What follows has been edited for content and relevance to the ongoing investigation
into events in Sugar Creek, Ohio on the night of September 26-27, 2015.
into events in Sugar Creek, Ohio on the night of September 26-27, 2015.
The following entries provide the heretofore missing information from Jim Corrie's journal, covering the period from June 3 to June 25, 2014. These were provided to BCI by Mr. Corrie's daughter Miranda during her interview on October 26, 2015.
June 3, 2014
Carl Weaver* lived a short distance from the cafe. He had walked, so I offered to drive him back. I'd brought The Corries with me in the car, and "Killiecrankie" came out full blast when I turned the key. It startled him, so I turned it off. He remained visibly shaken the entire drive, and kept glancing over at the CD player as if expecting it to come blaring to life again at any moment. The man was an emotional wreck, so I figured that was what it was.
I hate to say that Carl's home was exactly what I thought it would be. He lived in a small condo that was part of a complex built in the late '80s, likely respectable when he moved in but gone seriously to seed in the twenty-five years since. Every blind was drawn, casting the interior of the house in shadow. It was cleaner than I'd thought, if a little dusty. Carl invited me to sit and immediately disappeared into the kitchen. I'm embarrassed that I expected him to emerge with a whisky bottle, given how he looked, but he only had two glasses of water. He handed me one and immediately produced a bottle of pills, proceeding to down three with a swallow of water.
Carl Weaver* lived a short distance from the cafe. He had walked, so I offered to drive him back. I'd brought The Corries with me in the car, and "Killiecrankie" came out full blast when I turned the key. It startled him, so I turned it off. He remained visibly shaken the entire drive, and kept glancing over at the CD player as if expecting it to come blaring to life again at any moment. The man was an emotional wreck, so I figured that was what it was.
I hate to say that Carl's home was exactly what I thought it would be. He lived in a small condo that was part of a complex built in the late '80s, likely respectable when he moved in but gone seriously to seed in the twenty-five years since. Every blind was drawn, casting the interior of the house in shadow. It was cleaner than I'd thought, if a little dusty. Carl invited me to sit and immediately disappeared into the kitchen. I'm embarrassed that I expected him to emerge with a whisky bottle, given how he looked, but he only had two glasses of water. He handed me one and immediately produced a bottle of pills, proceeding to down three with a swallow of water.
"I don't really sleep," Carl said, reading my mind. "This helps even me out. Sometimes." We all have our own ways of coping, Doc.
I got right to the point. I asked him what he'd meant about "it" getting Jennifer. He gave me a blank stare and waved me off, saying we'd talk about that. Then he asked me what I'd seen. I more or less summarized everything I've written up to this point: the artifacts, the dreams, the coincidences.
The feeling of being watched.
Carl barely reacted to any of it, just nodding slightly every so often. When I'd finished, he lowered his head and started massaging his temples.
"It gave you something," he said. " When you got its attention. That's how it started with us." Carl told me about the day in late March, 1985 that Angie had toddled up to the porch, her hands and shoes caked with red mud. Neither he nor Jennifer had seen her wander off, and they were frantic that she had gone that far without them knowing. Their fear and anger quickly melted to curiosity when their daughter held out her tiny hand and deposited two grimy lead pellets into Jennifer's palm.
"Musket balls," I said, and Carl nodded. Much as it had with me, the discovery had fired their imaginations about the local legend, particularly Jennifer's, since she was already writing about town lore. For the next several weeks, Carl started going to the Creek on Saturdays, sifting the sediment for finds.
"I never found a thing," he said. "Not one thing in the dozen or so times I went." When he raised his head, I saw tears welling in his eyes. "At one point Angie was bringing us something every other day."
Carl and Jennifer never knew how their daughter kept slipping away, and were amazed at the things she brought back. The list was eerily similar to my own: arrowheads, antique trinkets, buttons, buttons, buttons. They asked her every time where she found them, and every time she answered the same: "The Creek gave it to me."
"We stopped being as concerned about it after awhile, even though it was so strange," Carl said. "Just treated it like a quirk of her little personality." He squeezed his eyes tight shut. "Until the day she brought back the ball."
That was what Angie had called it. It was covered in mud like everything else she had brought them, and was roughly the size of a softball. Jennifer had taken it inside to wash it off for her. As before, Carl asked her where she had gotten it, expecting the usual answer. But it was different this time.
