THE BLANK WHITE SPACE
A Tale of Terror
by
Lewis B. Smith
On December 30, 2023, Jeremiah Jameson of Caddo Mills, Texas was executed for the brutal murder of his two daughters, Melissa and Maria Jameson. The following week, I resigned my job as a prison psychologist at Huntsville State Penitentiary and fled the state of Texas, renting a small cabin in the Ozarks and withdrawing from all human contact. I’ve assured my friends and family that I am all right, that I am not suicidal, and that I will eventually return to my social orbit when I’ve had time to sort my way through some work-related trauma. Given the ugliness I have dealt with for the last eight years at Huntsville, they were understanding and supportive. At the time, I even believed myself. Now, I’m not so sure. If what I think I see in my latest cell phone picture is true, self-destruction may be preferable to the fate that lies in store for me.
The Jameson case caused a media sensation when the girls were killed in 2013. Jerry was a popular history teacher who played in a country western band on weekends, his wife was a successful real estate agent, and the girls were star players on their high school volleyball team. The family photos, snatched from their Facebook page by media outlets in the immediate aftermath of the killings, showed a happy middle-class couple with two beautiful daughters. One particularly poignant shot caught Jerry and his wife Ramona on their feet, cheering in the background, as Melissa spiked the ball to win a district match. They were a beautiful, close-knit small-town family.
But one night that February, while Ramona was out of town at a seminar, the girls were brutally slaughtered. The details were kept out of the press, although the word “mutilation” was tossed around frequently. The jurors refused to talk about the condition of the bodies after the trial was over; several of them turned pale and rushed away the first time the question came up. Their deliberations had lasted less than two hours before returning a guilty verdict against Jeremiah Jameson.
Jameson had been alone in the house with his daughters when they were slain; his short, monosyllabic call to the police was played on the news over and over again: “They are dead. My babies are dead, and it is all my fault.” When the police arrived, they found him cradling the girls in his arms, covered with their blood. The house was locked from the inside; there was no sign of forced entry or of any third party. His attorneys could only argue his complete lack of motive and the absence of any criminal history; there was no exculpatory evidence.
Jerry was utterly emotionless during the trial, and while his attorney pled “Not Guilty” on his behalf, he neither contested nor appealed the verdict when the jury handed it down. Ramona Jameson stated repeatedly that she believed her husband would never knowingly harm their girls, but after a lengthy jail house visit with him a few days after his arrest, she ceased speaking to the media. Six months after her husband was sentenced, she checked into a hotel room in Port Aransas and put a gun in her mouth.
Jerry’s mother Paula had attended the trial, maintaining her son’s innocence; his father was ill with cancer and passed away not long after his son was convicted. Paula Jameson perished from a stroke about a year before Jerry kept his date with the needle in Huntsville’s death chamber. After the executioner did his job on that bitter cold December night, the Jameson family was simply wiped from existence as if they had never been.
Jerry’s only public statement on the killings was made at the sentencing phase of his trial. Listless, looking at the ground, he said: “I didn’t kill them myself, but it doesn’t matter. I’m responsible. It’s my fault that they are dead. And with them gone, I have nothing to live for. Do what you want with me; I don’t care.”
I remember reading about the case with some interest, because I knew that Jameson would be coming to me after the sentencing phase of the trial was done. At that time, I was assigned to the Huntsville as a forensic psychologist; my official duty was to evaluate the mental health and stability of those who were sentenced to be executed; to help their attorneys determine if they were mentally competent, and to offer professional testimony in appeals cases.
Unofficially, my job was simpler; I tried to get to know these men and help prepare them for the fate that awaited them. I encouraged them to accept responsibility and help their victims’ families find closure; I also worked with the prison chaplain to help them find what peace they could within themselves during the long months and years of waiting for the wheels of justice to turn. On rare occasions there would be cases in which I became convinced the prisoner had been wrongly convicted; in those cases, I worked with their attorneys and the folks from the Innocence Project to get the conviction overturned before it was too late.
I had seen and interviewed dozens of killers at this point, from the cold-blooded, unrepentant monsters who relished telling me the details of their crimes and seemed eager to repeat them, to the grief-stricken penitents who explained over and over again that they hadn’t meant for anyone to die, that things just got out of hand; that they would take it all back if they could. Some were calmly accepting of their fates, some were in denial, some lived in hopes of a pardon or commutation, some raged against the system that condemned them. But none of them were indifferent to their fate, unconcerned about the looming date with mortality – at least, until I met Jeremiah Jameson.
