By sheikysheik
To start out, this story sort of takes place on and off again throughout most of my life. It starts out as a typical “my parents got a divorce when I was young” situation, but it unfolded into so much more. In fact I’m still picking up pieces of everything that happened. Just a warning, this is a super long story. I don’t blame you if you lose interest halfway in… there’s a lot of backstory that I feel is important to understanding what happened.
As it stands now, my father is dead. It was ruled a suicide, but I think that was only half of what happened. I’ll talk about everything that lead up to this, but more importantly, I believe that Mary definitely had a hand in what happened.
My mother and father divorced when I was around 4. Almost everyone I know has gone through some sort of similar situation. I have two brothers, one older and one younger. We saw him about every other weekend, he paid child support… you get the gist. One weekend visit, my father introduces us to a woman he’s seeing, named Mary. Her eyes and hair are dark, and her skin is pale. She had an obsession with the color red. Something was immediately off to me, but I didn’t really start to know what she was capable of until later.
I didn’t know it at the time, but Mary is one of the main reasons my parents got divorced. My father cheated on my mother with her. He met her while he was working as a waiter at a Red Lobster. When he moved over to his career at a casino as a slot-machine repairman, she followed. Mary would follow my dad anywhere. They got married pretty quickly after my mother and father divorced. I never even knew there was a wedding until later.
My mother hated her, but she never bad-mouthed my father or Mary in front of my brothers and I. She felt that it was important for us to make judgments for ourselves, even if this woman was part of the reason her marriage was broken up. We continued to visit what was now “Dad and Mary’s house” on our scheduled time with Dad. I always associated their house with red--Their house was always decorated with strawberries, Mary liked red sheets, she had red sweaters and pants… It was weird.
Mary was just unnecessary drama for awhile. Things like buying us toys that we could only keep at Dad and Mary’s house or saying that she and my father wanted to custody of us instead of my Mom… I feel like these things were harmless in a way. Every divorcing couple probably has some sort of variation.
Things carried on like this for a couple of years. We would have a special variation of Christmas or Easter or whatever aside from what we celebrated with my mom. I was about 7 or 8 when I remember the first incident that confirmed that I knew this wasn’t right. My little brother was a super curious child, and he was about 4. He had scooted a dining table chair to the fridge to get to a cereal box on top, and when he reached up, he pulled down a handgun instead of the cereal box. I panicked and got my dad, who acted really funny about it. My memory is fuzzy, but I remember going home early that weekend. My dad didn’t know the gun was there because it was Mary’s.
It was at this point that my mom started to have trouble with us going over there. My father got worse about being able to come pick us up. He was unreliable for the most part to begin with, but I know that he was ten times worse when he was around Mary.
My mom told me later, when I was much older, that Mary called our house around the time of the gun incident and said, “I want your life.”
My mother is a really tough lady. She grew up in East LA in California. This scared her. She was going to get a restraining order soon.
I guess what Mary meant was that she wanted my mom’s stability. Even as a single mom with three kids, she was doing very well for herself, and even dating. But even so, how long had she obsessed with my mom before she and my father ever got divorced? What did that even mean?
Not long after the phone call, my mom heard her car being smashed into one night. Someone had taken a brick and smashed the driver window. Nothing was taken. I know it was Mary. We had no way to prove it, but I just know.
My dad and Mary had a baby. Her name is Madison. I only remember holding/playing with her for so long. I can’t imagine all the shit she’s been through.
My mom met and married my step-dad pretty soon after that, and they decided that it would be best to move to Florida. We had other family there, and there weren’t many jobs where we were living in Tennessee. I don’t remember any problems at all when we were so far from my dad and Mary.
We stayed for about a year, and then we moved back to Tennessee. My step-dad was able to get a better job again, and we were closer to my mom’s parents. This is when the phone calls start. As soon as we moved back, we would get phone calls where someone would just listen for a few minutes, and then hang up. The numbers were always blocked… but I’m sure it was her. She always knew where we lived because we started seeing my dad again.
The calls continued for years. It became like an inside joke. We all knew who it was, but there wasn’t anything we could do. My father denied it. Any time I asked him about it, he took her side. We fell into this thing where my mom was the bad guy, and any time I questioned my dad and Mary’s behavior, they were sure my mom was putting me up to it.
Things escalated one night when my dad came to pick us up for a visit. My mom and Mary ended up getting into a fist fight, where Mary swung first, and my mom punched her so hard she fell backwards. My brothers and I watched from the apartment we were living in at the time. Mom went immediately to the police, but my dad and Mary never even called. My mom didn’t press any charges and the whole incident sort of faded away.
We ended up moving into a big house a while after that, where we still are today. Dad and Mary started to have problems and split up. I thought maybe she would be gone for good, or at least gone for the most part, but she never really went away.
My dad started to become a person we could somewhat rely on again when she was gone. I got to know my little sister more (the baby they had), and things were ok. She started coming around again, though. Whenever she was with my dad in front of us, she would whisper in his ear. My dad would drink more. He became physically ill-looking, and would start to gain weight. We could always tell when Mary was around because the difference was so drastic. He even officially divorced her at one point, but it was obvious that they still got together off and on.
