The Hand
by
Mary Ellen Gutierrez
(WARNING: not for the squeamish!! Due to graphic content)
Kids, if this gives you nightmares, I don't want to hear about it!
You've been dutifully warned!!!
It was a dark and stormy night ...
No, seriously, this story covers about 15 years and concerns the upstairs apartment of the house in which I grew up.
I was raised in a 4-story 100 year-old house in Waukegan, Illinois. My parents lived in this house for a total of 40 years before they finally retired to Texas where they currently reside. The house was typical for the middle-class suburban neighborhood: 4 floors consisting of a full attic & full basement, and two living floors. My parents and I lived on the first floor. Located on the second floor were two 3-room apartments that my parents rented out. Grandpa had lived in the apartment on the north side of the house for 8 years. My parents and I had lived there until I turned 1 and began walking. At that time we moved downstairs and Grandpa moved upstairs.
Things were fairly uneventful until I turned 9. At that time, Grandpa retired to San Antonio, Texas where he passed away four years later. With one vacant apartment my parents listed ads in the local paper and began interviewing prospective tennants.
One day, an old neighborhood friend and I were playing alone in the vacant upstairs apartment. I can recall we were playing "Star Trek." I had won the arm-wrestling match with him to be Captain Kirk. We were running around upstairs zapping imaginary aliens and monsters with our "phasers," which were really old TV remote controls that Mom had given us that no longer worked.
The layout of the apartment is quite simple. The door is at the back of the house. The two upstairs apartments have their own stairs and entries off the back of the driveway. The tennant would enter from that door and find themselves in the small kitchen. The next room was a nice long livingroom, then a little alcove. On the right side of the alcove was a door connecting both apartments that was always kept securely locked and only my parents had the keys. There was a linen closet, and opposite that, the door to the attic. On the left of the alcove was a short flight of 5 stairs, a small landing, and a door that lead to the stairway that went down into my parents' kitchen. It was through this doorway that my friends and I would gain entry to the apartment while it was vacant. Immediately beyond the alcove was the bedroom with a small attached bathroom.
So there we were, having a great time running to and fro playing "Star Trek." In the middle of an intense battle between us and a wily alien, I chased it into the bedroom. I was shocked to see that the bedroom furnishings had somehow changed. I stopped in my tracks with my friend Jimmy immediately behind me. Jimmy bumped into me as I exclaimed, "everything's changed! What's happened here?"
In my confusion I turned to Jimmy who clearly saw what I saw because he looked completely bewildered. Jimmy asked me, "Mary, how did you change all the furniture so fast?" So it was obvious he saw what I saw.
Against the far wall was a dark brown dresser. My parents nor Grandpa had ever owned such a dresser. There was a twin bed where originally there had been a queen sized bed. There was a small chest at the foot of the bed and a bookshelf over-stuffed with books. Instead of white lace curtains, dark blue curtains now graced the single bedroom window that overlooked the street.
We stood on the threshold of the room completely and utterly amazed as our young minds tried to register what was going on here. I was 9 and Jimmy was 8.
I turned to Jimmy. I was going to suggest we run downstairs and bring Mom up so she could witness the changed bedroom for herself because I knew she would never believe us. As I stood there facing Jimmy and began to suggest we go get Mom, he suddenly went deathly pale. Until then, I had never seen anyone turn pale, and this alone was enough to frighten me. Jimmy was staring intently past me, at what I assumed was that dark brown dresser. As I turned to look behind me, Jimmy took off running down the stairs to our kitchen screaming as if the hounds of hell were after him.
What I saw will stay with me a lifetime. To this very day I still have nightmares as what I saw as an impressionable 9 year old replays in my mind again and again.
My gaze first landed on the blue curtains. Against the blue were wet, brownish stains that were slowly spreading through the cloth. I couldn't figure out what that could be and I looked up at the ceiling thinking something had leaked down onto the curtains from the attic. There was nothing on the ceiling. I followed the stains down to the dresser.
Where there had been nothing before, suddenly there was a pair of neatly folded gray trousers on top of the dresser. However, laying on top of the trousers, which were quickly soaking up a great deal of the thick brownish liquid that was also on the curtains, was a very bloody disembodied lower arm with the hand attached! It looked as though it had been cut off from just below the elbow. Gore and blood oozed out from the stump of the arm as it lay there with the palm of the hand facing upward, the fingers slightly curled, as if flexing in their last response to intense agony.
Blood was dripping prolificly down the front of the dresser where it was pooling on the floor.
At that point I blacked out. The very next thing I can remember is being downstairs with Jimmy and Mom. Jimmy and I were both screaming hysterically as Mom desperately tried to get us to calm down enough so we could tell her what happened.
Being of Mexican descent, my Mom was taught that when someone suffers a severe fright you stuff their mouth with salt. It is believed extreme fright can cause a person to lose a piece of their soul at the scene of the fright. Plus, the intense taste of salt on the tongue tends to bring someone out of near-shock, which was clearly the condition Jimmy and I were quickly entering. Mom quickly poured salt into both our mouths. I'll never forget the foul taste of a mouthful of salt. It made me want to wretch and to this day I do not salt my food, except for french fries and cucumber slices.