Our first session lasted less than five minutes. I introduced myself and explained what my job was, and let him know that he could absolutely confide in me; that nothing he said in my office could be used against him, only to benefit him if he sought to appeal his sentence. He listened patiently, eyes on the floor, until I finished my remarks. Then he was silent so long that I feared he might have fallen asleep. I was about to call his name to wake him when he looked up and those haunted green eyes locked on mine.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “None of it matters. They’re gone, and it’s my fault. I just want to die and get it over with.”
That was all he said during that session, so after a few more attempts to draw him out, I sent him back to his cell in the Polunsky Unit.
Gradually, over the next three years, as his automatic appeals worked their way through the courts, Jameson opened up a little bit. He still refused to talk about how his girls had died, but he did talk about their lives and his former job as a high school history teacher. His eyes lit up when he described their volleyball achievements and participation in the school play, and the vacation trips they had taken together when Maria and Melissa were little. He might have been any proud father in America, recounting his daughters’ abilities to a friend over a cookout. But whenever I tried to steer the conversation to the circumstances of their deaths, he would withdraw into himself again.
“We should never have gone there,’ he said cryptically one day, after I had asked if he could tell me about the events that led up to their deaths. “It was all my fault. I might as well have killed them myself.”
“Gone where?” I asked, but he gave no answer, and after I pried a bit further, he asked to be taken back to his cell.
After three years of interviews, Jameson was fairly relaxed in my company, as long as I didn’t ask him how his daughters died. He told me a great deal about the rest of his life, from his childhood through his marriage through the early years of his girls’ lives. I did not know what to make of him. My gut told me that this man was innocent of any crime, or else he had so thoroughly blocked the memory of what he had done from his mind that he believed in his own innocence. Yet, at the same time, he clearly believed their deaths were his fault – believed it so soundly that he refused to cooperate with his attorneys at all, and instead demanded they quit appealing on his behalf. Eventually, they bowed to his wishes, and in 2023 the date of Jeremiah Jameson’s execution was set.
By this point in the process, I usually was working closely with the chaplain to make sure the condemned men we counseled were prepared to meet their end. Jameson made this easy for us; he said repeatedly that he welcomed the oblivion of death, if only so he could forget all that had happened.
“I don’t want heaven,” he said. “I know that’s where my girls are, but I don’t want to be there. I don’t want them reminded of what my stupidity and carelessness brought upon them. Just let me wink out and be gone forever in the dark, with no memories, no regrets! That is all I want.”
The day before he was executed, I had my last session with Jerry. I felt deeply sorry for this tormented man; I had done all in my power to understand him, yet I felt I had let him down. I expressed one last wish that he could have simply told me his story, that I might have been better equipped to help him. Jameson smiled at me ruefully.
“Doctor, you have treated me more kindly than anyone here,” he said. “I’ve thought long and hard about all that happened, and while reason tells me it would be better if no one ever understood the truth of the horror that took my girls, my heart wants at least one person to know it. I asked Jenkins for a laptop over a month ago, and I’ve also asked the sheriff to give you access to my case files. I laid it all out for you, every detail of what happened. The folder is called For Doctor Taylor. Be sure to follow the instructions in it very carefully. After you’ve read everything, delete the files – all of them. Especially the photographs. By then you’ll probably be regretting you ever asked me. But you’ve been so insistent, and so kind, that I feel you have the right to know. I hope no harm comes to you from knowing – you're a good man. Thank you for all you did to make my time here more tolerable.”
The next evening he was strapped to a gurney, and the cocktail of deadly drugs was injected into his veins. He died without a word, a long sigh the only sign that his life had ended. There were no representatives of the victims’ families present; Jameson was an only child, and his wife’s folks had moved to California to leave the memory of the murders behind them. After the coroner pronounced that Jeremiah Jameson was officially dead, the attorney, Ray Jenkins, turned to me.
“He wanted you to have this,” he said, handing me a Dell laptop. “He said you were the only person here who gave a damn about him as a human being. This may be the confession that he never made to anyone else – me, the police, his wife, anyone. I’ve talked to Sheriff Turner; he said you can have full access to Jameson’s case files now that he is dead.”
“Do you want to know what I find out after I go through it all?” I asked.
