hey everyone before the video begins I just wanted to make you aware of a GoFundMe link down below for some dear friends of mine who are one of many lives completely upended by Hurricane Helen these friends had their home flooded last year during Hurricane Adalia and were displaced for nearly a year while they wrangled with insurance FEMA and contractors to just now a year later get their lives back to normal only to a few weeks after have their entire home destroyed Again by 5 ft of flooding within the space of 12 hours now with all
that being said don't feel obligated to donate I'm just hoping that we as a community can give them enough leeway financially as they go through the recovery process and decide how to approach this incredibly uncertain time in their lives thank you [Music] [Music] on Halloween night back in 1978 I was just 10 years old and I was getting ready to go trick-or-treating with my buddies from fifth grade I remember being really excited because the year before my friends and I had gotten to run up and down the streets in total freedom knocking on houses wherever
we could now sounds crazy easy to think that we were allowed to go out at night at that age almost totally unsupervised but since we were going from door to door and being constantly greeted by adults giving us candy I guess folks figured that it was just safe as could be and it really was we had the night to ourselves running around like crazy and seeing all our elementary school friends in their costumes then at one point there was this big old candy swap going on where kids would swap their pixie sticks for Dum Dums
and their to rolls for peanut butter cups like some big old candy Stock Exchange it was magical one of those childhood memories you carry with you for the rest of your life and most importantly nothing very untour word happened and so as you can imagine I was incredibly excited to do the whole thing again next year and then incredibly disappointed when I found out it wasn't happening the first year so Back in 77 I remember my parents saying something like just make sure you're back before dark and don't go too far but then the next
year in 78 my mom seemed way over involved right from the get-go she wanted to know who I'm going out with where they live what their parents' names were and if I know their phone numbers and all of that she asked me a million questions to the point where it got very annoying and then when I told her that I was heading out to meet my friends she broke some very bad news I wouldn't be leaving on my own and I wouldn't be trick-or-treating with my fifth grade buddies I'd be waiting for our neighbor Mrs
Anderson to stop by with a bunch of random neighborhood kids and she was going to walk us up and down the block for like half an hour before dropping us off back home and believe me when I say I was devastated I kept asking why what had changed and why I couldn't go out with my friends but all my mom would tell me was that if I didn't want to go with Mrs Anderson then I wasn't going trick-or-treating at all I don't know if every kid's mom waited until the last godamn moment to ruin their
Halloween but mine did and I was on the verge of fullblown tears before I finally gave in I was either going to suck it up or miss out on the big bag of candy in time with my friends so obviously I chose the candy I remember finishing off my cowboy costume in a real stinker of a mood then when Mrs Anderson showed up to collect me off I went it was me Mrs Anderson and three other random kids from the neighborhood one of which was Mrs Anderson's kid Billy and at first I was still in
a very terrible mood because I wasn't with my friends we were under strict supervision and Mrs Anderson said that we could only walk in a short Loop up and down the street all the other kids were in chaperone groups like that too so it wasn't like it was just us and although it wasn't as as lame as I thought it was going to be it still sucked compared to the chaos of the previous year so we're maybe 20 minutes into the adult mandated trick-or-treating and the adults have this thing organized so badly that there's congestion
toward the end of the route we're literally queuing at this one house in front of not one but two other groups of trick-or-treaters and as Mrs Anderson and the lady in front start talking to each other her son sort of sidles up to me points off into the distance and says that kid's giving me the creeps I look to see what he's pointing at and off in the distance there's a kid standing near the edge of the park where the old jungle gy was he was close enough for us to see that he was wearing
a mask but he's not with any kind of group and so we say hey what gives he could gets to walk around in his own why not us looking back on it it was kind of cold to just drop him like that but we were kids we didn't know any better we saw perceived Injustice and we called it out even chimps and monkeys go crazy when they think something is unfair anyway we start yelling about this kid out there alone and Mrs Anderson sees him too so she starts saying something like hey come back here
right this instant young man you have to stay with your group the kid just kind of stands there for a minute not responding and then Mrs Anderson yells at him again and he starts walking over to the groups of kids Mrs Anderson then says which group are you with and then starts asking all around to the adults something like was this kid with you but none of the adults seem to recognize his mask so each just sort of shook their heads when confused in the chaos I remember looking at the kid and thinking how I
