I Killed the Baby

My mom refuses to talk about this unless someone brings it up first. Back in 1972, my parents bought an old fixer-upper that needed just about everything replaced. It had been sitting empty for a while, and the neighbors were more than happy to tell them why. According to several people on the street, the previous owners had gone through a terrible divorce after their second baby died from what was ruled as SIDS. It was tragic, but my parents didn't think much of it. They figured it was just another sad story attached to an old house and got to work renovating it before I was born.

One of the biggest projects was turning one of the bedrooms into my nursery. My mom spent days stripping old wallpaper and scraping layers of paint off the walls so she could start fresh. While working inside the bedroom closet, she noticed a patch where the paint was unusually thick. As she scraped it away, faded crayon marks slowly started to appear underneath. At first she thought it was just random drawings left behind by one of the previous children. Then the words became clear. Written in uneven, childish letters, at exactly the height a young child would naturally write, were five words that made her stop cold: **"I KILLED THE BABY."**

She told my dad, expecting him to laugh it off as a sick joke, but neither of them could come up with a reason why anyone would write something like that inside a closet and then paint over it. The writing looked old, as though it had been there for years before anyone tried to hide it. My dad eventually painted over it again without saying much, and they agreed not to mention it to visitors. They still finished the nursery, and I grew up in that room without ever knowing what had been written inside the closet until I was an adult.

Looking back, there's probably a logical explanation. Maybe it was an older sibling blaming themselves for a tragedy they couldn't understand, or maybe another child wrote something cruel without realizing what it meant. But every time my mom tells the story, she always pauses at the same part. It wasn't just the words that disturbed her, it was where they were written. Hidden inside a closet, exactly at the eye level of a small child, as if whoever wrote them never expected an adult to find them.