scary horror tales

fractured

My name is Sophia Radcliffe, and I am a retired Social Worker with the Ministry of Children and Family Development. I am only writing this because I am no longer working with the ministry, and have no obligations to keep my personal experiences to myself, however I will not use real names to protect the identity of the survivors. I have been given permission to share this story by my former client, Mrs. Sanderson, who is the only other person who knows the truth.

In the winter of 2003, I was given a case that would be the deciding factor in entering my early retirement. I had been a social worker for fourteen years by this point, and I honestly believed I had seen it all, but this case was interesting to say the least. The six-year-old girl that I was going to be working with had just been placed in the psychiatric ward of a nearby hospital, and I was to meet with her every week until she was considered well enough to be moved to a foster home.

The following information is what I am able to share from her case file, news reports and the research that followed:

The girl's father was a Lieutenant in the military and had been overseas when she was born, unaware of her existence until he came home to find his wife with a two year old girl. Unfortunately, Lieutenant Allan Blake returned with severe Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and had begun to suffer from paranoia believing that his wife had cheated on him, and that the girl wasn't even his own daughter.

His wife, Katharine tried everything she could think of to convince him, even going so far as to take the family to get a paternity test, but by then the damage had been done. In his attempts to overlook his crumbling mental health, Allan took to heavy drinking and pushed himself away from his family, occasionally interacting with his wife, though he ignored the girl completely. According to their family Doctor, Katharine regularly brought her daughter in for checkups, and he had suspected that she was being abused. However with the mother saying everything was alright, and having no proof that the bruises were anything other than playtime injuries, the doctors kept quiet and decided to simply keep and eye on them.

I remember hearing the news story just a few nights before, on Christmas Eve, about a man who had attacked his wife and daughter with the knife they had used to carve the turkey. A neighbor reported that he had been watching for his brother and sister-in-law to come for dinner, and noticed that the power in the Blake home suddenly went out, and that the only source of light was from the fireplace in the living room. Wanting to be helpful, the neighbor headed over with a couple flashlights and candles, but stopped when he saw a strange looking man in a suit standing in the living room with Katharine, who was holding the poker to the fireplace while covered in blood. Horrified, he ran back to his home and called the police.

When police arrived at the scene, Allan was dead, having been beaten to death with the poker, and Katharine herself was bleeding out, with over twenty cuts on her body, screaming about a thin man that had broken into her home before she died of a sudden heart attack. The girl seemed to be unharmed, though highly disturbed by the events, and was brought to the hospital for further monitoring, just in case. Though as it turned out, the girl had her share of trauma, screaming whenever she saw a reflective surface, screaming about the same thin-man that had terrified her mother.

Nine years passed, and the girl, named Kenna, had long been released and sent all kinds of homes in an attempt to find a family that could help her with her unusual symptoms. She had been diagnosed with paranoia and schizophrenia, and was still unable to bear looking in the mirror for fear of seeing the figure that had haunted her since her parents deaths. I remember one day when she told me that if she did look in the mirror long enough, she could hear him whispering to her, though when I asked what he was saying, she refused to say another word.

It was on Kenna's fifteenth birthday that I told her I found a family that was willing to take her in and help her keep healthy. I had been visiting with them for weeks, scheduled and unscheduled, so that I could see them at their best as well as their worst, and was confident I had found a good fit. Mrs Sanderson had a well kept home, a nineteen-year-old daughter named Gwen, and two sons, Heath and Paul, aged seventeen and sixteen respectively. The family was fully prepared for her, adding another bed to Gwen's room and clearing the one side of posters and belongings so that Kenna could have her own space. To my pleasant surprise, they had even gone so far as to install small curtains over all of the mirrors in the house, so they could be easily covered when they were not in use, to minimize the chances of her having a breakdown.