was 99% sure that I hadn't seen him around that night I've been checking out everyone else's costumes and whatnot and I didn't remember this kid's Green Goblin mask anywhere also it wasn't a Green Goblin mask like the villain from Spider-Man it was just sort of a goblin that happened to be green maybe that inspired Spider-Man I don't know now anyways I'm looking at the kid's Mass thinking I don't remember seeing him around but at the same time something about him was just oddly familiar to me I don't know if it was his shoes or his
clothes or the way he carried himself but I'm pretty sure that I knew that kid from school it turns out that I was 100% right on that one but we'll get back to that later so Mrs Anderson is calling around towards all the other grown-ups asking if they're missing a kid but I'm still watching the kid and trying to figure out why he seems so familiar so Anderson isn't watching him but I am and that meant that I was still watching him when he slips away from Mrs Anderson walks right up to a kid in
the group behind us that had just joined the line and then pulls out a knife out of that candy bag that he had with him and just starts stabbing things were calm one minute and Chaos the next and all I remember is running back to my house because I was only a block away my dad came to the door and as I ran inside he ran outside because he could hear 50 kids all screaming and running with adults trying to Coral them I mean it must look like a freaking disaster movie or something something cuz
some kids got blood on them some of the adults had blood on them too just wild stuff for him to run out into with no context whatsoever and I spent the rest of the night in my bedroom scared out of my mind with my mom making sure that I wasn't freaking out too hard and the rest of this I got from my dad so it's kind of secondhand info I obviously saw the first stabbing happen up close and in my head I was thinking way more kids got hurt maybe got killed too but by some
sheer Miracle no one died and only one kid and one grown-up had to be taken to the hospital and the grown-up only got hurt because they cut their hand on the knife while grabbing it off of the kid in the goblin mask who was doing the stabbing it seems like we kind of dodged a bullet right that it could have been way worse well it was way worse and even now no one really knows any of what that kid says is true or not it's became an endurance ing urban legend in the town that I
grew up in though and so the way it happened was that the kids started stabbing and then some grownup with brass balls ran up and immediately subdued the kid before he could hurt anyone else the kid who got hurt received only defensive wounds as in cuts to their hand risk from trying to defend themselves you know but then the cuts were only minor and it was like the kid was only trying to scare her not really hurt her but it just got out of control that kind of fell in line with the kid's story but
like with that other thing about recognizing him I'll get to that later and so this courageous grown-up pins the kid down grabs the knife off of him cutting themselves in the process and like some Christopher Nolan version of Scooby-Doo they pull the mask off the kid to reveal who the mysterious villain truly is only to discover that it was a kid named Leroy Leroy wasn't this kid's real name obviously but I don't think it's my place to be spreading him or his family name around the internet over something he did when he was 12 or
however old he was but he sure is how look like a LeRoy so I guess that's what I'll call him anyway this Leroy kid came from a very bad family mom was on drugs didn't take care of him properly and dad was never around it's a real sad story and not Leroy's fault at all but he ended up with a reputation as being like the school stinky kid but then almost totally unbeknownst to us kids Leroy's appearance at the trick-or-treating event surprised everyone and not just because he pulled out a knife but because by that
point Leroy had been an official missing person for almost 2 months so at the start of the school year Leroy didn't show up to school the school's principal then reached out to the county sheriff who drove out to Leroy's family trailer to talk to his mom or her boyfriend and both were high out of their minds thought Leroy was at school and raised all hell when the sheriff and his boys took them away in cuffs for child neglect they had no idea Leroy was missing but word has it that his mom baled her eyes out
down at the department and I guess whenever she sobered up it hit her what a terrible mom she was and at first everyone blamed her and her no good boyfriend for Leroy's disappearance by the end of September the sheriff had to scale back the search for him the weather was getting colder the nights were getting darker and it was looking more and more like it was a search for Leroy's Body rather than a search to find him alive and that was doubly so by the time Halloween rolled around cuz how the hell was a 12-year-old
kid going to survive being homeless for the better part of 2 months everyone was real shocked to hear how Leroy had just showed up out of nowhere nowhere but what shocked them even more was the story he told the cops when they finally got around to interviewing him because when they asked him why he showed up with a knife and tried to stab somebody he told them the devil made me do it and I'm guessing the cops figured that it was just an excuse at first you know kind of like that I don't like Monday's