"She said the 'Sticky Man' had given it to her," Carl said. "I didn't have a chance to ask her what it meant before I heard my wife scream."
When he had charged into the kitchen, Jennifer was pressed against the wall opposite the sink, sobbing. The object lying under the running water was a tiny human skull, possibly that of a newborn. It was missing its lower jaw, and a vicious fracture ran diagonally from the right eye socket across the top of the cranium.
"She was scared out of her mind," Carl said. "But not just because of what it was. She told me that, in the moment it had emerged from the mud, it had also started to bleed."
He'd found no blood anywhere, and at the time he had thought she had imagined it. But it did not change the fact of what it was, or that someone had given the grisly thing to their daughter. They had called the police, and resolved to keep Angie in sight at all times from then on.
I stopped him and asked him why there was no mention of this in any of the news coverage of her later disappearance, especially if they had the evidence of the skull. Carl shook his head and laughed miserably.
"Because they never saw it," Carl said. Jennifer had insisted that the skull not remain in their house while they waited for the police, so he had stuffed it in a paper bag and left it on the back porch. They arrived less than 20 minutes later, and he had brought the bag back in to show them.
"It was empty," he said. "Nothing in it but a residue of mud. I didn't let that bag out of my sight for more than a minute while we were waiting, and now these cops were looking at me like I had antennae."
He and Jennifer had insisted it had been there, and brought Angie in to ask her about the Sticky Man. "She wouldn't say what she the name meant," Carl said. "Was he covered in something sticky? Did he look like a stick? She just kept calling him that, like it was obvious what it meant. When we asked her about 'her ball' - we didn't tell her what it was - she said 'the Sticky Man took it back.'"
The police took their information and left. On the way out, they said that Angie "had a very active imagination," clearly taking nothing they had heard seriously. Carl gave them the bag as evidence. "There was something on the outside of the bag I wanted them to look at," he said. "A red smear that wasn't mud. It was like dried wax, only more viscous. I wanted them to check in out." He scowled. "They probably threw it in the trash."
The Weavers practically stood sentinel over Angie for the next few months as spring passed into summer. The flow of artifacts into the house stopped, as her parents managed to catch her every time she seemed ready to slip out the front or back door. She cried bitterly each time over being cut off from her favorite play spots, but eventually found other things to occupy herself, like the beautiful new doll they gave her the day she turned three that July.
A few nights after her birthday, Carl found himself being shaken awake by Jennifer. It was around midnight, and he said she could hear Angie talking in her room. When they opened her door, they found her standing up in her new toddler bed, fully awake, staring at the window that looked out onto the front lawn. (As he described it, I realized with some discomfort that Angie's old room is my current office.) She said without prompting that the Sticky Man had come to see her. Jennifer had immediately snatched her up and raced with her back to their bedroom.
"I hung back for a moment," Carl said. "Just looking at the window. There was no one there, no trace that anyone had been. Then in the moonlight I saw faint shadow across the glass toward the bottom, a streak where Jenny or I had maybe touched by accident. I looked closer and saw it was on the outside of the glass, not the inside. It wasn't skin oil, either, but something thicker, translucent and red." Carl paused, and I noticed that sweat had broken out on his forehead in spite of the coolness of the room. "I ran back to the bedroom and locked us in."
Less than ten days later, Angie disappeared. "I can even tell you the moment it happened," Carl said. "I could hear her through the front screen, talking to her doll, maybe five feet away from me. Then she made this sound. It wasn't a scream, or a cry. It was a tiny little noise that I barely even noticed at the time. I've been turning it over in my head ever since. It was surprise. Not even bad surprise. The sort of sound you'd make if someone familiar you weren't expecting to see just appeared out of the blue. Then nothing after that."
Carl sank back into the chair with his eyes closed. He was visibly shaking at this point, and his breath hitched in his chest as if he was fighting back tears. I asked him if he wanted to take a break and he waved me off.
"I'm okay," he said. "You wanted to know what I meant earlier, about my wife? Like I said, when you got it's attention, it would give you something." Carl swallowed hard. "My wife got its attention."