“Absolutely not!” he said. “I’ve looked into that poor, tormented bastard’s eyes since the day after those girls were killed. Whatever blighted him and left behind the pathetic shell I’ve tried so hard to save these last few years, I don’t want to know. Frankly, if I were you, I’d throw that hard drive into the San Jacinto River and get on with your life!”
I’ve often thought about those last words of his over the last few months, and now I wish I’d heeded them. But at the moment, all I could think of was that the mystery which had eluded me for the last seven years was going to be revealed. I drove home that night and plugged the hard drive into my laptop. I lived alone, ever since Laura and I divorced a few years earlier, so there was no one to distract me from the files except my cat, who was dozing contentedly at my feet.
The folder that Jameson had mentioned popped up immediately, and I clicked on it. About a dozen files popped up, but one was an MPEG titled “Watch this first” so I clicked on it. Immediately Jameson’s face popped up. He was in his cell at Huntsville, and the wall behind him was covered with odd, scrawling symbols in black, none of which I understood.
“Doctor Taylor,” he said, “I am sorry for what you are going to hear and see. But knowing that my days are numbered, I feel I have to unburden myself to someone – and you’ve been begging me to do so since I arrived at Huntsville. So you and you alone are going to get the whole story. What you do with it is up to you. But before you open the next file, you need to get access to my cell phone, which is in the evidence locker at the Hunt County Jail. I want you to copy all the pictures from my Gallery onto this hard drive. There’s not a great many – about 200 or so. I transferred them to my PC pretty regularly. Copy them to a flash drive, and then look at the first twenty pictures before you read the next file – the one titled ‘Beginning.’ I’ll explain further in that file and tell you which file look at next.”
He paused and looked around his cell, studying the arcane symbols he’d written on the walls. One of them, a red circle with a black ‘X’ cutting through it, occurred over and over again. He turned back to the camera, and those piercing green eyes fixed on mine.
“This is your last chance,” he said. “Destroy this thumb drive and forget you ever knew me - or keep watching and see how I wound up being executed for the deaths of my children. Just be warned . . . some knowledge leaves scars.”
By now my mind was aflame with curiosity, and his warning made little impact. The next day was New Year’s Eve; I called the Hunt County sheriff and he agreed to have a deputy give me access to their evidence locker. I went to bed early; it was a four hour drive up I-45 to the small town of Greenville and I wanted to get there and back before dark. Fortunately, the weather was cold but clear, and the traffic minimal, and with one quick stop for breakfast and another pit stop, I pulled up in front of the Hunt County Courthouse and found not a deputy but Sheriff Turner himself waiting to meet me.
After some preliminary pleasantries, he cut straight to the heart of the matter.
“You counseled Jameson in jail for seven years,” he said. “What did you make of him?”
“He was a broken man,” I said. “Without hope, everyone he loved gone, nothing to live for.”
“But do you think he did it?” Turner asked. “I mean, he taught my kids U.S. history, I coached Little League with him, and listened to his band a few times. I never once looked at him and thought; ‘I gotta watch that one.’ But when we came into his house that night – those eyes of his were as blighted as anything I’ve ever seen. Everything in his look screamed ‘guilt’ to me. And those girls of his – my God, I’ve seen homicide by shotgun, pistol, carving knife, baseball bat, even one hopped-up junkie who cut his girl up with a chainsaw – but I’ve never seen bodies like that. How could any man, much less a man I liked and trusted, do that?”
“How did they die?” I asked. “He never once told me a thing about that night.”
“You can look at the crime scene photos if you want to,” he said. “I can’t - I don’t want to even dwell on the memory. I see it in my nightmares as it is. Look, the files are all laid out, along with his cell phone. You can photograph or copy anything you want to, but take nothing with you when you leave. We can have some coffee when you’re done, but I hope you’ve already eaten. You won’t have an appetite for a while if you look at those pictures.”
I walked down the steps to the basement room where the evidence was kept, and found everything laid out neatly on the table. Even Jameson’s Android phone was charged up. I copied the pictures onto my laptop, then opened the file. I read the arrest report first, and shook my head in horror. It had taken three deputies to pull the bodies of the two girls from their father’s arms, and according to the sheriff, as he was handcuffed and hauled away, Jerry just kept screaming: “Just let me die! This is all my fault!”
