incident
in a public park. The girl's mom took her to
the park some place that had like a sand pit
and a jungle gym, and while her kids were off
playing with the other children, she strikes up a conversation

(03:29):
with one of the other moms. The whole time, some
guy had been leaning on the fence surrounding the jungle gym.
The lady figured that he must have been one of
the kid's father's, maybe even grandfathers, just watching on as
his kids or grandkids played with all the others. But
then as the mom's looking on, she sees the guy

(03:50):
get her daughter's attention, call her over towards the fence,
and then starts talking to her again. This all appeared
perfectly harmless, but then the mom watches the guy, who
wearing a long coat, hat and a scarf just covered
up SOA's face as slightly obscured, reaches out and asks
for her hand. The mom watches as her little girl

(04:12):
gives the man her hand, and then when the guy
leaned forward and appeared to start smelling her little girl's hand,
she starts walking over to intervene. She tells her kid
to get away from the strange man, then starts asking
him when his business is talking to children like that.
The guy didn't say a word, He just turned around
and walked off before the mom could actually confront him. Naturally,

(04:37):
the mom wanted to know what the man had said
to her little girl, but when she asked her, the
answer she got back raised more questions than they answered.
First off, the little girl said she couldn't understand what
the man was saying to her, but when her mom
asked how she knew to walk over and give the
man her hand all at his direction, she acted very

(04:58):
confused and then said she didn't know. The girl also
said that when he raised her hand to the man,
he hadn't sniffed it like her mom thought he had. Instead,
he'd said something to it, something which again the little
girl couldn't understand. The girl's mom then asked if she
knew the man from anywhere, like if she'd seen him

(05:18):
around town, and the girl cried, yes, it was the
same man who'd given her the little white doll while
she was trick or treating. As you can imagine, the
mom was terrified, and in discovering the connection between the
doll and that creepy man, she rushed to inform the police.
The cops put out some a p B on the
guy in almost every cop in town was out looking

(05:39):
for him, but after no one caught sight of him,
they figured that he'd been a drifter that had skipped town.
At the first sight of trouble, none of the moms
from the park recognized the guy, which in a town
our size usually meant that he was not a towner.
So when forty eight hours went by and there had
been no sightings of the guy from either civilians or
law enforce everyone just kind of figured the guy had

(06:02):
moved on. It took just days before they realized how
wrong they were. One morning, a young mom walked into
her daughter's bedroom to wake her up her elementary school,
only to find that she wasn't in her bed. She
looked around the house a little, then when she realized
her daughter was nowhere to be found, she had lettered
her husband, who in turn called the cops, and within

(06:25):
twenty four hours, almost every cop in the state was
out looking for this missing girl. But while a whole
army of cops and volunteers are out searching the fields
and woods surrounding town, a team of state police detectives
performed a search of the girl's bedroom. I'm guessing to
see if they could find any clues. Then guess what
they found tucked into the missing girl's pillow case a

(06:47):
little white doll, one that looked like it had been
stitched out of old rags. The police then had a
press conference asking if any one else's kid was in
possession of one of these little white dolls. Only one
said of parents came forward, saying their little girl also
had returned home from trick or treating with a little
white doll in her candy bag, and that little girl

(07:10):
just so happened to be my mom's best friend. I
bet you thought I was going to say that little
girl was my mom, didn't you. I can't blame you,
and so did I when I first heard that story
from her. But even so, she was half traumatized by
the whole thing, because not only did her friend and
her parents almost have a nervous breakdown out of fear,
but they also ended up moving out of town because

(07:31):
their kid just couldn't feel safe there anymore. Mom said
that she and everyone at school was convinced the man
would come back in the middle of the night and
snatch her up out of bed, just like he'd done
with that missing girl, who, by the way, was never found.
No corpse or remains ever showed up any place. There

(07:51):
were no credible witness sightings of her anywhere despite all
the public appeals, and they didn't even find any articles
of clothing or anything like that. Was like that little
girl just vanished off the face of the earth, and
that only gave credence to the theory propagated by local
kids that the child snatcher had been some kind of
boogeyman who targeted children with little white dolls on Halloween

(08:13):
before eating them alive on the nights that followed. Obviously,
that's not what happened, but it also wasn't like adults
could tell their kids the whole truth. All they could
say was that the girl was lost and that everyone
hoped she'd come home safe one day. But no one
believed that, not really anyway. In fact, a quick death

(08:33):
would actually have been one of the more merciful options
available given the circumstances of a grown man abducting a
little girl from her bed at night. I mean again,
it's unlikely the guy crept inside and snatched the kid
kicking and screaming from her bed. The dolls were to
win the kid's trust, so when the time came, they'd
come quietly, not loudly, and go quietly. She did, because,

