Anecdotes From a Morbid Childhood: Why I like true crime so much.
A ten year old Keisha circa 2002 on Halloween. My 4th grade art teacher Mrs. Sprinkle had entered my witch painting into the Philharmonic Halloween Art show. This was my outfit of choice.
Introduction to Horror
I have this vivid memory of me at the ripe age of 5 or 6. My younger cousins were staying the night and my dad showed us the original Night of the Living Dead. I was absolutely enthralled by it. Seeing zombies terrorize people stuck in a house in the middle of nowhere was exhilarating to a young, wannabe Wednesday Addams like me. From that point forward, my love of things that went bump in the night only grew when the kids in my neighborhood hosted weekly watch parties of Are You Afraid of the Dark. The five of us would scramble to my friend Alicia’s bunk bed trying to beat each other for the best seat in the house. Piled atop beds and pillows, all of us excitedly huddled around her tiny box tv, our faces illuminated by the screen, and all of us ready to be scared by the midnight society.
My Mom the Non-Horror Fan
My mom never enjoyed horror, but knew I enjoyed being scared. When she would run out of ideas to keep me entertained, she oftentimes resorted to our ghost game. She draped a bedsheet over her head and chased me around the house making varying “OooOooOOooo” sounds. The safe room would be the laundry room where I would hide. The game never got stagnant to me (although my mom admitted later in my adult years that it was so repetitive for her). Either way, the house would be filled with laughter and it was always a blast. As time went on, she switched it up.
At times we would sit with the door closed in our pitch black bathroom, gathered around the toilet (our campfire). Armed with a flashlight, my mom would tell me ghost stories. Wide eyed, I soaked in every spooky word, anxiously awaiting to hear what happened next. Joke’s on me though. Afterwards I was always afraid the ghost would come get me through the toilet and suck me down after I flushed.
Not Scary Enough
The stories got less tame about the time when I was seven (I often challenged her on telling me scarier things). The first story was a Taiwanese folklore about a woman who was murdered by her husband. He buried her body under his bathtub, but her ghost would cry and wail all day and all night. Eventually he was fed up with her cries, dug her body back up, and buried her underneath a willow tree. Her fate to forever be a weeping willow.
As a perturbed seven year old, that story quickly became one of my favorites. It was around this time that I started reading Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. Its disturbing illustrations both fascinated and haunted me, burning it’s gruesome characters into my mind forever (looking at you “The Haunted House). My mom’s folklore matched the scariness levels of those images leaving my morbid childhood curiosities satiated.
Taiwan Taxi Driver
Throughout the 90s and early 00s my mom and I visited Taiwan as frequently (and feasibly) as possible. This was always a thrill for me. Delicious food, exotic lands, my family, TAIWANESE KFC (I don’t actually know if it was different from the US, I was just hyped). Although it is a fuzzy memory now, there was a moment when my mom and I were waiting on a taxi to pick us up. I noticed a black and white flyer with a picture of a smiling woman on it. Curious, I asked my mom what the poster was about.
She told me that it was about a murdered woman named Peng Wan-Ru (彭婉如). The last time she was ever seen alive was after she stepped into the taxi that picked her up. It was presumed the taxi driver was the one that butchered her. He was never caught. She was murdered in 1996.
Shortly after hearing my mom’s retelling of this story, a taxi pulled over to pick us up. I climbed into the vehicle first and my mom followed behind me. I. WAS. TERRIFIED. I was convinced this man was the murderer. Surely all taxi drivers were killers I thought.
During my time in Taiwan, English was rarely spoken. Young me assumed the driver didn’t know English, so I turned to my mom and asked him if she thought he did it. The man looked back and smiled at me and asked me how I was doing in English. I was mortified. He told me about his life and that he was excited to see his wife after work. His kindness made me feel better…but I was still suspicious.
Pai Hsiao-Yen 白曉燕
One other story that I recall my mom telling me was the murder of Pai-Bing Bing’s (a well known celebrity in Taiwan) daughter in 1997. As she was leaving school in Taipei, she was kidnapped for ransom by a group of criminals. They mailed her finger to Pai Hsiao-Yen’s mother, demanding millions of dollars and to involve no one, otherwise she would be killed. After failed negotiations, they eventually found her remains. She had been deceased not long after the negotiations began.
Hearing this when I was 10 or 11, I could never understand why someone would murder anyone, nonetheless someone so young and innocent. From that point forward, I made sure to memorize the faces of missing persons on bulletin boards (remember when these were in every grocery store in the 90s??) in case I ever stumbled upon them in person.
Crime Junkie in the Making
It was around this time that I truly began to watch America’s Most Wanted with my dad on Saturday nights. I was fascinated by forensic science and criminal psychology. How someone could look at a crime scene and learn so much about the person that committed the crime was a mystery to me. I wanted to learn how.
At the time America’s Most Wanted also had a website called AMW.com. I frequented this weekly and made sure to check the map of the US. You could click on each state and sort through dozens of wanted and missing persons. Each person had their last known info tied to their photo. Of course this incredibly useful website is now defunct, but it was a gold mine for armchair and junior armchair detectives alike.
I eventually joined a forensics science camp in the 6th grade and learned about luminol spray, finger printing, and analyzing crime scene photos. I was CONVINCED I would become a forensic scientist. That dream was dashed when the police officer running the camp said decomposed bodies smell bad and police work wasn’t like the movies. I retired before my career even began and decided it was best to remain a hobbyist. Now as an adult I still get my true crime fix listening to true crime books and watching documentaries. I prefer it this way, it’s safer but just as exciting.
Stay creepy friends!
Keisha Wright
P.S.
Was anyone else as a child as disturbed as I was?