After reading the report twice, I looked at the folder labeled “Crime Scene.” I swallowed hard. Did I really want to see this? I didn’t - but would I ever understand Jameson’s despair without seeing for myself? Finally, I pulled the folder open and looked at the first picture – then the next, and the next. I was sweating and trembling as I turned the pages, each image searing itself into my mind. Finally I saw the photograph taken of Jerry Jameson as he was led from the house to the squad car, soaked in their blood, despair and grief written into his features with a searing pen. I shut the folder and sat there for a long minute; not sure I could get up without gagging. Finally, I heaved a deep sigh and rose. I followed the smell of hot coffee to an office on the second floor where the sheriff was waiting. He poured me a steaming cup and pushed it across the table to me as I sank into a chair.
“You looked,” he said.
“Is it that obvious?” I asked with a bitter smile.
“Pictures are bad enough,” he said. “It was worse when you were there. God, the smell! That was the worst. Coroner said that human brains just stink.”
“Did you ever find their eyes?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “We even asked Jameson if he would consent to have his stomach pumped, and he did. It was empty – he'd thrown up his dinner right there in their bedroom.”
“Did you ever find the murder weapon?” I asked.
“There wasn’t one, near as I could tell,” he said. “No bullet holes, no knife marks, just ‘extreme violence performed by hand, mouth, and teeth,’ was how the coroner put it.”
“And Jerry?” I asked. “Was there forensic evidence he did it?”
“He was covered with their blood,” the sheriff said. “And he told us it was his fault, his doing, that they were dead. But – we didn’t find skin or flesh under his nails or between his teeth. But he had just taken a shower – water was still dripping, towel still warm to the touch when we got there. I figure, he did what he did to those poor, sweet girls in some kind of alternate mental state, went and cleaned up, and returned to his right mind. Then he walked in and found what he had done, called us to confess, and cradled them in his arms until we got there.”
“Did the forensics at the scene match that course of action?” I asked.
“Somewhat, but not exactly,” the sheriff said. “Between local sentiment demanding a prosecution, and his admission the deaths were his fault, we had a pretty airtight case. I mean, he never appealed his conviction, right?”
“No,” I said. “I’ve never seen any man on death row more eager to get it all over with. Well, now that I have his pictures, I guess I’m going to go home and listen to the statement he left me. When I am done, do you want to hear it, too?”
Brock Turner looked at me with a stare slightly reminiscent of Jameson’s mug shot.
“Not really,” he said. “I don’t know that I ever want to discuss this case again.”
“Well, thanks for your cooperation, then, Sheriff,” I said. “I need to head on back; it’s a long drive to Huntsville and I’d like to get there before all the drunks hit the road!”
Traffic had picked up considerably since the early hours of the morning, and a couple of wrecks on I-45 slowed me down enough that it was nearly eight when I finally got home. Sure enough, I’d had no appetite after looking at those horrible images, but my nausea had subsided enough by evening that my stomach didn’t protest when I ate some peanut butter crackers. After eating those, and feeding my cat Khan, I opened the laptop and accessed the next file.
“I see you are still with me,” Jameson said, “and I assume, since you are watching this, that you have the photos from the gallery on my phone. Go ahead and open them up and look at the first twelve images. Stop and focus on that last one. Blow it up and see if you notice something unusual.”
I clicked on the file of photos I had copied from his phone and the first one popped up. There was Jerry, behind the wheel of a Ford Expedition, smiling and giving a thumbs up as his car pulled out of the driveway. The next shot showed Melissa and Maria in the back seat, leaning in towards another, grinning from ear to ear. Then a selfie of Ramona, taken from the passenger seat, leaning against Jerry as he drove. Happy times. The next photo showed a sign that said “Port Aransas – 25 miles!” Then a couple of shots of the family arriving at a beachside hotel. There were several shots of the girls and their parents hanging out on the beach, splashing in the surf, and eating seafood. The eleventh picture gave me pause. It was another sign, this one reading “Massacre Grove State Historic Site.” The text beneath it was stark: “NEAR THIS SPOT, IN 1840, FOURTEEN WHITE CAPTIVES, MOST OF THEM WOMEN AND CHILDREN, WERE TORTURED AND KILLED BY RAIDING COMANCHE INDIANS IN RETALIATION FOR THE DEATH OF SEVERAL COMANCHE CHIEFTAINS IN THE “COUNCIL HOUSE FIGHT” IN SAN ANTONIO. THEIR BODIES WERE RECOVERED BY THE TEXAS RANGERS AND INTERRED IN A NEARBY CEMETERY.”