(08:57):
as I said, no one found any trace of this
girl or her abductor, and she was declared legally dead
around the same time I graduated college. The town moved on,
but no one forgot, especially the ones close to the
whole thing, which explained why my mom got so scared
when she emptied my bag of candy on to the
table and saw a little white doll stitched out of

(09:19):
old rags lying among the chocolate bar and candy wrappers.
As you can imagine, she too rushed to call nine
one one, and after the cops got a hold of
the little white doll, the whole town basically went into
lockdown while they searched for the person that might have
placed it in my bag. No kid was allowed to
go anywhere alone for days, and when the commotion died down,

(09:40):
the cops said it was most likely some kind of
copy cat just looking to scare people. They figured it
was probably some teenager who'd heard the story of the
little white dolls, along with that of the girl who
went missing just days after they were handed out. They
didn't think they were seriously going to complete the copy
cat process. And try to abduct an kids who received

(10:01):
dolls and wasn't the only one, but given the weight
of police presents on the streets come November first, there
was a good chance it was that and that alone
which deterred the copy cat from going through with it.
I didn't hear the whole story until many years later,
and while my dad thought the whole thing was dumb
and that it was just kids being kids, it had

(10:22):
quite a heavy effect on my mom, I guess, because
it brought back all those bad memories from her childhood.
I mostly believe it was a copy cat too, as
in someone just playing a dumb prank, because no one
ever tried to snatch any of his kids who got
the dolls, not even years later. But sometimes I wonder
how much of a prank it really was. If the

(10:42):
whole town didn't take the dolls seriously, or the guy
hadn't picked my candy bag to drop one into so
that my mom didn't see it, would things have still
happened the way they did, or would of another kid
have gone missing in the middle of the night, snatched
up by the man who made the little white doll.

(11:09):
My name's Chris and I'm from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and I've
been a listener since Halloween of last year, but by
then I guess I'd missed the window to write this
up and send it over to you. It's a story
about a childhood friend of mine named Kevin and how
we eventually lost touch. And since that story starts on
Halloween night of nineteen ninety three, it's something I often

(11:31):
think about at this time of year. It's kind of
sad in parts, but I find scary stories are like
that sometimes, because that thing that's so terrible and terrifying,
it often has consequences and rarely do they make for
happy endings. Kevin and I lived on Decent Avenue on
opposite sides of the East Jerusalem Baptist Church, and we're

(11:52):
friends all throughout elementary school and then once we graduated
to middle school. We had a solid four kid friend
group that consists of men Kevin and a kid named
Toby who lived on Frederick Street, and then Todd whose
parents ran the seafood place up on East Hardy Street.
We were practically inseparable and school land at home, but

(12:12):
especially on Saturday nights, and that includes the night of
October thirtieth of nineteen ninety three. We were planning on
some trick or treating the following night, but just like
every Saturday, we walked around to each other's homes until
the whole crew was assembled. We usually just walk around
the neighborhood until we found somewhere to hang out, which
was usually the ballpark of Rebecca Avenue or some of

(12:35):
the derelook housing plots near Alcorn. But that night, since
it was the night before Halloween, we had something a
little different in mind. We were talking about which places
in Hattiesburg we believed were haunted. There was Vernon Dahmer's
old place, no relation to Jeffrey who was murdered by
the clan back in the sixties for being a civil

(12:55):
rights activist. His house isn't there anymore, it's just a
derelict plot, but lots of folks said that they'd felt
an eerie presence around the place, and others even heard
weird sounds. But since Vernon's place was at least five
or six miles out of town, we weren't about to
try and walk out there on a Saturday night. We
also had the old train yard, which was supposedly haunted

(13:18):
and the old Hattiesburg Cemetery was also an obvious choice
for some guaranteed spookiness, But at some point some one
brought up the old derelict house at the end of
Elizabeth Avenue. The old plantation styled two story home with
its wrap around veranda, tall columns, and large shuttered windows
had been abandoned for as long as I could remember.

