Читать книгу Real Monsters, Gruesome Critters, and Beasts from the Darkside - Brad Steiger - Страница 63

In June 2004, I received a very disturbing letter from a teenager named Lisa who said that she and her parents first noticed something was wrong when her little brother, Bobby (age 6) started to get bruises and cuts on his arms and legs.

In Lisa’s account of the frightening and painful encounters:

We would ask Bobby what was wrong, and he would say, “That man who comes into my bedroom hits me with a belt.”

Mom would roll her eyes and clean the cuts. Then one night, when he went to bed he acted scared, and he asked Mom to sleep with him. Mom told him no, but she turned on the night light.

The next morning when Bobby got up, he had a cut below his right eye. Mom figured he scratched himself, so she cut his fingernails.

Then a week later, he got a large bruise on his back. It covered both his shoulder blades. It really hurt him, so Mom took him to the doctor to see if he had something wrong with him. The doctor asked if he had a babysitter or someone we didn’t know very well watching him, because the bruises were probably from a beating, since he had so many of them.

They would ask Bobby what was wrong, and he would say, “That man who comes into my bedroom hits me with a belt” (art by Ricardo Pustanio).

Mom never had anybody baby-sit us, and she told the doctor this.

On a Monday, Mom woke Bobby for school. He said his arm really hurt, and he started screaming.

Mom rushed him to the hospital. His arm was broken. I learned from a neighbor while Bobby and Mom were in the hospital that a man used to live in that house in the 1960s with his two sons and daughter. They were all under seven years of age. He beat them, and one, the older son, even died from a beating. He was arrested, and killed himself in jail.

The younger boy and girl still lived in the neighborhood. I went to school with one of their children, and I went over to visit. When Mom came to pick me up, the daughter noticed Bobby’s broken arm. She asked Mom what happened, and Mom told her of the strange things that had been happening in Bobby’s room.

The girl got a look of terrible fear on her face. She advised Mom to move away. She said she didn’t know about ghosts, but she was sure Bobby was in danger.

The neighborhood was going to the dogs anyway, so we decided to move. We heard that a few months later that a family had moved in with a month old baby. The next day, the baby was found dead in its crib. It had a huge cut across its chest, and a bruised face. I guess you couldn’t even recognize the baby.

The parents were tried for child abuse and the death, but no evidence was ever found that they did anything to their baby so they were released.

I am nineteen now. I was about ten years old when all this went on, but I remember enough to know that the ghost of that terrible man was abusing my brother.