Jennifer had thrown herself into research after Angie vanished. She had pored through all of her old notes and thrown out anything that didn't relate to a disappearance, and followed any and every lead she could. What she had found, Carl told me, could have filled half-a-dozen books, much more than the slim volume she had actually published.
"You saw what was there," Carl said. "That's what she could find trace records for, and it was a lot. The rest was based on her own theories, and she had a lot. I thought she would tell me every single person who ever died in Sugar Creek was killed by this thing." Carl paused. "I could almost believe that now."
Jennifer had attempted interviews with family members of the recent missing. They had met with her grudgingly, and there was never more than one meeting. "She became a nuisance around town, a 'troublemaker.'" Carl said. "She'd raise the issue at every town hall meeting. She'd regularly call the chief of police, the mayor, anyone she could with a new scrap of evidence or theory. People got sick of it, sick of her. I'm ashamed to say it embarrassed me, too. I was so depressed, I just wanted to forget it. Most everyone did, it seemed. She was appalled at this, and refused to let us. I think that's how she drew its eye."
Carl said her nightmares started that fall, and what he described was terribly familiar. The following spring, the "gifts" started to arrive again, rusted pieces of junk appearing on the porch, always to vanish again sometime later, much as they had with Angie. Carl noted that it was always Jennifer who found them, never him, and they always disappeared before she could show them to him. But he never doubted that she was telling the truth, and could not avoid the toll it was taking on her mind.
"One evening, I was pulling up to the house after work, and I saw her tearing across the front yard, crying and screaming," Carl said. "She was more furious than I'd ever seen her, swearing a blue streak. Her arms were full of the biggest rocks she could hold from our garden. I followed her and watched her hurl them, one after another, into the creek, shrieking abuse at the dirty water. I got a hold of her and she collapsed against me, weeping. She said that today's "gift" had been a tiny shoe, one of a pair that we had gotten Angie for her last birthday. She hadn't even attempted to hold onto it to show me but had chucked it into the water, then had gone to get the rocks."
Carl's composure had deteriorated over this portion of the conversation, and he was shaking so badly that he had to dig his nails into the chair arms to steady himself. In an instant, two more pills were out of the bottle and had disappeared down his throat, no water needed, apparently. I tried to show some empathy, saying how similarly some of my experiences had been, and Carl's head snapped up, his eyes zeroing in on mine.
"How similar?" he said. "It sounds like it's given you plenty, but what's it taken from you?"
I dropped my eyes at that, a little ashamed. Carl kept going, his voice moving from accusation to pity. "Once that starts, it won't stop - it'll just take and take, and it'll be hard for you to know what's yours and what belongs to it."
"Then, at some point," Carl said, "you will see it."
I started at this. I asked him what it looked like. He shook his head.
"I didn't see a thing," Carl said. "Jenny did."
The event he described was two years after Angie disappeared. Carl had gone back to their bedroom to take a nap; Jennifer was sitting at the kitchen table, clipping and sorting coupons. They rarely talked at this point, so silence was normal for both of them.
"It was a beautiful September day," Carl said. I opened the window and let the sound of the trees in the wind just lull me to sleep. Everything was so peaceful, I felt I could almost forget everything that had happened.
"I dreamed. I was playing with Angie in the backyard, chasing her. I could hear her little shrieks of laughter, her feet padding through the grass. She was running right toward the patio door, like she was going to run into the house. But the door was shut. She was running so hard and so fast and didn't see the glass, and she was going to hit it with all of her force. I yelled to her to stop, just as her body hit the door..."
Carl crumpled in his chair, and his whole body heaved with sobs. I sat and watched as what seemed like years of pent-up pain poured out of him in wracking gasps. When he had finished, he looked up at me through exhausted, red-rimmed eyes.
"I woke up to the sound of tinkling glass," Carl said. "I leapt out of bed and ran down the hall to the kitchen. Jennifer was still sitting at the table, completely silent. Her eyes were wide, bulging, her face streaming with tears. She was staring at the patio door. The glass was still in one piece, but it had been starred with thousands of tiny cracks, like it had just withstood a heavy impact. I knelt down beside her and asked her what had happened, what had cracked the glass. She looked at me, didn't blink once, and whispered so low I almost didn't make it out:
'Angie. It was Angie.'
"Then she pointed at the bottom of the door."