(13:40):
I don't think it was ever part of an actual plantation.
I think it was more of a case that its
owner wanting it to look as grand as possible. And
it must have been quite a place back when it
was still occupied, But by nineteen ninety three it was
nothing but a crumbling, termite infested ramshackle ruin, and it
looked spooky as hell. Though unlike the old Dahmer place

(14:02):
of the Hattiesburg Cemetery, we hadn't actually heard any rumors
that the abandoned house was haunted, and maybe that's what
attracted us to it in the first place. I mean,
the place looked like it should have been haunted, so
in our minds it pretty much was. But that also
gave us a free pass to avoid visiting any of
the places we'd actually heard were haunted, sort of like

(14:22):
we're not pussy's, we're just very lazy. And so we
walk all the way down Decent Avenue, cross Gulf Port Street,
and then we're walking down Elizabeth Avenue discussing what might
have happened to result in the home being completely abandoned.
I remember Todd suggesting that the family patriarch had gone
insane slaughtered his family, and that the home's bloody history

(14:46):
meant that it couldn't be resold. Tilby then suggested that
some kind of tragic accident had resulted in restless spirits
being anchored to the place, and that's why I couldn't
be resold. We danced around a couple of other theory,
but the reality was that none of us really knew
why that old house on Elizabeth Avenue was abandoned. All

(15:07):
we knew was that the chances of encountering spectral activity
there had to be lower than at the train yard
or cemetery, and that in all likelihood nothing bad would
happen hanging out there. But we could not have been
more wrong. On the way down the street, we'd been
full of boyish bravado, as they say, But once we

(15:29):
arrived at the end of Elizabeth Avenue and saw that
the old house was looming there before us. None of
us felt quite so adventurous anymore. We talked about exploring it,
finding ghosts or maybe even buried treasure or some kind
of dark family secret, but once we were face to
face with it, no one felt like going inside. I
remember thinking how the old plantation house didn't look nearly

(15:52):
so spooky in the daytime, and that even though I
knew in my gut that there was nothing in there
but dust and cobwebs, I still couldn't bring myself to
venture inside. We all just kind of stood there, murmuring
to each other about how dangerous it kind of looked.
And then suddenly Tod dared me to go inside. I

(16:13):
remember saying something like, alone, no way, man, you must
be crazy. You think I'm going there on my own.
Todd then dared Toby to go inside, and he said
pretty much the same thing. But then when he dared
Kevin to go inside, even for just a minute, Kevin
replied with, and what are you going to give me
if I do? Todd thought for a moment, but Kevin

(16:36):
clearly had something in mind already. He said that he'd
go inside, up into a bedroom or down into a basement,
and bring back something to prove that he'd been there,
and in return, he wanted at least half of Todd's
candy hall from that following night on Halloween. Todd said
something like no way, and I even thought that that

(16:59):
was a little much of a heart bargain, but eventually
they settled on this. For every minute that Kevin spent
out of our sight anywhere in the house, he got
one fistful of candy from Tod's trick a treating bag.
The next day, and Kevin said that he wanted a
souvenir from the place anyway, something to proved that he
was the bravest of all of us. But we were

(17:20):
all convinced that he wouldn't last the more than two
or three minutes, with Tod being perhaps the most confident
of all of us that he wouldn't have to give
up more than maybe a few fistfuls of candy. We
watched Kevin walk off through the overgrown grass towards the
steps of the porch, which creaked as he climbed them,
before he walked toward the home's open threshold. I remember

(17:42):
the door had been completely taken off the hinges, so
there was nothing but an ominous black orifice waiting for him,
And when he reached it, Kevin looked back at Tod
and told him to be ready to count the minutes.
Tod then checked his watch and gave Kevin the thumbs up,
and then, after flicking on the cigarette lighter that he'd
borrowed from Toby, Kevin crept into the darkness. To say

(18:06):
that first minute was tense would be the understatement of
the century. I remember half expecting Kevin to suddenly scream
and then come running out of the house yelling at
us to just scram and I also remember thinking how
that would be an incredible way to prank us, but
running out too soon would mean forfeiting a whole bunch
of Todd's candy. But I guess that if he did

(18:27):
weigh it up in his head, he figured getting his
hands some more candy was a superior outcome to scaring
the living crap out of us, because when it hit
the end of that first minute, there was no sign
of him. When the second minute ended, then the third,
and then the fourth, and none of us had heard
so much as a peep from Kevin. I remember Toby

(18:48):
looking at Todd and saying something like, if he keeps
us up, you're not going to have any candy left
after all the trigger treat in tomorrow, and Todd actually
started to panic because five or six handfuls it was
going to be quite a lot of candy, and they
hadn't yet negotiated if fistfols meant two fistfolds or just
the one, et cetera, et cetera. And by the time

(19:10):
Kevin had been in that house for a full five minutes,
Todd marched around halfway through the grass towards the house
and yelled something out like, all right, Kevin, you made
your point, you got your candy, Now come on out.
I amost expected Kevin to just appear from around the
doorframe right then and there and show us how he
just tricked us into thinking that he'd been lost in
the bows of the basement or something, when really he'd

(19:33):
been standing feet away from us, probably stifling laughter while
listening to Todd getting increasingly frustrated. But after Todd called
out for him to come out and give it up,
the entire house stayed quiet, quiet as the grave and
Toby started to laugh very nervously, telling Todd that Kevin

(19:54):
was going to stay in there so long that Todd
would be practically working for him during trick or treating
the fun following night. I laughed, but Tod didn't find
it very funny and yelled at again for Kevin to
come outside before the spiders started climbing up the leg
of his pants. And the idea of that sure would
have motivated me to skip out of there at full speed.