killer girl that it was blatantly just an attempt to disguise her total psychopathy but when they asked more questions on who this devil was and how we met him it became increasingly obvious that Leroy had been kidnapped and held by not one but several different people according to Leroy he was playing outside one day when a man approached him claiming to be a friend of his father's the guy asked if he wanted to meet him and of course Leroy says yes but he also said how he wasn't comfortable just wandering off with a stranger the
guy says no problem let me go get your dad and then returns a half hour later driving a van and telling Leroy that his dad is in the back and little Leroy then approaches the back of the van looks inside and then before he even realizes it's empty the guy shoved him into the back closed and locked the door and then drove off with him screaming to be let out Leroy said the guy drove him somewhere some place he'd never seen before and had no idea how to get back to he said he was forced
into a windowless room with nothing but a mattress in a bucket and then kept there for so long and tortured so horribly that he lost track of time he said he got so thirsty and hungry that it hurt but when he begged for water the man who took him gave him water that tasted bad and after that he felt weird like he was tired but different and had dark spots in his memory the cops asked why Leroy had told him that the devil made him do it and he replied that although he didn't know if
the man was the devil for sure that's what he called himself he said the only time they really talked was when the devil took him out of the room one day to meet his helpers Leroy said that he drank some of the bad tasting water a while before but was still feeling woozy when the devil took him out of his room and over towards a circular dining table sat around it were five or six men in cloth hoods but the man who called himself the devil was wearing a larger wooden mask that had carved horns
sprout from the top the man calling himself the devil then introduced the men as his helpers and told Leroy that he was to obey them just like he obeyed him and that's when Leroy said that they gave him the mask and told him what they given him was very important they made him wear it never letting him take it off all the way not even when he ate and drank then after what we know was almost 2 months in captivity the man calling himself the the devil told Leroy that the only way to get the
mask off was to make a human sacrifice Leroy said that by that time he was ready to do just about anything for a shot at Freedom so he did exactly as the devil and his helpers asked him and attack the trick-or-treating groups that I was a part of he said one of Satan's helpers then walked him across the park to where our groups were trick-or-treating gave him the bag with the knife in it and then told him to do as he'd been told Leroy said that the moment he killed a kid any kid the devil
would then transport him back in time to his mom's trailer and that it'd be like he'd never been taken at all and that was all it took to get him close enough for us to see him and when Mrs Anderson called him over I guess he saw his chance right there I don't know exactly what happened to Old Leroy after that as in I don't know exactly where he is now or exactly how the legal process went after he was taken into custody but I do know his mom and her boyfriend got into trouble for
child endangerment and all of that and then Leroy himself got taken to some kind of Psych Hospital Kitty prison I guess the doctors there said there was a whole bunch of things wrong with him but he wasn't insane or delusional and some of the marks on his body were consistent with the methods of torture that he described to the cops but the thing that really messed with people and had this taking on Urban Legend status even after all these years is the fact that the cops never recovered The Mask you see after Leroy was taken
down and the cops showed up someone had already taken the mask off of him I guess I said a Scooby-Doo moment earlier but it it wasn't really like that they always used to wait until everything was over and done with before taking off the bad guy's mask right well this was real life so almost the second that they had Leroy pinned down someone whips that thing off of him right there and then to see who it is because why wouldn't you but then by the time the cops got a crime scene set up and went
looking for Leroy's Green Goblin mask that he was supposedly wearing no one could find that anywhere the cops started asking folks in the neighborhood to make sure that there isn't a kid who had picked up the mask by accident but then when no one comes forward they start going door to door in the neighborhood to make damn sure that there hasn't been a mistake after all lero said all his captors touch the mask at some point sometimes with their bare hands so the cops wanted to maybe check it for fingerprints or something like that and
in fact I think it was probably their only connection between Leroy and his supposed kidnappers but no matter what they did they couldn't recover the mask and to some it stands to reason that the person who took it did not wanted to fall into the cop's hands which means that there's a whole bunch of people who think that right as as all the chaos was unfolding after Leroy stabbed a kid someone who looks so normal that there's not a single witness to report them just sort of walks up picks up the mask and then walked
off into the darkness maybe appearing as another parent and since no one was ever arrested or convicted of Leroy's kidnapping those same folks who think it's all some conspiracy hiding in plain sight they believe his kidnappers are still out there and that maybe they've been doing stuff like that for longer than we can imagine now we know Leroy was kidnapped and we know he tried to stab a kid but as for everything else I guess a judge might just call it hearsay but me personally I don't know what to believe because from where I'm standing