Carl grew silent. His eyes closed and his head slumped forward, and for a moment I thought he was going to topple out of the chair. Instead, he reached over, opened a drawer in the end table next to him and pulled out an ancient Polaroid. He handed it to me and watched as my mouth slowly fell open:
I got right to the point. I asked him what he'd meant about "it" getting Jennifer. He gave me a blank stare and waved me off, saying we'd talk about that. Then he asked me what I'd seen. I more or less summarized everything I've written up to this point: the artifacts, the dreams, the coincidences.
The feeling of being watched.
Carl barely reacted to any of it, just nodding slightly every so often. When I'd finished, he lowered his head and started massaging his temples.
"It gave you something," he said. " When you got its attention. That's how it started with us." Carl told me about the day in late March, 1985 that Angie had toddled up to the porch, her hands and shoes caked with red mud. Neither he nor Jennifer had seen her wander off, and they were frantic that she had gone that far without them knowing. Their fear and anger quickly melted to curiosity when their daughter held out her tiny hand and deposited two grimy lead pellets into Jennifer's palm.
"Musket balls," I said, and Carl nodded. Much as it had with me, the discovery had fired their imaginations about the local legend, particularly Jennifer's, since she was already writing about town lore. For the next several weeks, Carl started going to the Creek on Saturdays, sifting the sediment for finds.
"I never found a thing," he said. "Not one thing in the dozen or so times I went." When he raised his head, I saw tears welling in his eyes. "At one point Angie was bringing us something every other day."
Carl and Jennifer never knew how their daughter kept slipping away, and were amazed at the things she brought back. The list was eerily similar to my own: arrowheads, antique trinkets, buttons, buttons, buttons. They asked her every time where she found them, and every time she answered the same: "The Creek gave it to me."
"We stopped being as concerned about it after awhile, even though it was so strange," Carl said. "Just treated it like a quirk of her little personality." He squeezed his eyes tight shut. "Until the day she brought back the ball."
That was what Angie had called it. It was covered in mud like everything else she had brought them, and was roughly the size of a softball. Jennifer had taken it inside to wash it off for her. As before, Carl asked her where she had gotten it, expecting the usual answer. But it was different this time.
"She said the 'Sticky Man' had given it to her," Carl said. "I didn't have a chance to ask her what it meant before I heard my wife scream."
When he had charged into the kitchen, Jennifer was pressed against the wall opposite the sink, sobbing. The object lying under the running water was a tiny human skull, possibly that of a newborn. It was missing its lower jaw, and a vicious fracture ran diagonally from the right eye socket across the top of the cranium.
"She was scared out of her mind," Carl said. "But not just because of what it was. She told me that, in the moment it had emerged from the mud, it had also started to bleed."
He'd found no blood anywhere, and at the time he had thought she had imagined it. But it did not change the fact of what it was, or that someone had given the grisly thing to their daughter. They had called the police, and resolved to keep Angie in sight at all times from then on.
I stopped him and asked him why there was no mention of this in any of the news coverage of her later disappearance, especially if they had the evidence of the skull. Carl shook his head and laughed miserably.
"Because they never saw it," Carl said. Jennifer had insisted that the skull not remain in their house while they waited for the police, so he had stuffed it in a paper bag and left it on the back porch. They arrived less than 20 minutes later, and he had brought the bag back in to show them.
"It was empty," he said. "Nothing in it but a residue of mud. I didn't let that bag out of my sight for more than a minute while we were waiting, and now these cops were looking at me like I had antennae."
He and Jennifer had insisted it had been there, and brought Angie in to ask her about the Sticky Man. "She wouldn't say what she the name meant," Carl said. "Was he covered in something sticky? Did he look like a stick? She just kept calling him that, like it was obvious what it meant. When we asked her about 'her ball' - we didn't tell her what it was - she said 'the Sticky Man took it back.'"
The police took their information and left. On the way out, they said that Angie "had a very active imagination," clearly taking nothing they had heard seriously. Carl gave them the bag as evidence. "There was something on the outside of the bag I wanted them to look at," he said. "A red smear that wasn't mud. It was like dried wax, only more viscous. I wanted them to check in out." He scowled. "They probably threw it in the trash."