(20:14):
But Kevin didn't make a sound. It was like he
couldn't even hear us at all. We were coming up
to ten minutes when the mood shifted from nervous excitement
to minor concern, and by then all three of us
were much closer to the old plantation's house, and we're
all calling out Kevin's name in the hopes that he'd

(20:34):
come out if he had heard all of us calling
him and not just one of us, And we started
to sound scared too. I remember Toby's voice kind of
trembling as he called out one time, and how his
fear was almost infectious. We called out a little longer,
and then Tod suddenly announced that he'd have to go
inside and actually look for keV. I think Toby knew

(20:57):
as well as I did that it wasn't about the
candy anymore. We were just scared for our friend. By
that point, Todd started up the steps, with me and
Toby reluctantly following. But when he finally got within a
few feet of the open doorway, we started to hear
movement from within side. Todd called out again, Kevin, is

(21:17):
that you? But when we got no response, that fear
came back tenfold. We started backing up, half expecting some rotten,
stinking monster thing to come lurching out into the moonlight
with Kevin's blood on its claws and teeth. Whatever it
was moved very slow, without urgency, just these slow, steady footsteps.

(21:39):
As it came closer and closer to the door. We
kept on walking backward, getting ready to run. But then
suddenly who steps out into the moonlight but Kevin. We
all breathed this huge sigh of relief because he was
walking fine, not running, and he had no signs of
any wounds or injuries either. And Tod says, what the hell, dude,

(22:03):
you scared the crap out of us. And I was
waiting on Kevin to just burst out laughing before calling
all of us a bunch of scaredy cats. He'd secured
at least seven or six handfuls of Tod's candy and
managed to have all of us on the verge of
wetting our pants. If that was me, I'd be doing
a victory lap of the place's overgrown front yard with

(22:24):
Kevin didn't do anything like that. Instead, he just walked
right past us, across the grass and then started walking
back down Elizabeth Avenue with me and the others asking him, Kevin, Kevin,
where are you going, dude? Tod, Toby and I all

(22:44):
just kind of stood there looking at each other for
a moment, as if to ask what the hell's gotten
into him, And then we followed him up the street,
asking what had happened inside that house. Like I said,
we hadn't heard so much as a mouse's fart up there,
and had been complete silence the whole time, so we
wanted to know what Kevin had been doing for so long.

(23:06):
He also wasn't acting scared either, at least he wasn't running.
He was just walking away like he was tired and
wanted to go home. Toby and I ran around the
front of him because he wouldn't respond to a word
we were saying, and we say, hello, Kevin, what's going on?
What happened in there? It was only then that I

(23:27):
saw how Kevin had tears in his eyes. Both Toby
and I were saying, dude, what the hell, what's gone
into you? And then Toby tried to physically get him
to stop. But I remember how Kevin, instead of stopping,
when from all calm, too furiously violent as he shoved
Toby off of him and screamed, get the hell away

(23:49):
from me. He screamed it so loud, his voice broke
like it started as a roar and ended in some
kind of squeal. And we were so stunned that we
stopped dead in our te and just let him walk
on for a second before we carried on following him.
No one knew what to say at first. It was
kind of scary to see him freak out like that

(24:09):
in the first place, But as we carried on following
Kevin up the avenue, we started calling after him again.
We asked him to stop, asked him to talk to us,
and then asked him to at least slow down a
little bit, but again he completely ignored us until it
was Tod's turn to jog ahead of him in an
attempt to block his path. Kevin tried to avoid Todd

(24:31):
by walking around him without saying a word, but then
Todd stepped in front of him again, Kevin started swinging.
Todd leaned back so hard to avoid the punches that
he fell on his ass, and then me and Toby
ran over trying to separate them, and Kevin started swinging
on us too. He started screaming, don't touch me, and

(24:52):
keep them away from me again. His voice was cracking,
like he was fighting back tears, and all the time
I'd known him, I'd never known Kevin to hack like that.
He looked crazy, his eyes were wild, his face was red,
and he was serious about hurting us if we got
too close. I mean, he moved on Todd so fast

