One of the most pulverizing, chilling cases in the state of Arkansas, has to do with 11 year old Mary Bovranio. She was considered a sweet girl by many around her, soft spoken, just as quiet and gentle in her personality. She cared for animals and people alike, always giving a helping hand, even in tasks that many would be sure a young girl at her age couldn’t handle, like helping cut wood and fixing the leaking roof of her house, fixing car batteries and engines, or pulling heavy bales of hay at the farm down the street from her, all with adult supervision of course.
But in her free time she loved playing with her horse dolls out on her front lawn. She’d make them jump and do tricks, and would dress up like a cowgirl and ride on her favorite horse, her tan-colored palomino named Rusty, while rounding up all her toys and dolls, which were her “caddle”. That was what she looked forward to the most in the summer. The heat made her feel like she was really out there with the other cowboys and cowgirls. Rarely did any crimes, surprises, or anything particularly out of the ordinary happen in this town. That's exactly why this story continues to chill the local residents of the town, right to their core. Even 39 years later.
It was the grueling hot August summer, around 100 degrees outside, and Mary’s parents went out to see a movie, Cujo to be exact, since there wasn’t much else to do and the movie theater always had air conditioning. Of course most wouldn’t leave their child to fend for themselves, but Mr. and Mrs. Bovraino thought Mary would do fine for a couple hours, knowing she could get water from the well anytime she pleased. And they were under the assumption that their neighbors would keep a close eye out and make sure nothing happened to Mary.
But a couple hours later around 3 p.m., heading home from the movie, they pull into their driveway, slowly after looking out at their front lawn. There sat a pink lasso, multiple toys and plush dolls, and Rusty the palomino…but no Mary. Thinking she just went inside, they pulled all the way into the driveway, parked and got out of their car. They walked through the door, which was open, and called out her name. “Mary?”, her father shouts. No answer.
They walked into the kitchen, hoping to see her sitting there drinking water at the table. The chairs were empty. They checked her room, expecting her to maybe be playing with her other toys. No sign of her. There wasn’t a trace of her in or outside the house. They walk, hastily, over to their neighbor’s house, Ms. Lance. They knock on her door as they hear footsteps near her window, coming at a normal pace. She opens the door and greets them, as Mr. Bovranio asks if they’ve seen Mary.
She has a confused look on her face. “No, dear…I thought she would have been with you.” Mary’s parents share an equally confused look. “We told you we were gonna be at the movies,” her mother responds. “Oh, well yes, but, I just saw you drive up to your front lawn about an hour ago.” “Ms. Lance, what do you think our car looks like?” Mr Bovranio says with the slightest smile, mostly out of nervousness. But that nervousness turn to even more confusion, on the verge of terror, as Ms. Lance reaches out her hand and points to their car.
The car Mary’s parents own, is a bright blue 1979 Ford Fairmont, which was exactly how Ms. Lance continued to describe this car as that pulled up in front of their house. The exact same color, exact same look, even right down to the exact same dent in the corner left bumper, which was even noticeable from the distance Ms. Lance was at, when she was standing at the window next to her door, seeing Mary stand up and get into the car.
“She just got up and walked right over, jumped into the passenger seat. I figured you may have been taking her for ice cream,” Ms. Lance says with a small laugh. “That..w-wasn’t us,” Mrs. Bovranio says with an increasingly frightened tone, as Ms. Lance’s small smile turned into a concerned look. “Can we use your phone? We need to call the police right now,” Mr. Bovranio asks. “Why yes, of course, of course,” Ms. Lance quickly says, opening her door. Mary’s parents rush into her kitchen and grab the phone off the wall.
Over the next week or so, police officers of the town and friends of the Bovranios spread out and tried their best to search for Mary, but to no avail. With not a shred of evidence, or some kind of a lead that would point them in any possible direction of Mary’s whereabouts, every member of the search party was basically walking in circles, so the case was eventually ruled out as unsolved. All Mary’s parents could do was put up missing poster signs, praying that someone would know something and call. Another week passed by, then another. By 31 days, one entire month after Mary’s disappearance, not a thing had changed since the day she was “kidnapped”.
Not knowing if he would ever see his daughter again, and waking up in the middle of the night listening to her mother’s heart-shattering cries, Mr. Bovranio didn’t think he could feel any more sorrow and hurt in the pit of his soul, until something changed. But not at all in the way he expected. He woke up around 2 am, to the sound of quiet knocking at their bedroom door. Groggily, he turns his head to the right, the other side of the bed empty. “Jenine, is that you?” he mutters out in a slur, still half awake, to complete silence. He slowly gets up and walks towards the door before looking back at his bed to make sure Mrs. Bovranio is still not there.