The Weavers practically stood sentinel over Angie for the next few months as spring passed into summer. The flow of artifacts into the house stopped, as her parents managed to catch her every time she seemed ready to slip out the front or back door. She cried bitterly each time over being cut off from her favorite play spots, but eventually found other things to occupy herself, like the beautiful new doll they gave her the day she turned three that July.
A few nights after her birthday, Carl found himself being shaken awake by Jennifer. It was around midnight, and he said she could hear Angie talking in her room. When they opened her door, they found her standing up in her new toddler bed, fully awake, staring at the window that looked out onto the front lawn. (As he described it, I realized with some discomfort that Angie's old room is my current office.) She said without prompting that the Sticky Man had come to see her. Jennifer had immediately snatched her up and raced with her back to their bedroom.
"I hung back for a moment," Carl said. "Just looking at the window. There was no one there, no trace that anyone had been. Then in the moonlight I saw faint shadow across the glass toward the bottom, a streak where Jenny or I had maybe touched by accident. I looked closer and saw it was on the outside of the glass, not the inside. It wasn't skin oil, either, but something thicker, translucent and red." Carl paused, and I noticed that sweat had broken out on his forehead in spite of the coolness of the room. "I ran back to the bedroom and locked us in."
Less than ten days later, Angie disappeared. "I can even tell you the moment it happened," Carl said. "I could hear her through the front screen, talking to her doll, maybe five feet away from me. Then she made this sound. It wasn't a scream, or a cry. It was a tiny little noise that I barely even noticed at the time. I've been turning it over in my head ever since. It was surprise. Not even bad surprise. The sort of sound you'd make if someone familiar you weren't expecting to see just appeared out of the blue. Then nothing after that."
Carl sank back into the chair with his eyes closed. He was visibly shaking at this point, and his breath hitched in his chest as if he was fighting back tears. I asked him if he wanted to take a break and he waved me off.
"I'm okay," he said. "You wanted to know what I meant earlier, about my wife? Like I said, when you got it's attention, it would give you something." Carl swallowed hard. "My wife got its attention."
Jennifer had thrown herself into research after Angie vanished. She had pored through all of her old notes and thrown out anything that didn't relate to a disappearance, and followed any and every lead she could. What she had found, Carl told me, could have filled half-a-dozen books, much more than the slim volume she had actually published.
"You saw what was there," Carl said. "That's what she could find trace records for, and it was a lot. The rest was based on her own theories, and she had a lot. I thought she would tell me every single person who ever died in Sugar Creek was killed by this thing." Carl paused. "I could almost believe that now."
Jennifer had attempted interviews with family members of the recent missing. They had met with her grudgingly, and there was never more than one meeting. "She became a nuisance around town, a 'troublemaker.'" Carl said. "She'd raise the issue at every town hall meeting. She'd regularly call the chief of police, the mayor, anyone she could with a new scrap of evidence or theory. People got sick of it, sick of her. I'm ashamed to say it embarrassed me, too. I was so depressed, I just wanted to forget it. Most everyone did, it seemed. She was appalled at this, and refused to let us. I think that's how she drew its eye."
Carl said her nightmares started that fall, and what he described was terribly familiar. The following spring, the "gifts" started to arrive again, rusted pieces of junk appearing on the porch, always to vanish again sometime later, much as they had with Angie. Carl noted that it was always Jennifer who found them, never him, and they always disappeared before she could show them to him. But he never doubted that she was telling the truth, and could not avoid the toll it was taking on her mind.
"One evening, I was pulling up to the house after work, and I saw her tearing across the front yard, crying and screaming," Carl said. "She was more furious than I'd ever seen her, swearing a blue streak. Her arms were full of the biggest rocks she could hold from our garden. I followed her and watched her hurl them, one after another, into the creek, shrieking abuse at the dirty water. I got a hold of her and she collapsed against me, weeping. She said that today's "gift" had been a tiny shoe, one of a pair that we had gotten Angie for her last birthday. She hadn't even attempted to hold onto it to show me but had chucked it into the water, then had gone to get the rocks."
Carl's composure had deteriorated over this portion of the conversation, and he was shaking so badly that he had to dig his nails into the chair arms to steady himself. In an instant, two more pills were out of the bottle and had disappeared down his throat, no water needed, apparently. I tried to show some empathy, saying how similarly some of my experiences had been, and Carl's head snapped up, his eyes zeroing in on mine.