(25:14):
that he fell on his butt, and if me and
Toby hadn't have blocked off when we did, then we'd
probably end up fighting him. We wanted nothing more than
for him to just tell us what had happened in
that house, but if he didn't want to tell us,
then there'd be no getting him to do it. I
guess we just had no choice but to let him go.
I mean, they had nowhere else to go but home,

(25:35):
So after Todd got to his feet, we let Kevin
walk on a while before he turned off in the
direction of his house and disappeared from view. Toby, Todd,
and I then walked back towards their houses because I
didn't want to follow Kevin back in the direction that
he was going, just in case he saw me following
him and decided that he wanted to just beat me up.

(25:55):
I guess I was pretty badly shaken up from still
seeing him like that in the first place. So I
walked with Toby and Todd for a while while we
tried to work out what had happened back in that
old plantation house. Toby was convinced that Kevin had seen
some kind of ghost or spirit, because to him, nothing
else explained why he was so scared, but Todd didn't

(26:16):
buy it. He thought Kevin had seen something something scary
enough for him to react the way that he did,
but it couldn't have been a ghost, because he put it,
ghosts aren't real. He figured it might have been maybe
a dead body, an old blood stained or even like
a man sized cage in the basement. It was something
creepy enough to scare the crap out of him. But

(26:37):
there's no way that Kevin saw a ghost then just
walked out of the building without telling us. It had
disturbed him very deeply, but I guess it wasn't a threat.
It seems ridiculous all these years later, but at no
point did any of us even think to go back
and take a look around that house ourselves, you know,
so we could actually know for ourselves what Kevin had seen.

(27:00):
But we were just kids, man, just scared young kids,
and all we wanted to do was just go home
and hope Kevin would just tell us what had happened
the following evening when we went out trick or treating.
The next day, I remember calling Kevin's house to see
if I could talk to him. His mom answered the phone,
and she sounded just fine at first, but when I
asked if I could talk to Kevin, she said that

(27:22):
he was feeling under the weather and couldn't come to
the phone. I asked if he was okay, and she
said yes, but that he was upstairs taking a nap
after complaining of feeling very sick. I remember pausing for
a few moments, so long that Kevin's mom asked if
I was still there, and only then did I find
it in myself to ask her if he had been
acting strange when he returned home the previous night. It

(27:46):
was her turn to pause just long enough to let
me know that her answer wasn't as natural as she
wanted it to sound, and then told me no, Kevin
had been just fine. He just woke up that morning
feeling a little worse for wear. She wasn't lying, but
she wasn't quite telling the truth either. She was covering
for him, understandably, so she was his mom. But why?

(28:11):
Before I hung up, Kevin's mom said that she had
no reason to believe he wasn't coming trick or treating
with us, and that she'd get him to call me
back whenever he woke up from his nap. I waited
and waited, but got no call from Kevin, so I
decided to just call him a second time, and that's
when I got the news that he was still feeling

(28:31):
under the weather and wouldn't be coming out trick or
treating with us. I was devastated, but not so much
because he wasn't heading out with us. It was more
because I knew that whatever happened was still affecting him,
and in a deep enough way that he turned down
the opportunity to grab as much candy as he could carry.
Trick or treating was huge for all of us, So

(28:52):
for Kevin to miss it was a big deal, and
Todd and Toby knew that too. It was almost impossible
to enjoy ourselves up there, though, so much so that
we ended up heading over to Kev's house to give
him a share of our candy. We were desperate to
see him, desperate to make sure that he was at
least kind of okay. But when we got to his door,

(29:13):
his mom told us that he was too sick for visitors.
And he stayed sick And I put that in quotation
marks for about a week before I got a chance
to get him on the phone, and I asked but
one time if he wanted to talk about what had
happened back in that house. He told me word for
word that if I ever asked about it again, he
wouldn't be my friend anymore. So I didn't. I resisted

(29:37):
the temptation for as long as I knew him, But
keV was never the same kid he walked into that
house as one guy and came out as a different one,
And for the life of us, no one could figure
out why Todd and Toby and I were too scared
to head back into the house on Elizabeth Avenue for
fear of the same thing happening to us. Kevin had

(29:57):
also told the two guys the same thing. He told
me that he didn't want to talk about it under
pain of excommunication, so they ended up biting their tongues
about it too. That wasn't the end of the story, though,
and we didn't think it was any coincidence that the
old plantation house on Elizabeth Avenue ended up getting demolished
not even six months after Kevin walked into it. And

