If you're creepy and you know it, clap your hands!
Vol. 25: The Children! The Children!
Oh, let's not forget the sweet little children. It's Halloween-time, and that used to be a holiday for the kids, an exciting night to choose a costume and go trick-or-treating, you know, before we adults decided it was a great excuse to dress up as a slutty cat and get drunk. So let's give this volume over to those little darlings.
Oh, wait... I'm putting this thing together and I'm an awful person. Hmmm. Let's see what happens...
The Creepiest Kids We Know
Most children are sweet, helpful, innocent of all bad thoughts and wrong-doings. You can trust the average child. But I'm countering with a list of the horrible ones that star in our favorite movies and books. “These are fictional characters, children like this don't really exist,” you say. And I answer back with, “What til you get to the last article, smarty-pants.”
1.The Bad Seed- William March published this novel in 1956 and it quickly made itself comfortable in American pop culture, becoming a play and a movie that has been re-made several times. It was ground-breaking in that it was the first time we had seen a young, female psychopath.
Eight year-old Rhoda should be a blubbering mess, what with all the deaths that have occurred lately. Her school mate who beat Rhoda out for an award, a neighbor who had promised Rhoda a coveted snow globe, the family dog...so many death in a short amount of time, yet the girl remains unmoved.
It's unfortunate that March died just a month after his book was published, so he didn't see how successful it became.
2. “Little Girl Vampire” from 30 Days of Night- Yep, that's how we know her, and she's a darling in her hair ribbons and razor sharp teeth. She had a very small part in the comics, and a slightly larger role in the movie, getting two lines, “I'm done playing with this one. You want to play with me now?” It would be a gentle question if she wasn't smeared with blood and crouching over a dying victim.
The 2007 movie role was played by New Zealand actress Abbey-May Wakefield, who is now a news reporter.
3. Anthony from The Twilight Zone's “It's A Good Life”- This is the TZ episode that people will call, “the one about the freaky little kid who turns the guy into a jack-in-the-box”. From 1961, it's the story of little Anthony, who has great and terrible powers that make him the dictator of his town. Able to read minds and twist matter to his own liking and whims, he doles out punishment when he catches someone thinking bad thoughts about him, with the worst punishment being sent to the cornfield, a euphemism for ceasing to exist.
Anthony was played by actor Billy Mumy, who was seven years-old at the time and had a red-hot career, appearing alongside Jimmy Stewart in Dear Brigitte and as a regular on Lost in Space. As an adult he made occasional appearances in movies but became a professional musician, best known for the novelty song “Fish Heads” by Barnes&Barnes.
4. The Children of the Corn Gang- Little pinch-faced Isaac forms the children of a small Nebraska town into a religious cult, one where all the adults must die gruesome deaths. One unfortunate traveling couple is captured and do their best to survive.
Stephen King has written about many horrible children and this isn't his only creation on this list, but here he has created a whole town of murderous little shits who blindly follow their insane leader.
If you've seen the original 1984 movie, here are two bits of information:
1. Isaac, the eleven year-old leader, was played by 5' tall actor John Franklin, who was 25 years old. He went on to play Cousin It in The Addams Family movies.
2. If I had been there, I would have been one of the first poisoned adults in the diner scene. It was in the coffee, and after overhearing that lady murmur “good coffee,” I would have swilled it down like nobody's business and been looking for a refill while my tongue swelled and my eyes crossed.
5. Carrie White- And here's another one of King's creepy kids. Sixteen year-old Carrie would probably have been a happy, popular girl if not for her upbringing by a mother obsessed with sin. But the mother existed, and so did Carrie's incredible powers of telekinesis. Toss in the normal anxiety of prom with the abnormal psyches of her classmates and you've got a powder keg of a teenage girl.
The movie version of 1976's Carrie was played by Sissy Spacek, another 25 year-old stealing a kid's job.
6. Damien from The Omen – Coming out the same year as Carrie, this classic horror is about an American diplomat and his wife who make a too-quick decision to adopt a little baby in Italy. They call him Damien, and there's no better argument for dealing with a reputable adoption agency. With rosy cheeks and piercing blue eyes, Damien is a mostly quiet child, but try to get him into church and all hell breaks loose, which is preferable to, oh, say, his nanny hanging herself in front of a children's party.
Damien was played by Harvey Spencer, who landed the role at four years-old when, during the audition, director Richard Donner asked Spencer to physically attack him to see if he could pull of the church scene. The child attacked, landing a good shot to the groin and a star was born. Spencer has taken just a handful of roles since, becoming an animator, though he did make a 2017 court appearance after going Damien on a couple of cyclists during a road rage incident.