"How similar?" he said. "It sounds like it's given you plenty, but what's it taken from you?"
I dropped my eyes at that, a little ashamed. Carl kept going, his voice moving from accusation to pity. "Once that starts, it won't stop - it'll just take and take, and it'll be hard for you to know what's yours and what belongs to it."
"Then, at some point," Carl said, "you will see it."
I started at this. I asked him what it looked like. He shook his head.
"I didn't see a thing," Carl said. "Jenny did."
The event he described was two years after Angie disappeared. Carl had gone back to their bedroom to take a nap; Jennifer was sitting at the kitchen table, clipping and sorting coupons. They rarely talked at this point, so silence was normal for both of them.
"It was a beautiful September day," Carl said. I opened the window and let the sound of the trees in the wind just lull me to sleep. Everything was so peaceful, I felt I could almost forget everything that had happened.
"I dreamed. I was playing with Angie in the backyard, chasing her. I could hear her little shrieks of laughter, her feet padding through the grass. She was running right toward the patio door, like she was going to run into the house. But the door was shut. She was running so hard and so fast and didn't see the glass, and she was going to hit it with all of her force. I yelled to her to stop, just as her body hit the door..."
Carl crumpled in his chair, and his whole body heaved with sobs. I sat and watched as what seemed like years of pent-up pain poured out of him in wracking gasps. When he had finished, he looked up at me through exhausted, red-rimmed eyes.
"I woke up to the sound of tinkling glass," Carl said. "I leapt out of bed and ran down the hall to the kitchen. Jennifer was still sitting at the table, completely silent. Her eyes were wide, bulging, her face streaming with tears. She was staring at the patio door. The glass was still in one piece, but it had been starred with thousands of tiny cracks, like it had just withstood a heavy impact. I knelt down beside her and asked her what had happened, what had cracked the glass. She looked at me, didn't blink once, and whispered so low I almost didn't make it out:
'Angie. It was Angie.'
"Then she pointed at the bottom of the door."
Carl grew silent. His eyes closed and his head slumped forward, and for a moment I thought he was going to topple out of the chair. Instead, he reached over, opened a drawer in the end table next to him and pulled out an ancient Polaroid. He handed it to me and watched as my mouth slowly fell open:
"There was something else, too, just outside the door," Carl said. "A shoe. The other one."
I asked him again if he had seen what made this, and he shook his head again. "No," he said. "She - it - was here for Jenny. To f__k with her, and f__k with her it did." Carl sagged back into his seat, looking utterly exhausted. "I left the house a few days later, just walked out with a suitcase, and never looked back. A year later the divorce went through, and I haven't heard a word from her since." A remnant of the pain from his earlier breakdown seeped back into his voice. "She wouldn't go. She was never going to leave, and now I know she never will."
Doc, if you had seen this man...you could have done a case study on him. He was the most haunted human being I have ever seen, and I felt like I was watching him slowly die in that chair. I decided to cut things short, and I thanked him for his help. He just sat there in a heap and nodded at me, his eyes closed, and I figured that was it. I was halfway to the door when he called out to me again.
"I forgot," he said. "I wanted to tell you when you came in, but I forgot. It freaked me out at the time, so I took a pill first to calm down and it slipped my mind." He lurched over the arm of the chair and looked up at me. "In her notes - the ones I gave you. I told you, she had theories, not just of what this thing had done, but of what it was.
"That song you were playing, in your car. That Scottish song? The name of it. I've heard it before. That name is in Jenny's notes."
*Note: BCI interviewers visited Carl Weaver's residence in Dayton, OH on October 29, 2015 only to find that the property has been empty for some time. The last reported sighting of Mr. Weaver by his neighbors was on January 21 of this year as he was retrieving his mail. Reports say that as he returned up the walk, he suddenly started and fell to the ground, feeling frantically about himself. He then became still and looked westward, staring at something no one could see for more than three minutes, after which he rose to his feet and fled back into his home. The next day his door was standing open, and his car was gone. A sheet of paper was found on the kitchen table with the words "still too close" scrawled on them in marker. Mr. Weaver's present whereabouts remain unknown.
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