I did not sleep with the lights out until I was twenty-five-years old. I tried.
Believe me, I tried. I went to bed sleepy. But within minutes after I turned off the light, terror struck. Not the run-of-the-mill boogeyman under the bed kind of terror. No, this was paralyzing, heart-pounding, unable-to-catch-my-breath terror. Terror that, when I finally could move, had me lunging for the nearest light. Sometimes I would actually jump out of bed and run to my parents’ room and wake them up, just to hear their voices. Many nights, I sat up, trying to fend off the inevitable, watching first Johnny Carson, then Tom Snyder, and, finally, the Emergency Alert System testing that played when there was no more television to watch. If someone was in the room with me, I could sleep undisturbed—as if a roommate or boyfriend or cousin could actually fend off what I feared.
I can trace my night terrors to 1967, when I was ten years old, which happened to be the year I finally moved out of my grandmother’s bedroom and into my own, upstairs. Mama Rose had not been an ideal roommate, muttering at me in Italian and shoving me to the far side of the bed. I was eager to be rid of her and settle into my new white-with-gold-trim bed. I had a matching bookcase, chosen, much to my mother’s disapproval, over the make-up vanity, and a bureau with a big mirror. On top of the bureau sat a mirrored tray with a heavy fake gold brush that I wasn’t allowed to use. I counted the days until that furniture arrived and I could sleep solo at last. Unfortunately, before the anticipated move-in day, I went to the library and took out In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. Before the sheets were on my new bed, I’d read the entire book. And for the next fourteen years, I kept a light blazing in order to sleep. Or so I thought then. But what I know now is that I kept a light on in order to keep murderers, to keep evil, away.
No one taught me how to read. One day, when I was four, I picked up my older brother’s reading book, and I read it. I can still see the words on the first page: Look! Look! I can still feel the thrill of realizing that those letters formed words, and I could read those words. Unfortunately, we were not a family of readers, so there weren’t books lying around the house. We got Reader’s Digest every month, Time magazine every week, the Providence Journal every evening, and three newspapers on Sunday: the Providence Journal, The Boston Globe, and the New York Daily News. These, along with the Childhood of Famous Americans that lined the shelves in my classrooms and the Weekly Readers we got at school on Fridays, made up most of my reading.
That Sunday New York Daily News had a feature that captivated me. In fact, it was the first thing I read after my uncle deposited the newspapers on our kitchen table.
Each week, they ran a two-page spread on a true crime. Women murdered by jealous husbands, innocent people killed by lunatics, teenaged girls who moved to New York City to become famous but fell in love with bad guys who strangled or stabbed them. I couldn’t get enough of the evil out there, which was how I thought about it. New York City, though less than two hundred miles from my hometown in Rhode Island, seemed a faraway dangerous place to me.
Until fifth grade, I relied on those Sunday newspapers, the “Milestones” column in Time, “Dear Abby,” and “Humor in Uniform” from Readers Digest to entertain me. Then our town got a library, and everything changed. The Tuesday night I walked into the Champlin Library and saw all those books—shelves and shelves and shelves of books—I ran straight to the biggest, fattest ones and filled my arms with them. In another town, in another place, the librarian might have urged me out of the adult section and into the children’s section. She might have handed me The Wind in the Willows or A Wrinkle in Time or any number of books that I never read until I was well into adulthood and had my own children. But in West Warwick, Rhode Island, in 1967, in that library with the smell of new carpeting and fresh paint, the librarian didn’t offer any reading advice. She mostly just stamped the return date in the back of the books.
I was left to run free, to choose books without restriction or guidance. Looking back, it seems that I chose them based on their heft. Other than Time magazine, I had no glimpse into the world of books—what was new, what was winning prizes or getting a lot of attention. If I had, I might have known that In Cold Blood was about the brutal murder of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas, in 1959, murders described in The New York Times as: “A wealthy wheat farmer, his wife[,] and their two young children were found shot to death today in their home. They had been killed by shotgun blasts at close range after being bound and gagged . . . There were no signs of a struggle, and nothing had been stolen. The telephone lines had been cut.”
Instead, just as I’d chosen Les Misérables by Victor Hugo, A Stone For Danny Fisher by Harold Robbins, Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak, and everything by James Michener and Leon Uris, I plucked In Cold Blood from its place on the shelf simply for its size. I did not read flap copy or quotes from reviews, ever. I judged a book by its cover. No doubt, In Cold Blood was one of several books I checked out that week. I tended to read three or four of these tomes every ten days. But whatever books I read after In Cold Blood faded. Because when I finished it, I never felt safe again.
In some ways, my childhood was bookended by true crime. If In Cold Blood marked one end, then the Boston Strangler marked the other. Between June 14, 1962, and January 4, 1964, thirteen women between the ages of nineteen and eighty-five were murdered in the Boston area. Most were sexually assaulted and strangled in their apartments. Although I can’t say for certain when I first became aware of the Boston Strangler, it seems to me now that he lurked around the edges of my young life. I can remember coming downstairs one Sunday morning, dressed for church, to find my mother and grandmother huddled around the radio listening to a report of another victim. “These women let him right in!” my mother said in disbelief. “He pretends to be a maintenance man or maybe someone from the phone company, and they let him right in!” My grandmother turned her steely gaze on me. “Don’t you open the door,” she said in her heavy Italian accent. “For nobody. You understand?”