7. The Grady Twins from The Shining- Admit it, you were wondering when these two nightmares were going to be mentioned. When it comes to creepy children, these two in their pale blue dresses and hair ribbons, have become pop culture royalty. Super creepy, yes, so they belong on this list, yet they don't really fit in among these psychotics and vessels of evil because these two are murder victims, murdered by their own father to boot. That's how Danny Torrance, he of the Big Wheel and the shining abilities, is tormented by them, showing him flashes of their bloody bodies and then repeating that monotone, “Come play with us, Danny. For-eveh and eveh and evah.” So are the Grady twins actual ghosts, or is the evil Overlook Hotel playing them on some kind of paranormal loop to drive residents insane?
8. Regan from The Exorcist- If creepy kids had Big Kahuna to look up to, it would be Regan MacNeil. She did it all: power- barfing, crab-walking, mom-smacking, crucifix-defiling, director-murdering, public-urinating ALL. When it comes to creepy kids, especially those of the possessed kind, Regan wrote the book and then barfed on it. Every kid who came after could only dream of terrifying audiences the way Regan did.
Released in 1973, the role was played by thirteen year-old Linda Blair, who received an Oscar nomination, while the film made its production budget back 35 times over.
Now Let's Get Even: Scary Books for Kids
So we've discussed some scary kids who joyfully terrorize adults onscreen. Let's turn the tables by handing the kid in your life a Halloween book that will give 'em a good scare. I'm not suggesting you give a book instead of candy, give it along with candy. Don't be an a-hole.
For the Younger Ones:
Goosebumps, of course, but also the Spooksville series, about a group of kids who live in a town full of supernatural events and a local witch.
For a child who loved Room on the Broom a last year, there's the Worst Witch series by Jill Murphy that published volumes for over 40 years, and the Scary Godmother series by Jill Thompson.
Author Eva Ibbotson has many fun and slightly spooky books, like Dial-A-Ghost and Which Witch?
If your kid liked A Series of Unfortunate Events, jump to the Tales from Lovecraft Middle School series by Charles Gilman.
Finally, read the Native American folklore tale of Skeleton Man by Joseph Bruchac together. It's the story of a young girl who can't find her parents, but a creepy man she's never seen before claims to be her new guardian.
For Middle School Kids:
The Echo Falls Mystery series by Peter Abrahams begins with Down the Rabbit Hole. Quirky Ingrid goes looking for her lost shoe and finds a murder.
How To Disappear Completely and Never Be Found by Sara Nickerson is a mystery too. Margaret, her mom and sister move to a small island in the Pacific Northwest, where Margaret finds a friend in a comic book-obsessed boy, and a mystery at the local library.
The Magic Forest, the amusement park in Closed for the Season by Mary Downing Hahn, has been closed for years. Two bored friends, Arthur and Logan, start researching the unsolved murder of a local woman. The killer doesn't like that.
J.W. Ocker has three that fits this age group are Death and Douglas, the story of a young boy whose family runs a New England funeral home. He and his friends have their lives changed when the body of a murdered woman arrives.
The next is The Smashed Man of Dread End, the story of the kids who live on a dead end street who have spent their lives being terrorized by the monster who can seep into any of their homes.
Ocker's latest is The Black Slide. The slide appears on the playground one day, but the kid who plays on it will regret it.
For Teens:
The Cirque Du Freak series by Darren Shan is the story of high-schooler Darren, who becomes the assistant to a vampire circus performer.
My Best Friend's Exorcism by Grady Hendrix delivers on both scares and laughs.
This is the right age to introduce them to Shirley Jackson, Queen of the Creeps. If your teen has already read The Lottery in school, hand them The Haunting of Hill House or We Have Always Lived in the Castle.
Norman Partridge's Dark Harvest has the young men of a hamlet having to hunt a pumpkin-headed creature each year. The winner is allowed to leave town, or so the rules say.
Carrie by Stephen King may be the ultimate teen horror novel. A sixteen year-old with the ability to move, shift and destroy with just a thought. Sure, what's not to love?
And now for something really scary...
The Horrible and True Story of Mary Bell
It's an unfortunate truth that children are murdered. Smaller and more vulnerable, they are easier targets for adults, particularly an adult who is in the child's everyday circle.
But every once in a while society must deal with a murderer who is a child themselves, and we are left questioning how someone so young could even think of committing such a horrible act, and what is the legal system to do with that child. Mary Bell was unusual because she was female, and because she was just ten years-old when she committed her first murder.