much stranger things have happened and are still happening right now I just know that what Leroy told the cops and the fact his mask was never found somehow scares the living hell out of [Music] me the single most frightening confusing and traumatizing thing that's ever happened to me happened on Halloween night of 1999 my mates and I had just started year 7 which in America is equivalent to sixth grade starting at 11 and finishing at 12 starting secondary school was exciting in but it also meant that we were quickly reaching the point where it was
no longer acceptable to go trick-or-treating I don't know what it's like in America but around here if a load of kids walk up your drive dress like minions of course you're going to give them a mini Mars bar or seven but if a bunch of surly looking almost teenagers complete with pimples and Min stashes start banging on someone's door demanding chocolate under threat of vandalism they'd be lucky to leave with broken teeth let alone rotten ones now with that in mind we knew it was a case of one last blowout then jacket in for good
in hopes of transitioning to Halloween costume parties with beers and siggies and most importantly girls but before all that we could have one more night of wholesome costume fun and ensure a sweets haul that'll last us till Christmas if we rationed it properly and so in March of 1999 you might remember the Matrix came out I don't need to explain what the Matrix is so I won't and nor will I have to explain why a bunch of 11-year-old boys thought it was the best thing since sliced bread so when it came to Halloween costumes we
decided to just be the Matrix and not one of us either but all of us but then because we didn't all have the making of a matrix costume two of us just wore school uniforms black ties and sunglasses at night by the way blind as bats and then two of us wore leather jackets and sunglasses myself included while the fifth lad whose sister was into all that goth music was the only one who did the full monty we look stupid like two members of the Village People in their security guards but but then the fifth
lad Jamie he actually looked the bee's knees now that I look back on it he had the long leather trench coat extra long since he borrowed it from his older sister he had the little sunglasses like the ones Morpheus actually wears and he had his hair all slick back with hair gel too with some army boots black jeans and a black T-shirt on to complete the look he actually looked fantastic to be honest but he also stood out like a sore thumb walking around neighborhoods where kids were dressed as Woody or buzz from Toy Story
and so we start knocking on these houses and we either get pensioners asking with a bloody hell are you lot dressed as or young BLS laughing when they instantly recognized what we were supposed to be it was a really good laugh actually and we made our way up and down the streets near where we lived until eventually we ran out of houses to knock at it was only about half s by that time and none of us had to be back inside until 10: at the earliest so we still had ages to kill and very
little to do but then Jamie had an idea instead of just going home we could walk walk down a road a bit and cross over the Dual carriageway and then knock at some houses in the neighborhood across from us we all agreed that was a good idea because who wouldn't want more mini chocolate bars there was just one small problem we'd have to pass the home wood estate Homewood is probably one of the roughest areas of Bradford that's not to say that the vast majority of people who live there aren't friendly and welcoming because 99%
of the time you can walk and drive around the area and not get even an ounce of trouble it's just never been the safest place to be after dark especially not for a group of 11-year-olds dressed like debt collectors on their way to a rave but then we had ourselves a little plan instead of walking down one of the larger roads past the estate we'd walk through the alley near the train tracks which would minimize our exposure to the estate while passing it to get to the other neighborhood now sorry for the logistical briefing there
but I'm just giving you an idea of why we thought it was a good plan to go walking down an Alleyway after dark while dressed like a German industrial band we thought that we wouldn't run into any of the bad lads who lived on the estate but little did we know they were hanging out in the one place we didn't want to bump into them so about halfway down the alleyway there's a blind 90° turn then you can't really see much at the end of The Alley either we thought that gave gave us cover and
it did but it also meant that we couldn't see what was around either Bend we round the first one and there's no one there so we think brilliant we're in the free and clear but then we round the second corner and we run into half a dozen of the very people we hoped not to run into I didn't know all the lads names but I do remember three of them the main two were the hand twins Francis and Anthony hand were both boxers and had the reputations to match they've been in trouble with the police
mainly because they love to fight but they were partial to just about any kind of crime you can imagine so robbing a few costume kids of their suits was really nothing to them especially since we were considered fair game and by that I mean of a certain age and male so not too shameful to Rob and possibly slap around some kids like us for a bit and so the second we round the corner there's obviously this massive uh-oh moment for us but the hand Twins and Company just burst out laughing they obviously knew what we