My brothers and I went on with our lives, and we became too old for visiting the way we were. Whole weekend visits became just going to see my dad for an evening. The whole time, however, the phone calls never stopped. They weren’t as frequent, but they were there in the background. Like a reminder that she was always there lurking.
When I got into high school, visits from my dad just about stopped altogether. We usually talked on the phone here and there, and I saw him when I had events like a marching band competition, a formal dance… Milestones like graduating high school. It was pretty common to go awhile without hearing from him sometimes. Mary was only a thought. I hadn’t seen her in years. I never saw her anywhere, at all. The phone calls had stopped, but only because we had gotten rid of the house phone.
I was a freshman in college, and I remember it being right around Halloween of 2009. I was shopping with my Aunt for some cheap decorations at the Wal-Mart by my house. I saw a woman walking slowly behind us, and my aunt and I both did a double take. It was Mary. She was totally following us around the store. She looked like she was maybe 50 years older than when I last saw her and her clothes were disheveled. My aunt kept elbowing me to go talk to her because we weren’t exactly sure if this really was her. It could have been someone who just looked really similar.
I worked up the nerve and went up to her. “Is your name Mary?” I asked.
“Yes, it is. Hi, Samantha. How are you?”
Using my name like that really caught me off guard. She knew who I was, and wasn’t bothering to talk to me. She didn’t even act like she was being caught. I asked her if she had talked to my dad lately, because it had been awhile since I heard from him.
She swore up and down that she hadn’t spoken to him for months, which I later found out was a lie. This was the beginning of my dad going missing. After I saw her, something happened, and it’s hard to pin down what, but he completely disappeared.
His cell phone was shut off, and when I called his work at the casino, where he had been working for over 15 years, they said that he was no longer working there, and couldn’t tell me why.
My mom and brothers and I called the police to file a missing persons report. We didn’t have to wait because it had already been several weeks since we had heard from him. They helped us make a flyer, and we looked and asked all over. Everything lead back to Mary most likely being the last one to see him. By the time we started talking to her, it was mid-November.
My mom and I called Mary, and she would told that she had, in fact, seen my dad on the night after Halloween. Mary told us that he was making a noose and this would be the last time anyone ever saw him. We honestly didn’t know what to believe. My dad was an alcoholic. It wasn’t uncommon for him to say dramatic stuff… but we never considered suicide.
When we told the detectives what Mary told us, they had her come in for questioning. She had told the detectives a completely different story, and her dates kept changing. There wasn’t any evidence of anything, though, so there wasn’t much they could do.
The detectives did, however, tell us that we shouldn’t talk to her any more. To quote them, “We don’t know what she’s capable of.”
Things went on like this until they found him on January 4th, 2010. My dad was found dead in a storage unit. He had pulled his car in, shut the unit door, and let it run until he died, and he had been there for sixty-three days. There were several suicide notes, all dated for November 2nd--one for my mom, one for each of his children. But there was an especially long note for Mary, where he doted on her and talked about what a wonderful woman she was. The suicide note even said for her to take any insurance money and use it on herself. The date on the notes was so close to the date where Mary said she had seen him. There are a million things that could have happened, but I know that she had something to do with it.
Even if my father really did kill himself, I know that she helped push him over the edge. I’m not one to just blame someone… I know my father was a troubled man. He was an alcoholic, and he was a depressant most of the time (usually because of Mary). But there’s something so frustrating and horrendous about this woman, and there’s zero evidence for me to prove anything against her.
She wasn’t allowed to come to the funeral. My mom and parts of his family put everything together. There wasn’t anyone he knew that hadn’t heard of her, and everyone felt that she was a bad woman.
I found a Facebook profile of hers months after they found my dad. There were only five or six photos of her and some guy obviously happy, and they were all dated for January 4th, 2010. The next year, on January 4th, 2011, she showed up at my family’s house. We didn’t let her in the house, and she kept saying something about having some stuff of my dad’s in the car. We told her to leave or else we would call the police. That night, someone put red tissue paper in and around our mailbox.
Even the next year, 2012, she called my mom and asked her to meet her in a Sonic Burger parking lot. She said she had a box of my dad’s stuff to give us. My mom made my step-dad go instead of her, but she never showed. I feel like she wanted to do something bad to my mom.
The next year, we didn’t hear from her. I did some research, and it turns out that she was put in jail for making meth. It made a lot of sense for some of the things, but I still have so many questions and issues that are unanswered.
Supposedly she was let out sometime last year, (summer of 2014 I think). The correctional facility she was at has a website, and it says that she was let out for good behavior and rehab. I found a different Facebook that showed her with some other family. God help them if she’s pulling the same crap as she did with mine.
Today, I have no idea where she is. And until I can move far away...
I don't want to see Mary ever again.
(A/N: Link to story~ http://www.reddit.com/r/LetsNotMeet/comments/2z5lyb/scary_mary/)