Cottage #4: Mummified Body in Bathtub

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There are people that enter in our lives and for some reason become like family who are there for every big event and holiday. In my family it was Audrey. Audrey was like a Grandmother that I never knew and was around every Thanksgiving and Christmas for the family’s party. She made sure that all the grandchildren got a dollar or two, wrapped around a candy cane. For April, it was Ronald.

After April and her sister moved out of the house on the corner, their Mother decided to downsize into a smaller place. She found a two bedroom cottage on a one acre lot a few blocks away from the house they were renting. This lot also had three other cottages that were rented out to others. One of the renters was Ronald. After a few months of living in the cottage, April’s mother heard a quiet knock at the door. She opened the door a saw this tall, thin, unassuming man, with scruffy beard standing there. He told her that his name was Ronald and he lived in cottage 4. After that initial meeting, Ronald came over many mornings having coffee, muffins or some other breakfast meal. Their conversations were of general subjects, never anything personal. Ronald never like talking about his personal life, especially any male companions that have been in his life or any he may be seeing at the time. He always came to her mother’s cottage and never invited her over to visit his. She never questioned why nor had any reason to suspect anything wrong. Even with that, they still had a special friendship. April and her sister got used to seeing Ronald at their mother’s place every time they came to visit. He was like an uncle to them. On Christmas morning, the girls would sleep in the spare room while Ronald slept on the couch. This friendship was strong for over two years.

One day, out of the blue, Ronald asked April, her mother and sister to start calling him Harry. He explained that it was his middle name and most people know him by that name. They thought it was an odd request for him to make since they have known him as Ronald for over two years. They told him that they would continue calling him Ronald because changing things now would be just plain weird. Shortly afterwards, Ronald started displaying very odd behavior and finally just disappeared without a trace.

April’s mother moved months later without ever knowing what happened. One evening she got a visit from the local police asking questions about Harry. She was worried and wanted to know if he was alright or if he did something wrong. They needed to know any information Harry may have told her because he was a person of interest in an investigation. She mentioned that she referred to him as Ronald and that he never talked about his personal life. She also told them that she never was in his cottage. She gave them as much information as she could remember with some questions of her own. Why the police was interested in Ronald or rather Harry?

In February of 2008, the Phoenix police responded to a call to the address of Ronald’s cottage. The owners were in cottage #4 to clean it out and found a mummified body in the bathtub. They rented this cottage out to an adult male in 1995. They received regular rent payments from 1995 to the summer of 2007, when the payment suddenly stopped. After briefly visiting the cottage and finding it abandoned, they did nothing at that time thinking that the owner would return for his things. They never entered the premises at that time either. But after not receiving any payments after that, they went in the cottage to inspect its conditions. They found it to be stacked from floor to ceiling with trash, personal items and was in extremely deplorable conditions. With the assistance of others, the owners started removing the trash. When they reached the bathtub, they found it covered with plywood and plastic. When they removed the wood and plastic, they found it filled with dirt and sand. As soon as they started removing the dirt, a human leg was exposed and the police were called.

The entire bathtub was removed along with the mummified body and dirt. Upon examination they found that the person buried in the tub had been dead for a number of years and they labeled the death as “unknown”. They are not positive that the body is of the original renter, Ronald, or if it could be someone else. Harry apparently took over Ronald's identity, cashed his checks and lived with his dead body for years. There are so many questions such as, how did they know each other and how did Ronald, or whoever that body belonged to, die? Was he murdered or just died of natural causes? Harry is only a person of interest at this time, with his whereabouts still unknown to this day.

This story was all over the local news in Phoenix and around the world. Because the case is still unsolved, the names of Ronald and Harry have been changed for that reason.

Above is an artist drawing of what Harry looked like.

~~Julie~~

An Urban Legend Memory: The Hook

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I was quite young when I heard this one for the first time. There was a group of us camping and one of the older gentlemen decided that he needed to tell us a story he claimed was true. He said that not too long ago in the area where we were camping, there had been reports all day about an escape murderer from the state insane asylum. This murderer had been described with having a hook where his right arm once was and they were calling him the Hook Man. Everyone in the area was warned to keep a lookout and when he was spotted to report his whereabouts to the authorities immediately. A teenage boy and his date were parked in the dark and desolate area for a little love making. He turned on the radio for some romantic music when an announcer chimed in to report the warning about the escaped murder and that he was in the area they were parked. The girl became increasingly scared and wanted to leave. The boy felt all macho, locked all the doors telling her that they would be just fine, and tried kissing her again. She became more frightened, arguing with the boy, when the car moved a bit as if someone or something was outside and they heard a scratching sound. Frustrated and a wee bit scared, the boy put the car in gear and flew out of there. When they arrived at the girl’s home, she got out of the car and as she began to shut the door, he heard her scream loudly. He ran around to her side of the car and hanging on the door handle was a bloody hook.

