As a teenager, my mother lived next door to a family with a "disturbed" teenager daughter, Pearl, and a younger son. One night, in 1947 or 48, my mother was listening to the radio on a hot summer night. The song Moonlight Serenade was playing when she heard the strangest, most unearthly howl. It came from the alley between the two houses. My mother ran downstairs to see what was happening.
There she saw my grandmother comforting the woman from next door, who seemed completely frantic and incoherent. She has clearly been the one who howled. My grandmother, being my grandmother, told my mother, a 16 year old girl, to go next door to see what the matter was. Being my mother, my mother obeyed.
This all happened pretty quickly, because as my mother crept up the stairs of the house next door, through the open front door she heard Moonlight Serenade--the radio was tuned to the same station my mom has been listening to. She pushed the door open and quietly said "hello?" a few times.
The song played on and mom ventured deeper into the house.
She came into the living room and turned to look at the couch. There the younger boy lay, his head bashed in, his glistening brains visible, an eye staring up, out of its socket. My mother recoiled and put her hand up to her mouth, but didn't scream, because at that moment she was overwhelmed by the sensation of being watched. Directly behind her was a closet, and as she turned to head for the door she saw that the closet door was slightly ajar. She moved toward the open door very, very slowly, still feeling eyes on her, until she got within about ten feet of the front door -- overwhelmed with fear she ran as fast as she could and got out, scrambling down the stairs and back into her house.
It turns out the parents next door has left Pearl in charge of her brother, despite the fact that she'd just been discharged from one of her stays in the mental ward. The father has dropped his wife off in front of the house and drove off to do something, we were never told what, so she was left to make the discovery on her own.
My grandmother called the police and they came to the house, where they quickly found Pearl grasping a bloody claw hammer -- in the living room closet.
We were told this story many times as kids but I was never sure it was true until I found a newspaper article about it on google news about five years ago. My father, bastard that he was, told us little kids that Pearl had escaped from the insane asylum and people sometimes heard her voice on my street, very late at night.
