2. Kid Stuns Detective
I was very young—probably seven or eight years old. My mother had gone to the store and left me alone—this is the early 1980s in a small town in Mississippi y’all, it was a different time. It had to be a Saturday morning because I was watching cartoons and I heard a knock on our front door. We didn’t have a window or a peephole since, again y’all, it’s a small town in nowhere Mississippi.
So I opened the door and there’s an elderly man standing there, bleeding from the head. He was wearing these thick gold coke bottle glasses, a bright red short-sleeved shirt with a pocket protector, blue jeans, and a belt buckle that had “Eddie” engraved on it in big letters. He said he was in a car accident down the road, and if I could please call for help.
He said his wife was still trapped in the car. I told him to come and sit down on our couch, he did and I shut the door. I went into the kitchen and called our local emergency department and told them about the accident. When they asked where the accident happened, I realized I didn’t know so I yelled out to the man “What road did this happen on?” and I got no answer.
I told the operator to hold on, walked into the living room and the man was gone. I didn’t hear our squeaky door open so I knew he didn’t leave. Also there was an imprint on the couch from where he had been sitting. I looked in my bathroom to see if maybe he had gone in there to wash the blood off his head and he wasn’t there. I also looked in my bedroom and my mom’s bedroom, nothing. I guess he’d left.
When I came back to the phone I told the emergency operator that the old man was gone and I didn’t know he had left. I gave them my address and some officers and firefighters came to my house. I told them about what had happened, what the man had been wearing, everything. The officers searched the area and found nothing.
They talked to my neighbors who said they didn’t hear anything and didn’t see anyone matching the man’s description. By this time, my mom got back home. She was mad at me and I got in trouble for making a false emergency call. Months later, when I got off the school bus one afternoon, there were squad cars everywhere at my house.
A detective was waiting inside with my mom and he said he wanted to ask me some questions about the phone call that I’d made about the man asking for help a few months previously. So, I told him the story again, and gave him the man’s description. After I was done he just sat there staring at me with his mouth hanging open.
He thanked me for my time, told me I wasn’t in trouble, and they gave me an officer teddy bear. They talked to my mom for a bit and left. After they had been gone a few minutes my mom called me back into the dining room and sat me down at the table. That’s when I learned the disturbing truth. The detective had said that they’d found a car that had driven off the road less than a mile from our house and had found two bodies inside—one was thought to be male and the other female.
The car was completely destroyed and upside down, about 60 yards off the road in a very rural and heavily wooded area, which is why it took them so long to find them. The body thought to be male was wearing the exact same clothes I had described. Both of them were pinned inside the car upside down…and both were still wearing their seat belts. My family and friends treated me really weird for a long time.