No sooner had they arrested the Boston Strangler, Albert DeSalvo, than Richard Speck made the news. At 11:00 p.m. on Wednesday, July 13, 1966, he broke into a townhouse in Chicago that was used as a dormitory for young student nurses. Armed with only a knife, he held nine young women captive for hours before methodically leading them out of the room one by one and stabbing or strangling them to death. Only one of the women managed to escape by wiggling under a bed while Speck was out of the room with one of his victims. She stayed hidden until almost 6 a.m. When she finally emerged, she climbed out of her bedroom window onto a ledge, screaming, “They’re all dead! All my friends are dead!”
“How could one man overpower eight women?” my mother asked again and again. “Why couldn’t they fight back?”
At which point, my grandmother looked at me and said, “This ever happen to you, you scream or run out the door.”
I thought about these crimes. A lot. All those murders in New York City. All those women who opened their doors to the Boston Strangler. The eight student nurses. Although they fascinated and frightened me, Boston and Chicago and New York were cities, as unlike my little mill town as anything could be. If I ever moved to a city, my seven- or eight- or nine-year-old self reasoned, I’d do as my grandmother warned me. I wouldn’t let anyone in my apartment, even if he claimed to be from Bell telephone. I’d scream. I’d run out the door.
But then I read In Cold Blood. The Clutter family did not live in a city. They weren’t young women out on their own making foolish mistakes. They were a family like mine—mother, father, daughter, son. They were asleep in their own beds. Evil, in the form of Perry Smith and Richard Hickock, walked right inside their house and killed them all.
Even now, over forty years after I read In Cold Blood, I can remember the horror I felt when Nancy Clutter’s two friends, Susan and Nancy Ewalt, find her body. Like my own family, the Clutters went to church every Sunday morning. Nancy Ewalt’s father dropped her at their house so she could go with them. But on the morning of November 15, 1959, no one answered the front doorbell. Nancy and Susan tried the other three doors, finding the one to Mr. Clutter’s office ajar. Politeness kept them from walking right in, but they knocked and called to the family, growing still more confused when they noticed the Clutters’ cars there. Mr. Ewalt wouldn’t go in the house because he had mud on his boots, so finally Susan and Nancy went inside, through the unlocked kitchen door. In her telling of what happened that morning, Susan remarks that the family never locked their doors, a detail that sent fear and dread through my ten-year-old body. My family never locked our doors, either.
Susan began to notice things amiss immediately. There were no breakfast dishes. Nancy’s purse was lying open on the floor. The door to Nancy’s room at the top of the stairs was open, and her curtains hadn’t been drawn. Bright sunlight flooded the room, another chilling fact to me. Before they went inside, Susan commented on how bright a day it was. And then she noticed all that sunshine. Somehow, this contradicted my noirish image of murder. Didn’t it happen in anonymous buildings set against gray cityscapes at night? A family on a bright November Sunday had to be alive, safe, didn’t they?
Although Nancy Ewalt realized as soon as she looked in that bedroom that her friend was dead, Susan couldn’t believe it and kept insisting that it was just a nosebleed. That was when Nancy said the words that both made me want to stop reading and compelled me to keep reading: There’s too much blood. There’s blood on the walls. When Mr. Ewalt went to the telephone in the Clutters’ kitchen to call for help, he found the receiver off the hook and the line cut. At which point, I jumped from my own yellow and white gingham sheets and picked up the white telephone on the night table, my heart pounding so loud that it took a minute before I heard the reassuring sound of the dial tone. This panic stayed with me for years, sending me to that phone many times in the middle of the night to make sure the line had not been cut. If someone came to murder us, I would reason, I could at least call for help.
Perry Smith doesn’t describe the murders until late in the book, on page 236. That’s when he tells us that he and Hickock simply walked into the house through the side door of Mr. Clutter’s office, the same door that Nancy and Susan found ajar that Sunday morning. Rumor of a safe in the house containing lots of money brought Smith and Hickock to Holcomb, Kansas, and the Clutter house shortly after midnight. The safe was supposed to be on the wall behind Mr. Clutter’s desk, but once inside, they couldn’t find it there, or anywhere. They woke Mr. Clutter and brought him to the office and demanded he tell them where the safe was, even after he looked them right in the eye and said there was no safe.
I still remember reading Smith’s confession, sitting up in my bed, that white bed with the gold trim, the yellow and white gingham sheets with matching curtains, a safe, pretty room, just like Nancy Clutter’s must have been. At one point he mentioned that they thought they saw a figure at the top of the stairs, and the detective believed that it had been Nancy who, frightened, went back in her room and hid her gold watch inside one of her shoes in her closet. What would I hide? I wondered, glancing around my bedroom? What should I hide, because surely with our own unlocked doors, it was possible, probable even, that something like this could happen to us. I didn’t have anything valuable then, but a few years later, when I got a pair of tiny diamond stud earrings, I kept them in the toe of a shoe shoved to the back of my closet.