Mary and her mother, Betty McCrickett, lived in the Scotswood suburb of Newcastle upon Tyne, in the Northeast region of England called Northumberland. Scotland sits on top of the region like a tilted cap, while just a little east of the city is the North Sea. Newcastle itself is bordered by the River Tyne has a long history of ship building. The citizens have an equally long history of financial struggles, with Victorian slums still undergoing demolition in the time of Mary's childhood in the 1960s, something that would continue in the 70s. The last coal mine in the area closed in 1956, making the economic situation worse.
Mary had been born on May 26th, 1957 to an unmarried seventeen year-old named Elizabeth “Betty” McCrickett who worked as a prostitute, and within a few years of Mary's birth, a dominatrix. Mary was Betty's second child, as she already had a daughter named Catherine, but Betty lacked maternal affection and reportedly refused to hold her newborn. Figuring out Mary's paternity is nearly impossible, but when Mary was a baby Betty married a man named Billy Bell, a violent alcoholic criminal who contributed little to the household, but this was the man Mary grew up believing was her biological father, and maybe he was. The marriage was brief, but both Betty and Mary took the name “Bell”.
Betty's family saw that the baby, then toddler, was frequently hurt when alone with her mother, and they suspected Betty of physical abuse. Relatives tried to talk Betty into giving them care of Mary but Betty refused, though once she either sold or gave Mary away to a woman she met on the street, a complete stranger. Mary's sister Catherine, barely older, found Mary and brought her home.
Mary grew into a beautiful little girl who was known among her classmates to be a liar and thief who often derailed the lessons with her behavior. Mary's home was filthy, and Betty would frequently leave her daughter with friends or relatives, which must have been a relief to the child. As an adult, Mary said that her mother began offering her daughter up to her customers for abuse.
Mary was expressing anger from a young age, saying she would like to hurt people, and she remained a bed-wetter. Children in these insecure situations are frequently loners, but Mary was not. She had a best friend next door, a girl named Norma Bell (no relation) who was a few years older than Mary but who complimented Mary's domineering personality by being a faithful follower. Norma appears to have been the only child who didn't avoid Mary, as she was known to attack other children, choking them and even filled a little girl's mouth with sand in an attempt to suffocate her. One schoolmate would later recall that the children learned to recognize the angry glare Mary would direct at a child she was about to attack.
On May 11th, 1968, a three year-old boy was found wandering around the neighborhood with multiple bleeding head wounds. He said he had been playing with Mary and Norma on the roof of an old air raid shelter when one of the girls, he didn't see which, shoved him off the edge, to plummet seven feet down to the ground. The same day, the parents of three little girls reported that their daughters had been strangled by Mary and Norma.
Police went to the homes of both girls, where Mary denied having anything to do with either incident, but Norma admitted that she'd watched Mary choke the girls, who had been playing in a sandpit. She told the police she'd asked Mary, “What happens if you choke someone? Do they die?” Mary took this as a challenge, walking up to the sandpit and chocking each girl until they turned purple. The police warned the girls about such behavior, notified local authorities about the two violent girls, and that was it. They simply didn't know what to do about the girls.
Two weeks later, May 25th, was the day before Mary's eleventh birthday, and it was the day she took her first victim. She lured a neighbor boy, four year-old Martin Brown, into an upstairs room of a crumbling Victorian house that was slated for demolition, as were many of the Victorians in the area. She strangled him to death. She managed to leave without being seen even though children commonly played among the debris. Within hours Martin's body was discovered by three playing children, which brought a workman. The boy appeared unharmed aside from some flecks of blood and foam around his mouth, and the man attempted CPR, but as he worked he saw two girls standing in the doorway watching. He told them to go away, thinking he was protecting them from the awful sight, but the girls, Mary and Norma, went to the home of Martin's aunt, Rita Finlay. When she answered the door, she was told, “One of your sister's bairns (babies) has had an accident. We think it's Martin but we can't tell because there's blood all over him.”
Martin's body showed no signs of violence and the postmortem failed to discover a cause of death.
The next day, Mary's birthday, Mary and Norma pulled tiles of the roof of a school and gained entry. They vandalized the rooms, smearing paint and ink and upturned the furniture. They also left four crudely written notes admitting, anonymously, to having killed Martin Brown. One read, “WE did murder martain brown fuckof you bastard”, while another said, “I murder SO That I may come back”.
May 29th the was day of Martin Brown's funeral. Mary and Norma knocked on the Brown's door that day and asked June Brown if they could see her son. She told them that her son was dead, to which Mary replied, “Oh, I know he's dead. I want to see him in his coffin.”