As Jimmy and I now concentrated on spitting out as much of the salt as we could, we both began to calm down and shortly after that we were telling Mom the entire story, beginning, of course, with the chopped off hand we saw. Mom quickly went to the phone and called the police. By the time we were coherent enough to give her all the other details of how the bedroom had changed, the cops were banging on the front door.
Mom didn't know what to make of our story and the cops merely smiled and chalked the entire incident up to a couple of over-imaginative kids hard at play. In order to appease us, they did go upstairs and checked it all out. Then they came back down & assured us there was nothing unusual up there. Then they escorted us back upstairs to the apartment.
Everything in the bedroom was back to normal. Grandpa's old bed and other pieces of furniture were back in their usual places. There was no twin bed, no chest, no bookcase overstuffed with books, no dark brown dresser, and most of all, there was no sign of that dismembered lower arm anywhere, nor any signs of blood.
At this point Jimmy and I became so distressed we both burst out crying. The cops took us back downstairs to Mom. The older cop took Mom aside as the younger one calmed us back down. Years later, Mom told me the older cop told her, "Ma'am, in my years on the force I have seen a great deal, some of which you would not believe. I firmly believe, based on the reactions of these children, that they clearly saw something up there. I can't say they saw what they say they saw, but they saw something that has them both very upset. If I were you, Ma'am, I would not allow your daughter to play in that upstairs apartment alone. Ever." And, from that day forward Mom never allowed me to play up there again - with or without friends.
It was more than enough to spook Mom, and later on after he got home & heard the whole story, Dad was spooked, too. Without doing the typical background check, they rented the apartment to the very next person who came for an interview.
Diane was young & pretty. Thin, petite, and she had a quiet demure way about her. My parents liked her immediately & they offered her the apartment on the spot. Diane moved in two days later.
Diane was a good tennant. Always quietly coming and going, and for the four months she lived upstairs she always paid her rent on time. Then, one day a man came to our door asking us if we knew Diane. We lived in a nice, quiet residential neighborhood where there was never any trouble. Mom was not the suspicious type, but something told her not to trust this man. She merely said, "I'm sorry, but without a warrant, it is against our tennants' rights to give out information. All I can tell you is that both apartments are currently rented out." The man left without saying much else. I didn't see any of this as I was at school at the time.
About a week later, the cops came calling. Dad was home sick from work that day & got all worked up when he saw the police knocking at the door. Mom was out buying groceries so he sent me to answer instructing me to tell them whatever they needed to know if I knew it. The cops asked to talk to my parents, naturally. I told them Mom was out and Dad was too sick to talk. They expressed polite concern, then they asked me if I knew a Diane Wilkins (not her real name). I said yes, she's renting the upstairs apartment from us. The cops then told me that Diane was not in any trouble, but that something had happened. They said they would be back.
The policemen returned in the evening. Years later Mom told me what happened. They had a warrant to check the upstairs apartment. They searched it, but evidently did not find what they were looking for. The cops told Mom that someone had found Diane's body in a dumpster behind the bar where she had been working. Her body was badly disfigured and before dying, Diane had suffered over 30 stab wounds. The night before other employees at the bar had seen Diane quarreling in the parking lot with a cab driver. The police could never find him as they did not have a description to go on and they were suspecting an old boyfriend. The police were hoping their search of Diane's apartment would turn up a picture or a name. Mom gave them a description of the man who had come asking for Diane, but the police never found anything and to this day Diane's murder remains unsolved.
Two weeks later Diane's bereaved parents came down from Michigan to clear out the last of Diane's things. It was a very sad time. I remember Dad helping them pack up boxes as Mrs. Wilkins cried off and on the whole time. All I knew was that something had happened and that Diane had gone away. This all happened when I was 9 years old. It wasn't until I was 13 when the next incident occurred that I learned what Diane's true fate had been.
Four quiet, uneventful years went by. My parents continued to rent out that upstairs apartment to various people, who, coincidentially, were all male. Not that my parents discriminated against females, that was just how it worked out. All was quiet and we went about our happy lives.
When I was 13 I started Junior High. The summer after the seventh grade my dad's youngest brother, my uncle Ralph, came to visit us from Mexico. His visit coincided with a time that we were in between tennants so Dad suggested that Uncle Ralph stay in the vacant apartment.
Uncle Ralph was going to visit with us for a week before continuing on to Wisconsin to visit my uncle Alfonso and his family. However, during the third night of Uncle Ralph's stay, Dad and I had trouble sleeping. It was around 3 AM and we were both up in the kitchen. Dad was in the middle of serving up some Mexican hot chocolate when Uncle Ralph frightened both of us by bursting through the upstairs kitchen door. He came flying down the stairs, his hair all wild, his eyes bugging out, and his face was a pale green color. He was babbling something about "sangre" and a "mano" (translation: "blood" and "hand"). I knew enough Spanish at the time to understand only some of what he was saying to Dad, but I knew what "blood" was and I knew what "hand" was. I ran to climb in bed with Mom, who slept through the whole thing.