I clicked to the next photo, the one I’d been told to look at closely. It showed the two girls standing side by side in front of a thicket of trees, some fifty feet behind them. They were looking solemn, and I figured this was the “Massacre Grove” from the sign. I noticed nothing odd at first, so I clicked the “+” button to enlarge the picture. The forest behind them was dark and gloomy, even on a sunny day, but here and there bits of light filtered through the trees, creating a dappled effect. But then I saw what Jerry had referred to – just over Melissa’s shoulder, there was a white oval floating among the trees. It was so stark and white it looked almost like a balloon floating there – a blank white space where there should have been the greens and browns of a Texas thicket in the summer. Looking closer, I saw skinny, vertical black line below the white shape, stretching towards the ground. It was too grainy to be sure, but it looked almost like a man in black with a pale, ghostly face standing there in the distance.
I went back to the video file and pressed “Play.” Jerry’s face popped up again on the screen.
“Did you see it?” he asked. “I didn’t notice it when I took the picture, or when I first glanced at it on my phone. I hope you can see it, because otherwise they are right and I really am insane. And if I’m insane, then that means what happened to my girls was just . . . me.” He paused, swallowed hard, and spoke again. “But I didn’t do that, I know I didn’t! So for God’s sake I hope you saw it. Or, let me be more specific. I hope you saw HIM. Now, click through the next three pictures. Study each one closely.”
Suppressing a shudder, I looked at the next photo. The family was standing next to their Ford, posing together – I assume Jerry had someone else taking the shot or was using a timer. In the distance behind them was a line of people getting food at a concession stand, and I could see the Gulf further back. At first I saw nothing amiss, but then in the crowd, I saw a silhouette that looked out of place. Or was it a sign? Maybe a cardboard cutout of a person? It towered over the others by a couple of feet, but all I could see was this slender black shape topped by a white oval. No eyes, no features of any kind. Was it even a person? Jerry seemed to think so, but it didn’t really look alive in this photograph.
I clicked to the next one. The family was inside a Buc-ee's store, one of those huge, crowded snack shops/gas stations/souvenir stores that seemed to be springing up all over Texas. A man in a beaver costume was standing there, the store’s mascot, and the Jameson girls were posing with him as several other customers looked on. The store was packed tourists and hungry travelers, as Buc-ee's always tended to be, and there was a line for the ladies’ bathroom visible in the background. I squinted at the sea of signs, menus, people, and shelves of snacks, but then I saw it again. Towering over a shelf of assorted chips and candies, a tall gaunt figure faced directly towards the camera, closer now than in the other pictures, yet somehow out of focus. Pale lines across the white oval barely hinted at facial features, but it was impossible to make them out. Despite the gaudy, kitsch-filled surroundings, a cold menace radiated from the image.
I swallowed hard and clicked again. This time, the Jameson family was home, the girls mugging for the camera as they unloaded the suitcases from the back of the Expedition. The small neighborhood looked peaceful and normal, and it was twilight. A few porch lights were one, but the sky wasn’t dark yet. It took me a long time to spot him this time, but down the street from their home was a utility pole with a bright arc light hanging out over the street. About six feet above the ground, a darker shadow leaned out from behind the pole, the ghostly white oval suspended above it, watching.
A strange, creeping dread came over me as I saw that blank white space where a face should have been. But there was also something familiar about it, as if I had seen it somewhere before. But where? I returned to the video file and pressed “Play,” but I was at the end of the clip. Clicking back to the menu, I saw another file that said, “Watch this after pics.” I double clicked on it, and Jameson’s grim face appeared again.
“It was subtle at first,” he said. “I didn’t see it at all in the first two pictures, but when I got home and saw that photo from inside Buc-ee's, it jumped out at me. It was unsettling in a way I can’t define. Then when I saw it in the background of our homecoming picture, I began clicking back. It first showed up there at Massacre Grove – it's not in any of the pictures before that one.”
He sighed. “I didn’t know what I was looking at,” he said, “Only that it made me feel odd. I thought it might be some camera glitch or lens flare, but the same one in four pictures? At the grove, at the amusement park, at Buc-ee's, and then on our own street! I was creeped out by then, so the next day I went in the front yard early, as the sun was rising, and clicked a few pictures up and down our street. You can look at them if you want. There was nothing. I decided not to dwell on it, that it was just some odd camera artifact. But then we went to the girls’ volleyball game the next week. Look at the next few pictures.”