(30:20):
that was the closest I ever came to breaking my
promise and asking what he saw in there, because that
demolition day really was the last chance to see for ourselves.
And again, there wasn't any way in hell that I
was going in there alone, not even in the daytime.
And maybe I should have asked, but I just didn't
want to lose a friend as old as Kevin, even
though he was a little different from the kid I

(30:41):
knew before. Kevin his family stayed in Hattiesburg for about
another year, long enough to graduate eighth grade, and then
he told us one day that he was moving away.
keV moved up to Jacksonville, apparently because his mom wanted
to be closer to her parents during their old age.
When we tried to keep in touch with him, we
always seemed way more interested in continuing the friendship than

(31:03):
he did. Like we'd asked him on the phone if
he ever wanted to come back and visit us, and
he'd always say, I don't know, I'll have to see
what my mom has to say. He was just never
very enthusiastic about it, and eventually Toby and Todd and
I just kind of took that hint, and before long
we lost touch for good. And many years later I

(31:23):
found the Facebook account on what I thought was his name,
but it had no picture attached to the profile, so
there was no way of me really knowing for sure.
I sent a friend request, but it was never accepted,
and I guess Kevin just didn't use it all that much.
I hoped that he'd accept it one day and maybe
get my number off of somebody and give me a call.

(31:44):
But about ten years back we got some bad news.
Kevin had passed a drug overdose, heroine, they said, and
he hadn't even hit forty yet. And at that funeral
we heard from folks who knew him up in Jackson
that he'd been struggling with addiction for years. None of
us had any idea, but it really hit home when

(32:04):
we heard people say that he begged almost everyone for
money whenever he was broke. He never begged any of us,
and hell, I probably have given him all the money
he needed just to talk to him after all those years,
but he didn't reach out. Even in his worst desperation.
He never came back to Hattiesburg, and I think that
has everything to do with what he saw in that

(32:25):
house on Elizabeth Avenue on the night before Halloween all
those years before. At the funeral, I ended up getting
the phone number of Kev's old narcotics anonymous sponsor. He
was the guy who probably knew keV the best up
in Jackson, as he spent a great deal of time
with him in the years leading up to his death.
He talked about his addiction at the funeral, and the

(32:46):
guy told me that if I ever wanted to see
a few less depressing anecdotes regarding Kev's last few years.
I should give him a call. Well, I did give
him a call, but it was only to ask him
if keV had ever mentioned the night of October thirtieth,
way back when we were young, and more specifically what
happened in the house. He told me no, that Kevin

(33:09):
had never mentioned it, not even once, and he and
keV had talked about all kinds of things from his childhood,
even mentioned us a couple of times. I thanked the guy,
hung up the phone and cried, not because I didn't
get to find out Kev's terrible secret, but because I
realized guarding it so hard might have just ended up
killing him. Rest in peace, keV, I still miss you, buddy.

(33:42):
Un Halloween ninth of nineteen seventy seven, the parents of
nineteen month old Nima Louise Carter laid her down in
her crib and kissed her good night. The Carters lived
in Lawton, Oklahoma, a city of around ninety thousand that
serves as the seat of Comanche County. Developed on former
reservation lands of the Kiawa, Comanche and Apache peoples. Lawton

(34:06):
was incorporated in nineteen o one. It was named after
Major General Henry Ware Lawton, who served in the Civil War,
where he earned the Medal of Honor before being killed
in action in the Philippine American War. Lawton's landscape is
typical of the Great Plains, with flat topography and gently
rolling hills, while the area north of the city is

(34:28):
marked by the Wichita Mountains. Although Lawton's economy is still
largely dependent on Fort Sill, it has grown to encompass
higher education, health care, retail, and manufacturing, the latter of
which employed Nema's father, George Carter. After laying their young
daughter down to sleep, the Carters retired to their own

(34:48):
bedroom to get some well deserved rest, But upon waking
the next morning, they discovered they stepped out of their
dreams and into every parent's worst nightmare. Little Sima's crib
was empty and she was nowhere to be found. After
contacting the police, officers were dispatched to the Carter's home,

(35:09):
where statements were taken and a search was performed. The
officers primarily wished to identify the method by which Nima's
abductor had gained entry to the Carter family home, but
after a thorough analysis of the house, they came to
a deeply chilling conclusion. Since Nina's bedroom windows had apparently
remained locked during the night of her abduction, and the

(35:31):
possibility of forced entry had been ruled out, officers were
faced with the horrifying possibility that Nima's abductor had surreptitiously
entered the home during daylight hours before hiding in her
bedroom closet until her parents were asleep. Then and only
then would they had been able to carry little Nima
out of the house without ever alerting her adoring parents.