were dressed as everyone of a certain age did because the Matrix was Bloody massive at the time but they weren't exactly the type to go giving us compliments on how much effort we put into our various costumes instead they saw fit to try and humiliate us they were laughing their heads off shouting stuff like these think they're in the bloody Matrix and we tried our best to just ignore them which was stupid really because when Lads like that sense any kind of weakness you're well and truly buggered and so despite trying to just walk around
them they were in no mood to Simply let us pass it started when they noticed our bags of sweets at which point one of the hand twins started saying something like look boys they brought us all their sweets and they started trying to grab one of our Lads bags of sweets saying something like you're too old to be dressing up like that and too fat to be eating those sweets which to be fair he probably was but just because we couldn't fight back didn't mean we were about to just let ourselves be bullied so one
of them trying to rob our mat's bag of sweets but our mate saying no get off me you wanker he's not throwing punches or anything but the confrontation was exactly what the hand Twins and Company were looking for so as soon as there's a bit of Argy bargy the hands and Friends spread out along the street so we couldn't pass at all we didn't all shout run or anything but there was this very recognizable moment where we all just kind of looked at each other thinking we're in trouble here then when the first one of
us turned around and ran back down the alley the rest of us followed but so did the hand twins who with their boys behind them went chasing us like the clappers of hell we ran like Lads possessed and since we were running down a blind entry there was only one way we could all run but then once we ran the corner and sprinted to the end of the alleyway there was no plan on where we were all running too two of The Lads ran left probably with the intention of running backwards towards our neighborhood but
the other three of us ran right this was definitely not a good idea as we'd have to walk back the way we came if we wanted to get home but in the moment all we were thinking was run run run so I just acted on Instinct and ran right with my two mates after the turn we were faced with quite a long long straight road with a wall on one side and trees on the other I happen to notice that to our right where the trees were there was a little Gap in a chain link
fence and on Instinct I just ran for it I didn't really know what was on the other side it all looked abandoned and overgrown but I thought in that case it' be a good place to hide I thought my mates would follow me because being the faster runner I'd managed to overtake them by the time that I'd spotted the chain link fence I thought they'd see me spotting a hiding place and would be right on my tail but the hand Twins and Company were much closer than I first thought if they'd have done the same
as me and run for the fence they'd have been slowed down trying to force their way through the Gap and the Hand twins gang would have caught up with them but then being at the front I didn't know that so after bursting through the fence and looking over my shoulder my first thoughts were this weird mix of oh no I'm alone and oh thank God because it didn't look like anyone was following me through the metal gates of whatever abandoned plot I was on I saw my mates running past than what looked like all of
the hand twins crew so there was this wash of relief that passed over me I didn't stop running though I was still scared out of my wits and wanted to find a hiding place so that's what I did and it basically involved sitting in a bush that had a view of the front entrance so I could be hidden whilst being aware of my surroundings if this had happened a few years later we'd have all had mobiles to call each other on but it was 1999 and I know people had mobiles back then but not five
workingclass 11-year-olds from Bradford and so instead of being able to do some information gathering I had no choice but to sit there in my leather jacket with my bag of sweets and just wait until I thought the coast was suitably clear I'm not sure how long I waited but it felt like a long time then just as I started think yeah I might be safe to run home I saw someone walking on the other side of the metal gate toward where the Gap in the fence was obviously I froze in place not being able to
see who it was just knowing someone was there and that it might have been one of the lads chasing us but then I remember thinking if it was one of the lads chasing us then why are they walking they seem to be walking quite calmly too not even a brisk walk or jog to suggest that they had any urgency around them whatso ever I started to think it's okay this is probably just some dog walker then just as I was about to climb out of the Bush I'd secreted myself in I heard something that turned
my blood to ice it was the sound of the chainlink fence rattling someone was forcing their way in I couldn't see who it was straight away there were a few trees blocking my view of that portion of the fence but I think I knew deep down that it must been one of that hand crew because I didn't even have to see them to know that I'd had to get back into the bush Crouch down and pray that no one found me I then watched as a lad called fery stepped out from behind the trees I