Smith goes on to describe how they woke the rest of the family and put them in the bathroom; how they tied up Mr. Clutter in the basement; how they then brought Kenyon Clutter to the playroom and tied him up; how they tied Nancy in her bedroom and Mrs. Clutter in hers; how they taped their mouths shut; how they discussed whether or not to kill them; how they shot first Mr. Clutter, then Kenyon, then Nancy, then Mrs. Clutter; how they drove away with the forty dollars they’d found in the house.
I read this and read it again. I thought of those eight student nurses, of the one who’d hidden under a bed and escaped. “How could one man overpower eight women?” my mother had kept asking. “Why couldn’t they fight back?” At the time, my mother’s questions had seemed like good common sense. Nine girls, one man. Why couldn’t they overpower him? So now, reading In Cold Blood, I wondered the same thing. Why hadn’t Nancy, who’d thought to hide her gold wristwatch, run out the door at the bottom of the stairs? Why hadn’t any of them done something when they had even the sliver of hope of getting out of there, of getting help?
“This ever happen to you,” my grandmother had told me after Richard Speck killed those student nurses, “you scream or run out the door.” That had seemed sound advice, advice I took to heart. But here was evidence that maybe, if this ever did happen, I wouldn’t be able to scream or run out the door. That something—fear, disbelief, paralysis—might keep me right there, in place. Like Nancy Clutter.
I did not sleep with the lights off until I was twenty-five-years old. And even with them ablaze, I still woke up several times during the night wondering if I had heard a noise? Perhaps someone at the door? Or I would wake up in terror and run downstairs to check first our front door and then our back door to be sure my father had locked them before he went up to bed. I begged for that, the locking of our doors at night. At first, my parents refused: we lived in a small town in the middle of nowhere. Who would want to break into our house? But once they realized I couldn’t go to sleep if the doors were unlocked, they began to lock them. Each night I’d watch as my father turned off the television, emptied the ashtrays, washed the few dishes in the sink, went into the bathroom, and then finally—finally!—locked the doors. Even though I’d watched him, in the middle of the night I still had to check, to be sure, to keep out whoever might want to come in and harm us. I slept with the phone by my side so that I could, at many points during the night, lift the receiver and hear the comforting sound of the dial tone.
Eventually, I went to college, where I could sleep if my roommates were in their beds, but not if I was alone. Alone, the same terror struck me, and I’d run around the small bunk-bedded room and turn on all the lights. I’d jiggle the doorknob, making sure it was locked. And then, after college, when I worked as a TWA flight attendant, I spent most of my time alone in hotel rooms. In San Francisco, Las Vegas, Los Angeles; Zurich, Rome, Paris. Jet lagged, I might fall asleep easily. But the familiar waking in fear came anyway, and I’d turn on the television, turn on the lights, check and re-check the lock on the door. I’d calculate the time difference; if it was four a.m. in Paris, then I could call my parents back in Rhode Island, where it was only ten at night, and make sure nothing had happened to them. “What time is it there anyway?” my mother would ask, confused. Her daughter was traveling the world, seeing and doing things that she’d never dreamed of. Why would I ever wake up in the middle of the night and call home?
The first night I slept in the dark, I was twenty-five-years old, and I had just moved to a tiny studio apartment on Sullivan Street in Greenwich Village. The building had once been a convent, but now it was painted Bermuda pink, and those cell-like rooms were converted to small apartments. From my bed—a door on a platform, topped with a large piece of foam, I could hear people in the street below. Drunks walking out of Googie’s, the bar on the corner. NYU students shouting and singing. Busy footsteps. Whistling. Whispers.
I moved to New York City, to that apartment, shortly after my brother died suddenly in an accident at the age of thirty. What I will never know is if his death, the culmination in so many ways of my childhood fears of something bad happening to my family, finally rid me of my night terrors. Or if it was Manhattan itself—with its constant reminder that I wasn’t alone, even in the middle of the night—that became my lullaby. All I know is that on the first night on my funny bed in my little apartment on Sullivan Street, I turned off the light. Despite my aching broken heart over losing my brother, I remember listening to the sounds of street life outside and smiling. I rolled over. And I went, finally, to sleep.
Ann Hood is the author of over a dozen novels, including the bestsellers The Knitting Circle, The Obituary Writer, and The Book That Matters Most. She has also written five memoirs, including Comfort: A Journey Through Grief, which was a NYT Editors’ Choice and was named one of the top ten non-fiction books of 2008 by Entertainment Weekly. Her essays and short stories have appeared in many publications, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, and many more. She has won two Pushcart Prizes, two Best American Food Writing awards, a Best American Travel Writing award, and a Best American Spiritual Writing award, Hood’s most recent book is her memoir, Fly Girl, which is about her eight years as a TWA flight attendant from the late 70s to the mid-80s. Her novel, The Stolen Child, will be published in May 2024.
Photo credit: Tobi