I went back to the file, and sure enough, there were three early morning shots of the Jameson’s neighborhood. The rising sun glinted off the trees and hoods of cars, the dewy grass glistened, and in one shot a dog was happily trotting down the middle of the street. Then I clicked on to the pictures from the volleyball game. There was a great picture of Melissa setting the ball up for Maria, both girls intent on making the shot. On the far side of the court, the visiting team’s bleachers were about half full. All the faces there looked normal, but as I looked more closely, I saw it again. Or him? In the narrow gap between the end of the bleachers and the wall of the gym was a shadowy area, and there I could barely see the grainy silhouette of an impossibly tall man, with a white oval above his shoulders, where his face should be.
I was puzzled. In a crowded gym, why could no one else see him? I studied the faces of the crowd, and then I did notice something. There were about six people sitting at that end of the visitor’s bleachers, and all but one of them, while obviously intent on the game, were visibly leaning away from the shadowy apparition in the corner. The other one was a toddler, who was looking at the corner, his mouth wide open and his eyes scrunched up in fear. I could almost hear him crying in my mind. I swallowed hard, and then clicked the next picture.
Here were Melissa and Maria with several friends, standing next to a pickup truck in the parking lot. It was dark, and the streetlights were shining overhead. Behind the truck, closer than it had been in any picture yet, was the shadowy form, its torso almost invisible in the dark, with that pale, malevolent orb suspended above its shoulders. As I studied it, I noticed a new detail, one that made my blood run cold. One imossibly long arm seemed to be reaching out towards the camera, and its fingers . . . no human could have fingers like that! Incredibly long digits, bending in more directions than normal joints allow, reaching towards the unsuspecting girls. I closed the file with a shudder and pressed “Play” again.
“When I looked at the photos from the game, I couldn’t deny what my eyes were seeing,” he said. “I even remember that baby on the other side of the court crying all through the game. Crying because he could see – or sense – what was lurking in that corner. Up to this point I hadn’t said anything to anyone, but when I looked at those pics, I called Ramona in and asked if she could see them. She said she did. ‘But there’s something familiar about that thing,’ she said. ‘I feel like I’ve seen it before somewhere.’ As she said that, Melissa walked by and asked what we were talking about. Before I could minimize the picture, she leaned in and gave a little shriek.”
Here Jameson hung his head for a moment, and when he looked up, there were tears glistening in his eyes.
“She laughed then, and said ‘Dad, why are you pranking us? How did you get Slenderman into our picture?’ That’s when it hit. Freaking Slenderman!”
I hit ‘Pause’ at that point and closed my eyes. I remembered in the early 2010’s when the creepy images of the tall, black-clad, faceless entity seemed to take over the internet for a while. That was why the ghostly image in Jameson’s picture looked so familiar! But the whole thing was nothing but a made-up internet trope, as I recalled, an image invented by a digital artist in answer to a challenge to create creepy creatures for an online contest. But Jameson’s face looked dead serious. I hit “Play” and listened to him again.
“You probably remember the Slenderman craze,” he said, “but working with teens, I’d been exposed to it so many times that I can’t believe it took me so long to recognize him from the pictures I’d taken. A couple of years before this, it seemed like every kid’s notebook had a sketch of him on it – details varied, but always skinny, always too tall, hands and fingers too long and too many to be human. My girls made me watch a bunch of YouTube videos about an amateur filmmaker haunted by Slenderman - “Marble Hornets,” I think it was called. It got so pervasive and people were taking it way too seriously for a while there. Two kids up north actually stabbed their best friend so they could become Slenderman’s disciples or acolytes or some such nonsense.”
He hung his head for a moment as memory intruded once more. He visibly shuddered as he looked at the camera again.
“By now Melissa had called Maria, and they were scrolling through the earlier pictures. They missed the one at the Grove, but they saw him at the park, at Buc-ee's, and at their game. Maria was more high-strung than her sister, and she was obviously creeped out. “Dad, you are pranking us, right?” she said. ‘We do know that Slenderman’s not real!’ She was saying that, but her eyes were saying something else. What was a father supposed to do? I laughed and said: “Busted!’ I was just having a little fun with Photoshop. Gotcha, didn’t I?’ God have mercy, I played along. I thought I could make it go away if I could just keep them from being afraid.”