didn't know him personally I just knew him by that nickname fery he didn't know me either and although we'd seen each other around town we'd never spoken a word in exchange he had no reason to hate me no reason to want to kick the shite out of me and Rob my sweet but that didn't stop him from chasing me and for some reason that scared me even more than the prospect of getting the crap beaten out of me but even scarier was seeing him start to actively and methodically hunt for me I didn't think anyone
had seen me Dart through the chain link fence otherwise surely they'd have immediately chased me but as it turns out someone had seen me and they were in no rush to come back I didn't know home would all that well you see and they knew something I didn't fzy didn't say anything as he sted closer and closer to the bush I was in he couldn't see me but by the time he got within a few feet he bolted it and ran as fast as I could out the back of the Bush I ran and ran
thinking there'd be some kind of way out ahead of me but there wasn't there was only this big brick wall at the back of whatever abandoned plot I was on and the only chance I had of scaling it was to climb a tree that was off to my right then hop over the wall after darting along one of its branches and so I ran and when I got there I dropped my bag of sweets and started to climb but it wasn't fast enough I was just about to scramble up a low Branch I'd managed to
grab on to when I just felt this pair of hands take hold of my leg fery pulled me down so hard that I grazed my hands on the branch and was dragged out of my grip and as I fell I landed so awkwardly that I felt the shooting pain go through my ankle before I collapsed to the floor I don't know if I genuinely thought that me being hurt would deter fzy from beating me up or if that was just pure wishful thinking on my part but it didn't make a blind bit of difference I
kept saying to him stuff like please no stop I I think I broke my ankle but it was like he wasn't listening at all he just started kicking me over over and over again aiming for my head but sometimes getting my chest and shoulder and my arm which I was using to cover my head he just kept kicking me and kicking me until in the end I made one final attempt to beg him to stop which unfortunately meant that he had a nice little window to land a full force kick right in my face I
don't think I was knocked out but I was definitely stunned the pain that shot through my nose and mouth M was like nothing I'd ever felt before and all I could do was lie there holding my face and head while groaning for him to stop I don't think I could get any worse I mean I was scared that he might kill me or something mostly by accident in one of those it was only a prank that turns deadly but aside from that I really didn't think I had much else to worry about but then Fern
started trying to pull my pants down and that's how I know I wasn't knocked out because I felt it and when I did I started to scream in a way I didn't know I was capable of I actually didn't know what he was planning at the time I was too young and naive to think boys were in any danger of that I just thought that he wanted to humiliate me even further by making me walk back home in the nude and with that in mind it was my turn to attack him although to be fair
my attempt was last laughably ineffective however what throwing punches and kicking out at him did do was ensure that I bought myself just enough time for the hand twins to show up at first this was terrifying to me as it looked like Fern now had backup to finish whatever humiliation he was planning but in some weird twist of fate it was those hand twins who saved me from what was about to happen they started laughing at fzy not with him but at him him and all because he'd got my pants halfway down and just in
case I haven't made it clear already I'm a boy not a girl and they were asking him what he was planning like sort of making fun of him calling him gay and stuff like that and they got him to stop immediately but then instead of trying to strip me he started kicking the crap out of me again the hand Twins were like whoa what are you doing because they could see with the state I was already in and they just wanted to scare us and Rob us of are sweets not bloody kill us one of
the brothers I think his name was Francis then started slapping frenzy around saying how he hated bullies which is ironic because that's the exact thing they were doing to us it seemed like they didn't let me leave with my sweets but they did let me pull my pants up and leave which to be honest was all I really wanted to do anyway I never told anyone what fery tried to do and if you're probably wondering why I haven't used many names is because I still want to a little bit of anonymity in all of this
as for fery I don't think that matters anymore because he's no longer with us 7 years after that incident fery was stabbed to death on a quiet street after a car with Four Lads hit him at 50 m an hour people just thought it was some kind of gang beef but the way they killed him makes me think it was something a bit more personal and that perhaps I wasn't the only one that fery had tried to do something ter able [Music] too my name is Martin and I've been listening to your YouTube videos since
the summer and since Halloween is coming up I thought now would be as good a time as ever to share something personal with you I say personal but it didn't strictly happen to me it happened to my dad but as you can imagine having something terrible happen to my dad was something I took extremely personal I grew up in High Wickham a town of less than 100,000 people that sits on the Northwestern edges of London I feel like I got the best of both worlds growing up because London is only about half an hour away