He turns towards the door again, and opens it quietly. He looks out to an empty, dark hallway. “Jenine?” he calls out her name again to no response, just eerie silence. He slowly starts walking down the hallway, before hearing another knock. Only this time, it wasn’t coming from his door again. It was coming from inside Mary’s room. Mr. Bovranio rushes over to her door and opens it quickly, hoping the past month has just been a long, grueling nightmare. He pauses as, straight ahead of him, on Mary’s bed, sits the figure of a girl. But it wasn’t Mary.
He flicks the lightswitch. No lights turn on. He flicks it on and off a couple more times before looking back at the figure ahead of him. He slowly walks towards it, and stops as his eyes get used to the darkness, and he can see faintly, due to the moonlight shining through the window, that it was one of Mary’s favorite toys, Dandy Daisy: a life-size plush doll of a girl with pig-tails, a green dress, and a rainbow purse. He lays it down on the bed, staring, confused, as he jumps at the sound of a plate falling in the kitchen.
As he starts to walk out, he stops dead in his tracks. A giggle is heard from the opposite end of the room, the exact same one Mary makes. He turns around as his blood runs cold, Dandy Daisy sitting up again, in the exact same position Mr. Bovranio found it. He grabs the doll and shoves it under Mary’s bed as he rushes out, shutting the door. He jumps out of his skin as Mrs. Bovranio is standing in their bedroom doorway. “Honey, what are you doing?” she asks, rubbing her eyes.
Mr. Bovranio tries to say something, and he rushes out to the kitchen, where he hears the sound of a plate falling. He turns on the kitchen light: nothing. No mess, no broken plates. Same clean kitchen as they left it before going to bed. “What’s going on?” She asks, both of them standing in the kitchen. Mr. Bovranio hesitates for a moment before speaking. “Nothing,” he turns back to her. “Nothing at all, dear. I guess I just scared myself a little, that’s all,” he kisses her forehead. “Come on, you need to get to bed, you have that meeting tomorrow at 8,” she says to him while putting her hand on his shoulder, before they start to walk back to their bedroom, Mrs. Bovranio taking a quick, sad look at Mary’s closed door before they go back to sleep.
The next day, Mr. Bovranio gets back from his meeting, still looking just as tired as last night. “I’m home!” he gets no response. “Hun?” He sets down his briefcase on the kitchen table and walks into their bedroom, Mrs. Bovranio is nowhere to be found. He walks back out to the kitchen, and finds a note sitting in his spot at their kitchen table. “Went out to go grocery shopping. Will be home later.” He puts the note down, and goes into his room to change out of his suit. As he’s removing his tie, he hears the smallest noise. He turns around, as a small crumpled up ball of paper rolls through the door. He opens the ball of paper, revealing the note Mrs. Bovranio left, scribbled out. He turns the paper around. “I’M HOME” is written in giant bold letters. He drops the paper and runs out to the kitchen, no one to be seen.
He spins around as the same laugh he heard the night before is heard again right down the hall, in their bedroom. He grabs a knife from the drawer closest to him and rushes down the hall back into his bedroom. “Alright you son of a bitch, I'm done playing games!” He raises his knife ready to attack whoever has been messing with him, but finds his room yet again empty. He looked to the left side of the bedroom, where he and Mrs. Bovranio’s bathroom is, and for a second, saw a quickly moving shadow from the bottom corner of the mirror, in one of those “blink and you miss it'' kind of moments. He runs into the bathroom and turns on the light.
He drops the knife in the sink and puts his head in his hands, and starts sobbing. “I’m losing my mind. I’m fucking losing it,” he says through tears. He puts the knife back on the rack, and sits on the couch, until it becomes dark outside. Mrs. Bovranio comes home, to him sitting in the exact same spot. “Hi honey,” she says, as she sets her things down. She looks over to him, still with his head down. “Are you ok?” she asks. “Hi. Yeah, sorry,” he says softly, his head barely moving to look in her direction, then back down. She walks over and sits next to him. Putting her arm on his shoulder, as he quickly breaks down into tears. “How the hell is this even happening?” he asks. “This makes no sense.”
She puts her head on his as he lays his head on her shoulder. “I don’t know,” Mrs. Bovranio says, choking up. “I thought everything would be ok at this point. I had so much hope, I was trying so hard to keep it together, go to work and let the hours pass by, because I was hoping she would just come walking right through that door, or maybe that i’d see her or hear her voice one night after getting home, almost like nothing ever happened. The hope is still there even though I feel like, I know, that she’s not coming back to us. As much as I don't want to say that, I don't want to believe it, I know. Every time I look at the pillow she’d lay her head on, her seat at the table, her spot on the couch, the patch of dirt she used to play in with her toys, I just keep thinking of how she’s out there somewhere. That we’ll probably never know for sure what could’ve happened to her, what they could’ve done to her.” Mr. Bovranio’s head sinks into her arm as they cry even more.