Uncle Ralph refused to go back upstairs so he ended up spending the rest of the night in my bed while I slept curled up in between my parents. The next morning he told Mom what he saw. He said a noise has woken him, he said it sounded like a piece of furniture being slowly dragged across the floor. When his eyes adjusted to the darkness there was enough light to make out details. There is a streetlight almost directly in front of our house and it shown through the white lace curtains in the window. Uncle Ralph told Mom and I that he had seen a brown dresser and that on top of that dresser had been pools of blood and a hand. He said there was blood all over the curtains, the wall, and even a bit up on the ceiling, as if the victim had been hacked to bits in that very room.
Uncle Ralph decided to cut his visit short and left that very day for Wisconsin. Although has visited my parents since this incident, he never again slept in that upstairs apartment, expressing his preference for a motel room instead.
A few more years went by and now I was a graduate student in Anthropology at the University of California at Santa Barbara. My parents had been renting the apartment out this entire time, and all those years, only men came to look at it so they only had male tennants.
I was on my way home for summer break when they rented the apartment out to a woman. Her name was Maria Esperanza (not her real name), a Spanish beauty, who worked for a lawyer and was fluent in both English and Spanish. She was 24 years old, the same age as I. Maria moved in the day after I returned home.
Maria and I became aquainted and we would sometimes sit and talk. She was always very polite, well-mannered, and did not seem to be the type who would attract any trouble.
Two months went by. It was now the middle of July, and the hottest part of the summer. Our old house was equipped with only window units for air-conditioners. One for us downstairs, and one for each upstairs apartment. One day Maria's air-conditioner went out. Dad took pity on her and set up a cot for her downstairs where she stayed with us for a few nights since at the time we didn't have the money to buy her a new air-conditioner.
That Friday, Maria didn't come home from work. She had made plans with Mom & I to make tamales with us the following day, Saturday. Maria didn't have any family and by the time 8 PM rolled around and she still had not come home or called, which was very unlike her, my parents began to really get worried. Although she didn't seem the type, Dad wondered if perhaps she had met some man and had decided to stay the weekend with him. Even so, Mom and I thought it peculiar that Maria did not return home to get any of her things if she had made weekend plans with someone.
When Maria still had not called or shown up by noon on Saturday, Mom was really upset. Maria and Mom had been planning for days to make tamales. Mom was going to show Maria and I how to make them. Not being one to overreact to things, Mom nevertheless called the police. They came and took down a description and the name of Maria's boss and left. We did not hear anything concerning Maria the rest of the day, that is, until the ten o'clock news.
Mom and I were clearing up the kitchen from a day of making dozens of tameles and Dad was watching the local ABC affiliate's newscast. Suddenly he began yelling for us to come into the livingroom. We arrived toward the end of the story to hear the commentator say, "as of this hour, the police have no suspects. The young woman is said to have no family. If you know anything about her or this case, please contact the Waukegan police department as soon as possible."
Dad quickly filled us in on the details. Evidently, the body of a young woman had been found along the train tracks in downtown Waukegan, about 6 blocks from the law office were Maria had worked as a legal secretary. The body had been badly mutiliated and partially dismembered. The newscaster had identified the young woman as 24 year-old Maria Esperanza.
Mom and I were besides ourselves with grief and guilt. What if Mom had called the police on Friday instead of waiting until Saturday? Would that have made any difference? I called the police department and asked to speak with the detective in charge. He told me that a person has to be missing for 24 hours before the police can do anything, unless the person is a child, so it would not have done any good if Mom had called them Friday night instead of Saturday afternoon. On Sunday three police officers came to our home to search Maria's apartment and to interview us and a few of the neighbors. Once again, as with the case of Diane's murder, the police suspected an unhappy boyfriend, but no one ever saw Maria with a man, nor did she ever have any visitors while she lived upstairs from my parents.
To this day, Maria's murder remains unsolved.
It was shortly after Maria's death, while telling one of my best friends about what had happened, that she brought up the story I had told her years ago about the hand. She wondered out loud if there was perhaps some curse on that apartment that only affected females who lived there. For some weird reason, each woman my parents rented to over the years had died a grisly and horrible death at the hands of an unknown assailant.
With her help, we invesitgated the house as best we could. We scanned old newspapers for mention of the address and the previous owner, by the name of Peterson. He had actually built the house for him and his family. They had lived there for many years before finally selling it to my mother and grandfather. We never could find any mention of it and the police never received any reports of a murder on the premises.
To this day, I cannot prove that any connection exists between the horrible scene that Jimmy and I saw as kids or the murders of Diane and Maria, but I am sure that they are all somehow mysteriously connected.
The End
(or is it?)
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