by train but High Wickam is surrounded by Countryside and Parks so it's not nearly as fast paac as life in the capital London has quite a lot of crime relatively speaking anyways whereas High Wickham is the kind of place where if there's even some so much as a burglary the whole town is shocked that kind of thing makes me feel lucky to have been brought up there because the violence and apathy of the big city hasn't yet permeated their way into the country then back in 2018 something happened on Halloween night that made everyone think
those days of innocent Tranquility were over just like everywhere else in the UK kids in high Wickam are exposed to a lot of American culture via movies and TV programs so when it comes to late October they want to dress up have a Halloween party and go trick-or-treating I say that thing about American culture because my parents were always fond of telling me that when they were kids there was no such thing as trick-or-treating and everyone looked forward to bonfire night instead which is only a few days later on remember remember the 5th of November
anyway so come Halloween night there are quite a few trick-or-treaters roing the dark Rainy Streets of High Wickham terrorizing pensioners with demands for harabo but I only got a brief glimpse of them because I was headed to a Halloween get together over at a friend's house it was a week night a Wednesday if I remember correctly so although I couldn't stay out too late I was 17 at the time and had six form in the morning I was excited to sneak a few beers in my mate's Back Garden his parents were really chill like that
as long as we didn't take the piss and get too loud then we we were fine to have a few cans I got there at about 5: after I'd arrived home from school and changed while my mat's parents said that we'd all have to make our way home by 11: but then after a few hours of light drinking and hanging out my mate's mom came out into the back Garden to tell me that my mom had just been on the phone I asked if everything was okay and my M's mom said they had to go
home right away I asked why and my Ma's mom said that she didn't know only that my own mother had called her asking to make sure that I was on my way home immediately I remember one of my mates being like uh-oh what have you gone and done now and the implication being that I was in trouble somehow I was actually convinced that was the case myself and as I walked back home I was racking my brain trying to figure out exactly what I'd done to Warrant having my evening interrupted like that I arrived back
home just about ready to face the music but after unlocking the door and walking inside things didn't go anywhere near how I expected them to usually speaking if I was in trouble the first thing that I'd hear when walking through the door is Andrew me and your mom would like a word with you and that was generally the sign that I was about to get a Boling and it was usually my dad who delivered that Stern opening address but that night on Halloween night back in 2018 it was my mom who had called called me
into the front room and she didn't sound angry at all she sounded terrified it feels weird looking back on it now because at the time I just knew something had happened to my dad he should have been home when I got back at around 10:00 p.m. but he wasn't and then the fact that my mom seemed so upset over something I just picked up on it right away before she could even say anything else I walked into the front room and asked where's Dad and she just replied dad's in the hospital then she told me
to sit down I asked is he going to die and my mom said no but that something had happened that meant that he probably is going to be scarred for life I was extremely relieved to hear that he wasn't going to die and I had this weird feeling that whatever came next would be fine and I know that sounds weird maybe a little bit callous but it was like no matter what my mom said next at least he's not dead it might be some life-changing injury but at least I'm not going to lose him that
kind of emotional Whiplash definitely helped me put things into perspective but what happened to my dad was absolutely atrocious and something I find chillingly disturbing even nearly 6 years later while I was at my maid's house chilling in his back Garden quite literally with it being October my mom and dad had been receiving a steady stream of trick-or-treaters the majority of them came between about 6:00 and 7 then as it got closer to 8:00 the knocks on the door were getting fewer and further between about4 to 8 mom and dad got one last knock at
the door mom said that she remembered telling my dad how they were almost out of sweets to hand out and how next year he should buy more dad gets up walks to the door then opens it up but instead of seeing a group of kids in fancy dress calling out trick-or treat there's just one grown-up standing there with some kind of white ghost mask on my dad takes one look at this bloke and says something like you're having a laugh aren't you mate and the bloke doesn't say anything in response instead he started to unscrew
a bottle of what my dad said looked like pink lucazade my dad said he sort of knew that it must have been some kind of prank and he had a feeling the bloke was about to try and give him a Lucas a shower so when he launched the liquid at my dad he darted behind our door so that the liquid landed and hit him on the face and on the part of his foot that wasn't covered by a slipper the guy with the bottle then legged it really fast away and my dad said that he