(35:55):
Nima's abductions sent shockwaves through the local community, with police
encouraging members of the public to be on the lookout
for signs of suspicious activity. No one could fathom why
someone would want to abduct a nineteen month old child,
but it seemed inconceivable that the suspect's intentions were murderous.
The entirety of the search effort that followed hinged on

(36:17):
the possibility that little Nema was still alive and that
some one was holding her with the intention of transporting
her out of state, but the reality was far more horrifying.
Around the month after Nima's abduction, a group of school
children were exploring an abandoned house around four blocks away
from where the Carter family lived. The house had been

(36:38):
heavily vandalized, its insides a mess of broken glass and
rough graffiti, but whoever had once owned the home had
left most of its furnishings behind. As the kids explored
the house, their curiosity drove them to open cabinets and
closets and cupboards, all in the hopes of uncovering some
long lost loot. Yet, until they won entered into the

(37:00):
home's dilapidated kitchen, their fines were all trash and no trinkets. Suddenly,
one of the kids noted the home's fridge and wandered
aloud if there was any food inside. With ghoulish inquisitiveness,
The boy's friends encouraged him to open the appliance's door.
The boy did as they willed him, approached the fridge,

(37:21):
and then swung open the door. But instead of being
greeted by the sight of rotten vegetables and maggot ridden meat,
what the children saw that day would haunt them for
the rest of their lives. Lying on one of the
fridge's bare glass shelves was the suffocated, decomposing body of
little Nema Carter. Lawton has always been something of a

(37:44):
rough and ready place and was no stranger to petty
and sometimes violent crime, but the abduction of children in
the middle of the night was unheard of, or at
least almost unheard of. Just the previous year. On April eighth,
of the night nineteen seventy six, twin sisters Mary and
Tina Carpenter were abducted in broad daylight while they watched

(38:06):
TV in their grandmother's house. According to the report, a
friend of the Carpeter twins unlatched the living room door
before coaxing the two girls outside. The two three year
olds followed, but were soon met by sixteen year old
Jacqueline M. Rubadeaux, who began dragging the girls down the street.
In phone calls to the police, witnesses claimed the Carpeter

(38:30):
twins were crying and trying to free themselves from Rubadeaux's grip.
They urged the police to hurry, but by the time
officers arrived at the scene, Rubadeaux and her two victims
were nowhere to be found. Several years later, in an
interview with local law enforcement, a ten year old Tina
Carpenter said She took us to a house. It was

(38:51):
white near railroad tracks. There were broken furniture inside when
we got in there, she took us to the refrigerator
and told us to get in. She said her aunt
will be there to get us out and take us
for ice cream. Later, the Carpeter twins did as they
were told, too terrified of Rubadeaux to risk her ire,
but once inside, Rubadeaux simply slammed the door closed and

(39:14):
ran away. Two days later, a group of children were
playing in a deserted house when they heard weak groans
coming from a grungy refrigerator. An eleven year old girl
named Cathy Ford and another neighborhood child bravely opened the
refrigerator door and Tina Carpeter tumbled out, exhausted, terrified, but alive. Miraculously,

(39:39):
Tina had survived by breathing through a tiny hole in
the refrigerator. Her twin sister, on the other hand, was
not so fortunate and passed away as a result of
prolong asphyxiation. When police questioned cathy Ford, she claimed to
have immediately asked the exhausted Tina, who locked you in
the fridge. Tina's reply was on most instantaneous and use

(40:02):
the sixteen year old Rubadeau's nickname when she stated Jackie Boo. Rubadeaux,
who happened to be Kathy Ford's babysitter on account of
being friends with her aunt, instantly became the target of
a police investigation. Yet under the assumption that three year
old Tina would prove an unreliable witness, a lack of
physical evidence left the authorities desperate for a straight up confession,

(40:25):
and without it, the investigation quickly stalled. In the end,
the police had no choice but to release Jackie Rubudaux
without charge, but the news was met with apprehension and
unease from those in the local community. People were scared,
real scared, recalled Ray Anderson, investigator for the Comanche County
District Attorney. They were asking themselves, how could this happen?

