I was startled awake one night with the feeling that someone was watching me. It was John. He was sitting up in bed and staring at me. “What’s wrong I asked?” He said, “I was just making sure that you were asleep.” This began our odyssey of paranoia, schizophrenia, and craziness in general. It was a lot for a young girl of 22 or so to handle. I did the best I could with what I knew at the time.
He thought he was the “Messiah” and I was the “Antichrist”. Why people that overdose on drugs get these religious delusions, I’ll never know. He did want to kill me, but luckily he also wanted to go fishing. I had a 38 snub nose that belonged to my mother. He took that gun and told me we were going to the lake. On our way to the lake we stopped at his mother’s house to get the fishing gear. (I never said this was going to make sense) I thought I would be able to get some help there. But his mother and stepfather had gone out of town. He climbed over the fence to get the fishing gear. While he was doing that I took the gun out of the glove box and removed the bullets. I’m glad I put the unloaded gun back in the glove box; because that was the first thing he checked when he returned to the car. We drove out to Benbrook Lake. I don’t remember fishing. I just remember driving all over and just trying to distract him with whatever I could think of. Finally we went home.
He seemed to settle down some with the outing to the lake. He didn’t mention the gun again and neither did I. I thought it was over. I thought he would get a good night’s sleep and that would be the end of it. I was wrong.
I woke in the middle of the night again with him staring at me. This time it was “We’ve got to save ourselves.” At least now we were in it together and I wasn’t the enemy. He told me the house was evil and he could prove it to me. He went up the crazy wooden spiral staircase and made me sit at the bottom where he could “see” me. Apparently I wasn’t completely trust worthy. My family had lived in that house since 1962. So there was a lot of stuff in the attic. He began to throw
things down at me, mainly books. He would throw a book down at me and say “This one is evil!!” Another one he might lay aside and say “This one is okay.”
This went on for a while. I was sitting quietly at the bottom of the stairs, silently crying, and waiting for this to be over. Only it wasn’t over. He came running back down and told me “Don’t you see? We have to burn down the house with the cat in it.” We had a black kitten that somehow had become evil while he was sorting out the books. He was dead serious about sitting the house on fire. We had been up for hours. It was about 5:30 or 6:00 in the morning. Knowing his mother was out of town, I called his dad.
Life with John Hudgins – Introduction
Wow Anna, I can totally relate to this story. Thanks for sharing with us.
You can’t end on a cliff-hanger! OMG!
holy shit girl . . .