thought it was weird to not hear any kind of laughter or anything like that and this is also in the age of smartphones so my dad also expected to maybe see someone filming the whole thing from the street but there was no one there some Rando had literally walked up our Drive all alone thrown Lucas a on to my dad and then just ran off but that confusion only lasted a few short seconds for my father because just moments after that pink liquid touched his skin it started to burn mom said that she just heard
my dad suddenly yelping like he was in loads of pain then when she ran out to see what was happening a patch of skin on the side of his face was blistering and bleeding neither of them had any idea what was going on until the ambulance was on their way at which point my dad started realizing that whatever was in that lad's bottle was not Lucas a and that it was some kind of corrosive acid mom said that he was shouting at her to grab some baking soda or bleach because he thought that he could
neutralize the chemical reaction but Mom was on the phone to the ambulance when that happened and when she asked the lady on the phone if that's what she should do the woman gave her clear instructions not to try and neutralize it or it might make things worse they still know what kind of substance the guy had thrown on to my dad so until they did they were to just wait until medical professionals had arrived before they started treatment dad was in agony by the time they arrived but he still had enough about him to tell
my mom to wait at home so I wouldn't arrive back to an empty house and then potentially see something on the news we were allowed to visit him the next day before he went into surgery for a skin graft and seeing my dad like that was really hard hard on both me and my mom he was full of strong painkillers so despite his injuries he seemed to be feeling quite perky and the irony wasn't lost on us that it was him telling us to stop worrying and that everything would be fine instead of us providing
him with any comfort his skin graph operation went really well and from where the burn was on his face you can't really tell he's even scarred unless you look really carefully in the right light but that was only one part of the puzzle solved the other part was why the effing hell he'd been targeted in the first place it kills me to even have to type it out but the police never caught who threw acid at my dad but I think that it might have something to do with another acid attack that had happened just
the previous year don't sue me if I get this bit wrong because it's all from memory but it 100% happened and there's news articles about it out there and if you're interested you can read more about it but to my memory this is what happened some guy drove up from London to square up against a local guy I think from a beef that started on social media I guess The Londoner then tracked the local lad down to a park and was carrying a bottle of acid when he confronted him now this is the part that
really sends me the local lad suspecting that there was acid in the bottle basically karate kicked the bottle out of his hand as soon as he unscrewed the cap but then the acid went flying into a woman sitting on a bench nearby and when she realized what was happening she was rushed to the hospital my dad was okay he got his skin grafted spent about a week in hospital recovering and then got sent home this poor woman on the other hand ended up getting a skin infection which then killed her that could have been my
dad it could have very easily have been my dad under the exact same circumstances I don't know how the poor woman ended up with a skin infection but she did it seems like just the luck of the draw almost she lost her life because some absolute scrot decided to use acid as a weapon one day she was rushed to hospital operated on all the same stuff as my father but she lost her life and he didn't and just writing that out makes me feel so lucky that I could cry the woman who died was a
mother of three her kids must have been absolutely Beyond heartbroken plus horrified that it was Bloody acid and a subsequent infection that had killed their mom why didn't that happen to me why them and not us I'm not saying I think my dad should have died or anything no one should have to go before their time like that especially not in such a horrible way but the thing that really plays in my mind these days is just that why them and not us another reason I was inspired to write this is the fact that another
acid attack happened in London just the other day I heard it was two school girls that got a thrown on them most likely by a boy that had been rejected after asking one of them out I support calls for tougher sentences for acid attackers but it also makes me think like how many more times is this going to happen and in my darker moments I don't think it'll ever stop I have the sick feeling that acid attacks are just part of our life now that if you piss someone off big enough they won't just beat
you up or want to fight or anything else like that they'll just buy some acid off the internet and throw it in your face because with something like that if you live the rest of your life with horrible scarring you're considered one of the lucky ones because the Unlucky ones like that poor woman sitting on the bench that day don't get to walk away with their lives intact so rest in peace to her and to my dad I love you and I'm glad you're still here hey friends thanks for listening click that notification Bell to
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