Author: Sarah Jones

After Jason died, I spent the rest of that winter, all of spring, and most of the summer couch surfing. I was drifting from one place to another, trying to figure out what the hell came next. I didn’t really have a home. I didn’t really have much of anything.

Then, sometime around August or September of 2020, I finally got an apartment of my own. It was a townhouse, and on paper it was exactly what I needed: a place to land, a place to breathe, a place that was finally mine.

The problem was that I hadn’t really been alone in a very long time. And being alone was harder than I expected.

Before long, my mom moved in with me. Then I met Robbie, and eventually he moved in too. So there we were: me, Mom, and Robbie, all living together in my little townhouse.

Robbie and I noticed pretty quickly that there was something strange about the place. We started seeing things. Little figures would peek around the staircase from upstairs while we were sitting in the living room. They looked like children. We’d catch glimpses of them and then they’d be gone. It was creepy as hell.

There was also a dog. My mom and I would sometimes see what looked like a dog walking behind the fainting couch in her bedroom. You couldn’t see the whole animal, just this long ghostly tail bobbing up and down behind the couch, as if it were walking past us. There was never any explanation for the dog. None of the research I did ever mentioned one.

Then one night, Robbie and I went to the casino. When we came home, it was late, and there was a man standing outside in civilian clothes holding an AK-47. He looked at us and said, “You need to get in the house.”

So we did.

We went inside and started peeking through the blinds. Before long, there were police everywhere. They were at the townhouse directly across from ours, where a man lived with his pregnant girlfriend. I’d talked to him before. He always seemed incredibly nice, kind, friendly, gentle. The kind of guy you wouldn’t think twice about.

The police took him away in handcuffs.

Eventually I went outside for a cigarette. I don’t smoke in the house, and after the police told me it was safe, I sat outside and smoked while trying to make sense of what had just happened. That’s when they told me why they’d arrested him. He was wanted for murder in California. Years earlier, he had allegedly killed a woman, and the police had discovered a body in one of the storage units at the back of our complex, one he’d rented under the radar.

I remember thinking: You have got to be fucking kidding me.

I already had a haunted apartment. Now the seemingly nice guy across the street was a suspected murderer. But while I was sitting outside, I overheard the police talking about something else. They mentioned a murder-suicide that had happened years earlier in the same complex.

Well. Naturally, I needed to know if it had happened in MY townhouse. The police wouldn’t tell me. So I went inside and did what any reasonable person would do: I started doing some Nancy Drew shit.

I searched. I called around. I dug through old newspaper archives. Eventually I found a Tulsa World article about it. A man had killed his wife and two of their children inside that townhouse before killing himself. Their children were Caroline, who was five, and Franklin, who was three. There had also been a much younger child who survived. And then I saw a photograph of Caroline.

I had already taken a picture of what I believed was one of the little figures I’d seen in the townhouse. In the picture, she appeared to be standing in front of the bathroom door. You could actually see the doorknob through her body. And when I looked at the newspaper photograph of Caroline, I swear to you, it was the same little girl I had been seeing.

Caroline and Franklin. Those were the two little figures peeking around my staircase. I never saw their parents. I only ever saw the children. And sometimes that dog tail. Then came the strangest experience of all.

My son had been staying with me, and he’d bought me an herbal bath soak from the Asian market nearby. I decided to take a bath. I put the herbs into a little washcloth sachet, tied it up, and dropped it into the water. Within a short time, I became incredibly dizzy. I don’t know whether it was the herbs, the heat, relaxation, something psychological, or something I can’t explain. I only know that the experience became extremely vivid. 

And then Caroline and Franklin appeared in the bathroom. Not like the little glimpses we’d seen before. They seemed solid. Present. Close enough that I felt like I could reach out and touch them. And then Caroline showed me something.

I was suddenly standing in what looked like my bedroom, but it wasn’t my bedroom anymore. The furniture was different. The room was different. I was watching a man and woman arguing. I understood that I was seeing the moment their family had been destroyed. I watched the argument escalate. I watched the father shoot the mother. Then the children came upstairs because they heard the gunshot. They saw their mother on the floor. They were terrified. And then he shot them too.

What happened next is difficult to explain, because I didn’t hear Caroline speak in the ordinary sense. It felt more like she put the understanding directly into my mind. She wanted me to know something.