I can’t tell you how scared this story made me. The jerk told us that we were camping in the same area and that they never caught the man. Needless to say, I didn’t get any sleep that night and was glad we left for home the next day.

I have many memories of certain Urban Legends, but for some reason this one really scared me. I first heard this story when the Zodiac killer was on a murder spree in California in the late 1960's, so the possibility of the hook man killer was quite real.

--Julie--

Urban Legend: When a Stranger Calls

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Many stories are handed down from generation to generation in the form a modern folklore or urban legends. Urban legends are stories that are spread in various forms that are usually false though believed to be real by those telling them. Some believe that they are based on real events making the tales even more twisted. The substance of these stories usually consists of humor or horror. Sometimes the stories are told around campfires or at slumber parties with the person telling the story holding a flashlight under their chin for visual effects. Many horror movies are based on urban legends of one sort of another. One of the stories circulating around is the one about the babysitter. The horror/thriller movie, "When a Stranger Calls", was based on this very story and scared many of us from babysitting other people's children. I saw the 1979 version of the movie in the theatre with my friends. I am the biggest chicken when it comes to watching horror flicks even though I still loved to watch them. In 1979 there were fewer theatres so waiting in long lines was typical so you wasn't sure which show time you would make. Most of the time I just hated it when a tall person sat in front of me except during a horror flick. But as luck or lack of luck would have it, we ended up in the second row and had a perfectly clear view of the screen. Now I had to depend on squinting my eyes or looking through the fence fingers during the intense scenes. The fence fingers are just my hand in front of my face with my fingers slightly apart enough for me to see the movie. The first part of the movie, which starred Carol Kane as the babysitter, was based on the babysitter urban legend. The story begins with Jill (Kane) at the home of a doctor and his wife watching their children. The children are upstairs sleeping when Jill's terror begins. She receives a phone call from a mysterious man asking her questions about what she is doing and asking “have you checked the children”? At first, she just dismisses the calls as a practical joke but the calls kept coming along with more frightening threats. She becomes so scared that she calls the police. They told her that she needed to keep him on the phone long enough so they can trace the call. Now watch the video and see what happens next.



Although this story has been told many times with different variations of what happen, the basic story is still the same. Some stories say that the babysitter hears heavy breathing with the killing telling her that he is coming to get her. The part where she calls the police, they trace the call and tell her to “get out” because the man is inside the house, is basically the same. The killer getting away and the children being dead are also told the same in this Urban Legend.

The movie, “When a Stranger Calls” goes beyond the Urban Legend letting us know what may have happened afterwards. (If you haven’t seen it then maybe you would not want to read on.) The middle of the movie is slow where we follow the killer, Curt, after he escapes from the asylum and the retired detective, Clifford, tracking him down. We now find Jill as an adult, married with children of her own. Curt just happens to find out where she was living from a newspaper article. Jill and Stephen, her husband, go out to dinner and get a babysitter to watch their two kids. Jill receives a call at the restaurant, answers it only to have the creepy voice of Curt on the other end asking, “Have you checked the children?” Jill freaks out; they call the police and head home to find everything just fine with the babysitter and the children. Later, we see Jill having trouble sleeping, as you can imagine, and in the kitchen getting milk when all of a sudden, the lights go out. She heads back to bed and hears what appears to be Curt’s chilling voice whispering to her from the closet where the door is ajar. She shakes her husband, trying to wake him up, but it was Curt that was in bed with her. He rips her nightgown, chases her around the room, trying to kill her. Officer Clifford shows up in time to shoot Curt and kill him. Jill’s husband was knocked out in the closet and still alive.

During the climax of this movie, I hid my eyes, my friend Mary grabbed my leg and dug her nails in, and my friend Deb’s popcorn, (whatever she had left) was all over the place. Oh my, we sure enjoyed that adrenalin rush. You can’t beat a good horror/thriller movie that has an intense ending. I have seen the more current version of this movie but did not care for it.

There are many urban legends out there; this is just one of them. Look for Mike and myself to blog about other urban legends that have movies made from them or the ones we just like to talk about.