(40:49):
Why would someone target such a young and innocent child
like that. Folks were going out and buying guns, new
locks for their doors, fitting bars to their kids windows.
You could feel how scared they were. Following her arrest
and release, Jackie maintained a quiet, unassuming presence around town,
and somehow she managed to claw back enough of her

(41:10):
reputation that folks began hiring her to babysit for them again,
and by the fall of nineteen seventy seven she was
a regular babysitter for the Carters, the young Native American
couple who led active week end social lives and was
well acquainted with their infant daughter, Nima. She was also
their first choice of babysitter during the period. An intruder

(41:32):
lifted Nima from her crib with the windows locked, crept
down the hallway of the tiny lotten home, passed her
sleeping parents, and out through the front door. I remember
the next morning like it was yesterday, Nina's father, George
later recalled it was one of those cool, crisp Oklahoma mornings,
a day I might have otherwise enjoyed immensely. Instead, he

(41:56):
and his wife were condemned to endure the worst nightmare
of young parents. Everywhere someone had snatched their infant child.
George later said his heart raced so bad that he
thought he was having a heart attack, and that in
her panic, his wife Rose began frantically searching the most
irrational places. She ran between kitchen cabinets, closets in the

(42:17):
family doghouse. She even checked underneath the house and in
the field behind the backyard fence, but little Lima was
nowhere to be found. During the initial phases of the investigation,
and given the high percentage of parental involvement in missing
child cases, detectives had no choice but to consider George
and Rose Nema's own parents as preliminary suspects. Naturally, we

(42:44):
called them in for questioning, recalled Cecil Davidson, a retired
Loton police detective who worked the case. They agreed to
take lie detector tests in each passed with flying colors.
Once the parents were ruled out as suspects, almost everyone
under the net of suspicion, including neighborhood babysitters Joy Smith

(43:04):
and Jacqueline Rubudeaux. It's amazing that it took us that
long to put it together, recalled Davidson. But someone eventually
remembered that Jackie Rubudeaux had been implicated in an almost
identical crime not even a year before, and after that
it was all eyes on her. When Detective Davidson finally
confronted Rubadeaux regarding Nima Carter's abduction and murder, her response

(43:30):
was cagey, to say the least. Rubudeaux claimed that she
was playing bingo the night Nima disappeared, and at first
her alibi seemed air tight, but as Davidson continued to
question her, he began to doubt Rubudeau's innocence. She was
very quiet, Davidson recalled. She never looked you in the eyes.

(43:50):
Her gaze was always somewhere else, sir, looking at the ground.
She would always get real close to telling you something critical,
and then she'd back right off, like she was scared
to in Criminals. In light of this, Detective Davidson remains
almost convinced of Rubadeau's guilt, but laments the case's lack
of closure. We can never get her to confess, He

(44:11):
later said. The frustrating part was we had no physical evidence,
no finger prints, no footprints, no hair, no blood, nothing.
The only thing I think we really had was this
odd response I got from her about bingo. She was
very angry about the fact that everybody got to play
bingo while she would get stuck babysitting, Davidson explained, And

(44:33):
to this day, I'm convinced Jackie Rubudeaux murdered Nema, but
the district attorney never felt that we had enough to prosecute.
Detective Davidson might be unshakable in his belief, but not
everyone as convinced. Jackie Rubudaux abducted and murdered little Nima Carter,
including her own father, George. Two months prior to Nima's abduction,

(44:56):
the Carters found their dog poisoned. A few days later,
they returned home to discover it was trashed by vandals.
I find it hard to think all those events were
mere coincidence, George said. The Jackie Rubadeaux we knew. No,
it just doesn't add up. I never since that about her.

(45:17):
Whenever Jackie came over, Niema would run up to her
and give her a big hug. But several years ago
I saw an interview with Jackie in a newspaper, and
she said that she was on drugs that time in
her life. Was it someone we knew, George was asked.
I think so, someone who was familiar with our house.
But I've never been fully convinced it was Jackie. George,

(45:39):
whose wife Rose Carter died in two thousand, is plague
by the haunting reality that no one was ever charged
with his infant daughter's murder. He claimed the passage of
a long three decades had helped ease his pain a little, But,
as he so poetically phrased it, quote unanswered questions still
burn within. In the initial aftermath of her murder, detectives

(46:02):
became convinced they'd positively identified Nema's killer in their suspect,
Jackie Rubudeaux. Yet they too have been left with a
sense of unfulfilled justice. My wife and I lived for
years with the what ifs, said George Carter, who was
now an active member of his local church. Nema cried

(46:23):
that night when we put her down to sleep, and
we never got up to check on her. We figured
that we didn't want to spoil her, that she would
eventually go to sleep, he continued, And now I think
that person who took her was already in her room,
probably hiding in the closet. What if we had opened
the closet. What if we had gotten up to check
her that night? What if we brought her into sleep

(46:46):
with us? What if? What if? Hey, friends, thanks for listening.
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