On July 31st, three year-old Brian Howe was playing in the street in front of his home with his siblings, the family dog, Lassie, and Mary and Norma. Somehow, Mary and Norma lured him from his family.
After hours of searching, Brian's body was found among the rubble of an old construction site, wedged between concrete blocks and covered in torn-up clumps of grass. A pair of broken scissors were nearby. He'd been strangled, but also stabbed, and the letter “M” was lightly cut into his stomach. A clump of his hair had been cut away. Upon examination, it was the coroner who surmised that, due to the lack of pressure used in both the strangulation and mutilation, the killer was a child.
Detectives were brought in from all over Northumberland and over 1200 children were interviewed, including Mary and Norma. Witnesses had seen the girls playing with Brian that day, and both girls admitted they had played with him before lunch, their stories almost matched, but while Norma was nervous, the detective questioning Mary felt she was sly and taciturn. The detective went back the next day to question Mary again, and this time she named a neighbor boy, saying she had seen him holding a pair of scissors and had seen him hit Brian. The officer, DCI James Dobson, knew he was speaking to Brian's killer. The police had held back any mention of scissors.
On August 4th, Norma's parents called the detectives to their home. Norma wanted to talk to them. DCI Dobson arrived, and Norma had a new story, now claiming that Mary had shown Norma little Brian's body after the fact, that she hadn't taken part in the murder. Mary had also pointed out the letter she had cut into the boy's stomach, done not with the scissors but with a razor blade, which Mary had then buried. After listening to so much lying from both girls, DCI Dobson took Norma to the site Brian's body had been found and had her retrieve the razor blade.
Police went next door and confronted Mary with this new evidence and Norma's story. The confident eleven year-old told the officers, “I will get a solicitor to get me out of this.” Meanwhile, Norma and her parents were becoming increasingly frantic and called the police to their home again. Now Norma admitted to being present at Brian's murder but claimed she ran away when Mary tried to involve her in the actual strangulation.
On the day of Brian Howe's funeral, DCI Dobson turned up at the house. It was a time when the deceased would be kept in the front room or parlor of the family home, in the coffin, until the funeral began, and the detective stood outside while the child's coffin was brought out to begin the procession. He was shocked to see that Mary Bell was also standing outside the home, and that she began laughing when the coffin appeared. If Dobson had the slightest doubt about Mary being the murderer, it disappeared. Seeing her laughing made him even more determined to charge her, despite her age.
Both girls were arrested that night. Now Mary was turning on Norma, saying she had been present as Norma killed the boy, and she confessed to the school break-in too.
Both girls went through psychiatric evaluations, with Norma found to be developmentally slow, having the mental capacity of an eight year-old and a submissive personality, while Mary was determined to be a psychopath.
Their trial began December 5th, 1968, and was presided over by Mr. Justice Ralph Cusack. Both girls had individual solicitors and both pleaded not guilty. From the first, the judge made the rare decision to allow media to cover the trial, something that didn't regularly happen in juvenile trials. This is why the names, photos and proceedings became known.
Both girls testified in their own defense and both named the other as the actual killer. Norma's mother testified that a few months previous, her husband had found Mary strangling their eleven year-old daughter and had to punch Mary to make her release the girl.
The trial lasted nine days. The jury retired briefly and returned with their verdicts: Mary was found guilty of the reduced charge of manslaughter on both counts. She avoided the murder charges because of her age. Surprisingly, Mary's mother was present during the trial and cried when the verdict was read.
Norma was acquitted of all charges. She returned home and was mostly left alone by the press. Very little is known about her subsequent life.
Mary was given a sentence of “detained at Her Majesty's pleasure,” which meant an indefinite sentence.
Mary, left. Norma, right
She was moved around to several youth facilities for the next couple of years, and made her first bid for parole less than five years after sentencing. In 1977, when she was twenty, she and another female inmate escaped to the holiday seaside town of Blackpool to meet up with some men. Mary was found days later in a man's home and returned to prison with a month's suspension of privileges as a punishment.
She received work release in late 1979 and worked as a secretary and waitress. She was officially released from prison in May 1980, at twenty-three years old. She had served just under twelve years. She petitioned and was allowed to change her name.
She gave birth to a daughter in 1984, father unknown. She moved frequently. The media discovered them in 1998, forcing Mary to call for a police escort as she and her teenage daughter left town. Though Mary collaborated on a book about her crimes and was paid for her interviews, when the media began reporting on her life in the late 90's, she petitioned the High Court and received a lifetime anonymity order for herself and her daughter, which made it illegal to track or publish information about them. When her daughter had a baby, the order was extended to that child also.
Oh shit, forget I said anything