Her daddy loved her.

She wanted me to understand that he had been a good father. That he loved her. That he loved Franklin. That he loved their mother. She wasn’t asking me to excuse what he did. She wasn’t saying it was okay. She was trying to make me understand that the man who committed that horrific act had not necessarily been a monster every minute of his life.

In her understanding, something in him had snapped. And in that moment, his thinking became horribly distorted. He believed that everything was over, that his children had witnessed something they could never recover from, that they had no one else, that their family was gone, and that somehow the only answer was for all of them to die together.

It was horrifying. It was also profoundly human. And that changed something in me. Because it made me realize how badly we want human beings to fit into simple categories.

Good person. Bad person. Monster. Victim. Innocent. Guilty. Crazy. Sane.

We want the world to make sense, so we put everything into neat little boxes and close the lid.

But people aren’t neat little boxes.

Human beings are complicated. Trauma is complicated. Mental illness is complicated. Grief is complicated. Rage is complicated. Love is complicated.

Sometimes a person can do something absolutely horrific and still have been capable of tremendous love. Those two things can exist at the same time. Understanding that does not erase accountability. It doesn’t make the harm disappear. It simply means that understanding a person is not the same thing as excusing them.

I’ve thought about that a lot since then. Especially when I see people talking about cases involving severe mental illness. A recent case involving Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts mother who killed her three young children during a severe episode of postpartum psychosis, brought that issue right back to the surface for me. People saw the headline and immediately reached for words like “monster” and “cold-blooded.” But severe postpartum psychosis can profoundly distort a person’s perception of reality.

That doesn’t undo the unimaginable loss those children suffered, and it doesn’t make what happened okay. But it does force us to ask a harder question:

What was happening inside that person’s mind when she did it?

That question matters. Because if we refuse to look deeper than the headline, we may never understand anything about the tragedy at all. That’s what Caroline taught me, or at least, that’s what I took from the experience.

She wasn’t angry. She wasn’t vengeful. She didn’t seem consumed by hatred. She simply wanted me to understand that there was more to her family’s story than “murder-suicide.”

There was love. There was fear. There was mental illness, trauma, desperation, and a catastrophic moment that changed everything forever.

When I came back to myself, I was sitting in a bathtub full of freezing cold water. And, naturally, after everything we’d just experienced, I had one final thing to say.

“Caroline. Franklin. Look. We need to establish some house rules. Because listen, if you’re going to haunt my house, there are boundaries. If I’m in the bathroom, you wait your turn. I don’t care if you’re alive, dead, three years old, five years old, or a fucking ghost. You do NOT walk into the bathroom while I’m taking a bath.”

Apparently, even the afterlife needs boundaries.

My mom and I eventually became determined to help those kids “cross over.” I know how that sounds. I know how ambitious, and maybe even a little ridiculous it sounds to think two women with absolutely no idea what they were doing could somehow help two dead children move on. But we tried.

We sat together and talked to them. We told them that if they wanted to leave, they should look for a light. We told them their mom and dad might be waiting for them. We told them they didn’t have to stay there anymore. And then, shortly before we moved out, we stopped seeing them.

I have no idea what that means. Maybe the activity simply stopped. Maybe packing and moving changed the atmosphere of the house. Maybe there was an explanation I never found. Or maybe, just maybe, Caroline and Franklin found the light we’d been telling them about.

I’ll never know. But I do know this:

That apartment changed the way I think about humanity. It taught me that sometimes the story underneath the story is the one worth hearing. It taught me that empathy doesn’t require us to excuse terrible things. It simply requires us to remember that people are more complicated than the worst thing they’ve ever done, or the worst thing we’ve ever heard about them.

And maybe that’s what I want people to take from all of this. Not that you have to believe in ghosts. Not that you have to believe Caroline and Franklin actually visited me. You don’t even have to believe my bathtub story.

Believe whatever you want.

But I hope you’ll consider this: Before you decide you know who somebody is, maybe look a little deeper. Before you call someone a monster, ask what happened inside them. Before you reduce an entire life to one terrible moment, remember that human beings are messy, complicated, contradictory creatures. Sometimes there isn’t a clean explanation. Sometimes there isn’t a box big enough to hold the whole story. And sometimes, the only honest thing we can say is:

I don’t understand what happened, but I want to try.