Laying in bed that night, Mr. Bovranio tosses and turns, the words Mrs. Bovranio said to him earlier going through his brain like a knife that cuts deeper than steel. “She’s not coming back to us. She’s not coming back to us. She’s not coming back to us.” Hours upon hours he keeps hearing that sentence. He finally gets up, and walks out to the kitchen and pours a glass of water, sitting at his table, lowering his head again after taking a sip of water. “Daddy,” he hears to his left, the word clear as day. He doesn’t lift his head, staying motionless, holding his glass. “Daddy, look at me.”
“Get out of my head,” he mutters. “Daddy, please.” “Get out of my goddamn head!” he says louder, gripping his glass of water until it shatters in his hand, cutting it open and bleeding all over the table. He looks down at the blood and water combining on the table. “Who are you talking to?” Mrs. Bovranio says to him, appearing at the edge of the kitchen. He looks at her. “Nothing, I'm sorry I-” she walks quickly over to him. “What happened to your hand? Let me see it.” He turns it over, revealing a deep cut. “We need to stitch that up. Here let me get you some bandages.” She starts to walk to the bathroom before he stops her. “It’s alright,” he says as he gets up from the table, wrapping a dish towel around his hand. I just need some sleep, I think.”
He walks back into his room, to which Mrs. Bovranio is sound asleep. Confused for a moment, he turns around quickly, looking to the end of the hallway. After about three seconds, the kitchen lights shut off and the entire hallway fills with complete darkness. He rushes back out to the kitchen, no one and nothing to be seen, except the broken glass and the bloody water surrounding it on the table. He turns around to Mrs. Bovranio walking quickly out of the hallway darkness, holding a butcher knife. He falls backwards to the ground, as he looks up and straight ahead in a shock, to Mrs. Bovranio fast asleep as she was earlier.
The next morning, Mrs. Bovranio comes out to the kitchen to Mr. Bovranio sitting at the table, the blood and water both dried onto the wood, as he sits at the opposite end. As she walks closer, she sees him writing on a piece of paper. She gently puts her hand on his shoulder, as he jumps, startling her as well. “What are you doing?” He rips the paper up from laying on the table and shows it to her. It’s a list of times on specific days. “I noticed a pattern. I sat here last night after everything happened, and and-” he stutters for a moment while she asks “When what happened?”
He grips the paper tighter. “And-and I realized they’re patterns. We were gone between roughly 1 and 3 pm the day she went missing, right?” He stands up and puts his hands on her shoulders. “Well-well all this weird, crazy shit has been happening and I don’t know how to explain it. First it was the car, remember? Like Ms. Lance was talking about. How the hell could she have seen that? She’s not old enough to have dementia, she doesn’t see things. And she saw the exact same fucking car we drive. And a week ago, exactly a month since she went missing, it was the doll and her laugh, it was our little girl’s laugh i heard it so fucking clearly. And her doll was sitting there on the bed, and when i put it down it sat right back up again, the damn thing moved, that was around 2 am. The next day it was the note. It was around 2:30 when I got home. And literally seconds after that, it was Mary’s same laugh. The same one,” he says through gritted teeth. “And there was the mirror minutes after when I went into our bedroom.”
He pulls out a piece of paper: A drawing Mr. Bovranio made of their bathroom mirror, and a small piece in the bottom right corner, of a dark figure with long hair and brightly lit white eyes with no pupils, that sent a chill down Mrs. Bovranio’s spine. “This is what I saw. It was only for a second but I SAW HER. It was too dark but I could easily tell it was her straight brown hair, and her eyes. I could see her eyes but they weren’t her green eyes.” He sits Mary down.
“And last night, I saw you. You tried to attack me. At least it looked like you, it sounded like you, but it wasn’t. Because you were gone then you were in the bed, I-I just” He puts his head in his hands and violently sighs in frustration and fear. “I thought I was going crazy, I thought I was nuts, but I know what I saw. I know what I heard. I don’t know what the hell is going on but I'm scared. I’m so goddamn scared, because I know there’s no ghosts and shit, I don’t believe in all that paranormal crap, so how else do you explain something like this?”
Mrs. Bovranio gently leans into him, lifting his head. “What do you want to do?”