He sighed and looked straight at the camera.
“Doc, if you’ve stuck with me this long, first of all, thank you. You can see why I never admitted to any of this in court. Folks would just think I was crazy, trying to duck a murder charge by pretending insanity. But if you’re seeing what I saw in those pictures, then I hope you know that’s not true. I have no idea how to use Photoshop. I can barely do Instagram filters. I didn’t add those images. And yet – like you, like my girls, I KNEW Slenderman wasn’t real. Just a made-up internet ghost story to spook gullible kids, right? So what was following us? What took on that form, at that moment, when an entire generation of school kids were frightening each other with Slenderman stories? I have a theory.”
“That place – Massacre Grove – it's a bad place. I grew up around there, and there were always stories that it was haunted, that people who went in there after dark sometimes didn’t come out – or came out changed, somehow. Most Texans learn about the Victoria raid and the Council House fight in seventh grade, but the Aransas Massacre is only in the oldest books. Those Comanche raided the town right after the Council House Fight had killed twelve Comanche chiefs, and they were mad. They weren’t out for plunder, but for payback. They hit that little town hard and fast, killed off most of the men, and dragged the women and children to that grove. Normally kids were adopted into the tribe, and women raped and enslaved – but not this time. Those fourteen captives were sacrificed, disemboweled and killed slowly, as a blood offering to some dark god that the other Indians didn’t like to talk about. I’d read about the raid several times, and I wanted to get a picture, since we were passing close by. I think our presence – especially the presence of two young girls on the cusp of womanhood – caught the attention of whatever lurked there, some dark spirit that feeds on fear and pain. And when it looked into their minds to see what they were afraid of, what did it see? Slenderman, the internet myth. Slendy, the kids call him, with his long arms and blank face and grasping claws. So it chose to take that shape as it followed us. Somehow my camera seemed to act like a homing beacon, and every time I took a picture of my girls, I was drawing it closer to its intended victims. Sounds crazy, right? I sure would think so if someone else told me such a bizarre story. But go look at the last photos in the gallery. Look, and I’ll tell you how our horror story ended.”
By now I was shaking as I reached for the mouse. The man’s sincerity, his regret, his fear, were all undeniable. I wasn’t sure I believed him, but I knew HE believed it. I sat there for a long time, half of me wanting to delete the whole mess, drink myself into oblivion, and go to bed – the other half wanting to know. To really KNOW what happened to those two poor kids. So I clicked the file.
There were ten more pictures. The first nine were of Jameson and his wife, of their house and yard, and of the same dog I’d seen trotting up the street. No Slenderman in any of those pictures – but no girls, either. Melissa and Maria weren’t in any of them. But the last picture – it was dated November first, the day of the murders. It showed Melissa and Maria, sitting on the edge of their beds, arms thrown around each other’s shoulders, grinning bravely for the camera. At first they were all I saw. But then I looked at the wall behind them, and he slowly swam into focus.
Oh, he was faint, as if caught in the act of materializing. He blended with the shadows on the wall and the pattern of the wallpaper, but he was there nonetheless, towering over their bed, his head, that blank white space, touching the ceiling, leaning over them, in the bedroom with them. The cold menace radiating from that picture terrified me more than anything I’d seen or heard all evening. I closed the file and hit “Play” one more time.
“It was a week later,” Jameson said. “Ramona was off to a realtor’s conference, volleyball season was nearly over, and the girls were getting over their fright. I cooked spaghetti for them that night, and we watched some dreadful rom-com they insisted I needed to see. I went back to my study to grade some papers while they got ready for bed, and I found them sitting there chatting happily. I kissed them goodnight, and then Melissa said ‘Hey, Dad, why don’t you take a picture, just to make sure Slenderman isn’t still stalking us!’ I didn’t want to, but I could tell it was important to her. So I went to my room and grabbed my phone, and they sat there and posed for me. I snapped the pic and then pulled it up and looked at it. I didn’t see him at first – the light was dim, and he was blending in so well, I didn’t see anything at all. I laughed and said ‘No Slenderman this time, kiddos! Now goodnight!’ Then I went back to my room and called Ramona. We chatted for a few minutes, and when I hung up I turned off my light to go to bed. But then something made me check the picture one more time. In the dark, the image was much bolder and clearer, and that was when I saw him there, blending in with the wall, towering over their bed, reaching for them. And even as my feet hit the floor I heard them start screaming! I leaped up and ran down the hall and threw their door open. All I could see was this shadow looming over them as they writhed and screamed, and then I turned the light on.”