He stares at her with a puzzled look before opening his mouth. “You don’t think I'm a whackjob?” Mrs. Bovranio shakes her head gently. “You’ve never been crazy, and you’ve always been such a caring man, with a good heart. That’s why I married you. And I'm with you on whatever you say. So if you think there’s some crazy shit going on here, I believe you. We’re gonna figure something out.” They both embrace and kiss. She looks at him. “We’ll go stay at my sister’s tonight.” He gives her another odd look. “How are we even gonna explain something like this to her? She’s not gonna believe you and she’s sure as hell not gonna believe me.” “We’ll just say we got someone to exterminate the house and they’re gassing it, and that we need somewhere to stay for a few days. She lives an hour and a half away, she’s not gonna come check to see if we’re lying.” Mr. Bovranio shakes his head. “We’ll figure all this out then,” she puts her hand on his face, as he holds it.
Later that night, Mrs. Bovranio is putting paranormal-related books in her handbag that she borrowed from the library, and Mr. Bovranio is in their room packing clothes, until they hear a noise outside. They go outside and look over to the patch of dirt Mary used to play in with her horses. Mr. Bovranio takes a closer look as the middle of the dirty patch slowly rises up and down, almost in a breathing motion. Mrs. Bovranio slowly grasps a handful of the moving dirt, as her blood runs cold. The tips of 2 human fingers can be seen rising out of the dirt. Mrs. Bovranio grabs another handful of dirt, giving a more clear view of the fingers, one of them having Mary’s blue ring. Both Mr. and Mrs. Bovranio hastily start pulling away dirt until they manage to uncover the bottom side of the hand, grabbing it and pulling it up as Mrs. Bovranio lets out a blood curdling scream.
A severed hand, with the wrist and opposite side of the hand already decomposing, worms and maggots coming out of the stump. Mr. Bovranio grabs a shovel from the shed nearby and starts digging until he reaches what they’ve been fearing the most. Mrs. Bovranio holds her mouth and crawls over to the side of the whole where she instantly becomes sick and vomits all over the ground at the horrific, sickening sight, as Mr. Bovranio pulls out the also decomposing body of Mary, half of her face showing skeletal bone and maggots coming out of her left eye, as Mr. Bovranio holds her body close and sobs into it harder than he ever cried before. He gently sets her body down and, through a shaky tone, says “We need to call the police. Tell them we found her.”
He hobbles to the door, the adrenaline pulsing through his veins and everything in his vision spinning like a merry-go-round, as he stumbles through the house and grabs the phone off the wall, almost ripping the cord. As he’s putting in the number, there’s no ringing, no sound. He smashes the phone against the wall and runs into their bedroom, grabbing the cellular telephone off their nightstand. Dialing in 9-1-1 as ringing is heard, another blood curdling scream comes from outside, and again it’s Mrs. Bovranio. In an instant, all the lights in their house go out. He rushes out through the dark hallway, to the front door, which doesn’t open.
He quickly looks out the window next to the door as he’s pulling on the doorknob, and doesn’t see Mrs. Bovranio in the yard. He then quickly looks to the right, and in the darkness, clear as day, he sees their exact same blue car speeding off behind trees nearby, headlights flashing on and off like a lightswitch. “NOOO!” Mr. Bovranio screams at the top of his lungs as he bangs on the window. “Don’t fight it,” he hears behind him, the voice of Mrs. Bovranio. “We’re both gone now and there’s no escape,” he hears, the sentence changing halfway through from Mrs. Bovranio’s voice to Mary’s. He slowly turns around, visibly shaking, to Mary standing 8 feet away from him, ghostly pale and half of her face still decomposing. She pulls out her right eye and drops it to the floor, as she walks towards him. The skin on her entire face starts to peel off, as a skull is revealed, and her face as well as the rest of her body start to become translucent, revealing itself to be a supernatural entity, taking the form of anyone it kills, using the look of the victim almost like a shell or a mask. She, or it, continues walking towards him, closer and closer, until the last thing he ever hears, is the sound of his own piercing shriek.
The next morning, Ms. Lance walks up to their door, not noticing the patch of dirt completely covered over again. She knocks and waits a moment before saying loudly “Jenine, Tim, are either of you in there?” No response. “Cou-could I come in?” She shouts semi-loudly. She opens the door slowly, walking in and looking around, the whole house empty. She looks in the kitchen, as Mr. and Mrs. Bovarino’s bedroom door slowly opens. She turns and walks down the hallway. “Um, Jenine-” she pauses as she steps on something hard. Slowly bending down, she picks up Mary’s severed finger with the blue ring on it. “What in the world?” she says quietly with an incredibly confused look, as laughing is heard behind her, made up from all the combined voices of Mary, Mr. Bovranio, and Mrs. Bovranio.