Jameson faced the camera one last time, and I saw his face devoid of all color and emotion, much like the first time I saw him. His eyes were the worst – they were the eyes of a man whose soul was already dead, even if his body was still breathing. I thought at that moment that he was literally no longer breathing, that I was listening to the last terrifying testimony of a madman.
“I can’t block it out of my mind, what I saw,” he said. “Those arms! Longer than a spiders leg, forking at the elbow, four hands with fingers that were too long and had way too many joints in them for any creature that lives in our sane, waking world. Two of its long fingers were punched into their eyes, through their eyes into their brains, filling them with visions that made them scream over and over. Four more fingers, each wrapped around their wrists, holding them down as they kicked and squirmed and this thing feasted on their fear. I must have cried out, because that pale, oval face turned towards me. There were still no features, but if flexed outward ever so slightly along its lower edges, as if it were grinning at me. Then yet another one of those fingers reached across the room and tapped me in the forehead, and my world went blank.”
“I came to standing in the shower, scrubbing my body, as if I’d come in from some filthy chore. I just stared at the shower wall for a moment, and then I turned off the water and went into my room, put on sweats and a T-shirt and picked up the remote – and then suddenly the memory of what I’d seen came crashing back into my head full force. I ran down the hall calling their names, and when I burst into their rooms – well, you’ve probably seen the photographs the police took by now. You know what I found – my beautiful girls, their eyes gone, their hearts gone, their souls gone, their faces frozen in a rictus of terror. I clutched them to me and howled and wept for a very long time. Then I staggered to the phone and called the police, and returned to their room and held them till the cops arrived, held them and wept for my children, my beautiful daughters.”
A single sob escaped him, and he sighed and swallowed.
“That’s my story. Either I am a homicidal maniac who killed my own children, or else I am guilty of somehow summoning an ancient evil and fixating it on them until it took them from me forever. Either way, I have nothing to live for. So there’s my story, Doc. Make of it what you will. Good bye.”
I didn’t believe him, of course. How could I? I was a man of science, after all. But here was an example of one of the most extreme cases of neurotic paranoia I had ever seen. I was wondering if there was an ethical way to share it in a scientific paper – but then I remembered those pictures. I had clearly seen the figure in them, gradually getting closer, menacing those girls, reaching for them in that last photograph. Surely that was something Jameson had done with Photoshop, his denials notwithstanding. I wondered what the police had made of them, so late on New Year’s Day, I called Sheriff Turner.
I asked him if they had analyzed the pictures to see how those images had been added.
“What images?” he asked.
I demanded that he pull up the photos from the original phone onto his computer screen so he could see them. But again and again he said “No, I can’t see what you are talking about.”
He couldn’t see them, even though I was looking straight at them on the same set of pictures. Finally, I hung up in frustration and stomped to my window, looking down into the street. Across from me is a small city park, with swing sets and slides. It was dark, but I could see some kid had left a white balloon tied to the nearest swing set, drifting a foot or two above the crossbar. An involuntary shiver hit me, and I laughed.
“That crazy fool has got you all worked up,” I said to myself.
That’s when the “balloon” began drifting across the playground towards me, and I saw the shadowy silhouette it rested upon; a tall, slim form clad in black
I fled the state that night, driving north for hours, staying in a cheap hotel in Fayetteville. I rented a cabin up in the mountains, away from civilization, away from other houses with children whose fertile imaginations might provide inspiration to things that had no shape or form of their own.
I watched the videos and studied the pictures over and over again, then finally, after drinking too much one night, deleted them all. I began to sleep better after that, and this afternoon, when my boss asked if I was ready to think about coming back, I told him I might be. Surely, I had just seen an abandoned balloon, and my worked-up imagination had turned it into that sinister, featureless face. The next day my sister called, concerned that I was shunning contact with my whole family. I assured her I was fine, and then I took a selfie outside the cabin to show her how beautiful the place was.
Tonight, before I went to bed, I glanced at the picture I’d taken, and there he was – standing in the tree line, watching me. A tall, impossibly thin black shape.
And a blank white space where his face should be.
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