Duality
Christina has five children. The four boys—Blake, Cody, Matthew, and Asheston—are all grown up and out on their own, leaving Hannah, the one and only girl, at age fifteen, still living with us.
However, I would come to find out that Hannah was supposed to have a twin brother. Trust me, I didn’t want to believe it either. But it’s all true—hospital records prove it.
We were lying awake in bed one morning when I noticed Christina was not acting like herself. I can always tell when something is wrong with her: she just shuts down.
You know? You get the “I’m fine,” and as we all know, that means “You better keep asking.”
I kept at her and eventually she shared a story I had yet to hear, a story that opened my eyes to the haunting we were experiencing.
Christina became pregnant again in October 2000. In January 2001, Christina’s life was turned upside down after getting in a terrible car accident. But frankly, you can’t call it an accident because that word implies nobody was at fault. Somebody literally ran her off the road and headfirst into a tree.
Still to this day, the oncoming vehicle that crossed into her lane at high speed has not been identified.
I can only assume a drunk driver carelessly veered into her lane, forcing her to make a quick decision. This ultimately placed her off the road, into the woods, and wrapped around a tree.
The guy saw the accident but chose to keep on going. Sometimes the most frightening things in the world are selfish, uncompassionate cowards you can barely call human beings. The guy is a murderer as far as I am concerned.
It wasn’t until the next morning that she was discovered by a passing vehicle.
She had been unconscious all night and trapped inside the crushed remains of the car. Emergency responders used the Jaws of Life to cut her out of the vehicle. Christina was immediately rushed to the hospital.
Doctors feared the worst, considering she was pregnant. A crash that extreme rarely ends well for the victims. However, other than minor cuts and bruises, she was fine. But there was some bad news to deliver. The doctor informed her that she had lost one of her babies in the crash.
Christina questioned the doctor’s news because of the way he worded the terrible news—“one of your babies.” Christina thought she was only carrying one baby. But the doctor revealed to her that she was in fact pregnant with twins.
One was a girl, and the other was a boy. The girl survived, and the boy tragically did not.
I’m not medically educated by any definition, though I do hold a degree in psychology.
My expertise is evaluating behavior and mental processes. Which, believe me, drives my friends and family crazy.
Good choice of word there, huh? Crazy.
So I often turn to Christina when it comes to wanting to absorb some medical knowledge. Occasionally I pick my mother’s brain as well, who has retired from the medical field.
What happened to Christina after the accident is called vanishing twin syndrome (VTS). First recognized in 1945, VTS occurs when a twin disappears from the uterus during pregnancy. This is typically a result of a miscarriage.
Occasionally, a twin can vanish in which no medical reason for the disappearance can be determined.
The dead fetal tissue is absorbed by the other twin, the placenta, or even the mother. It’s like a magic trick. Which is why the syndrome is often referred to “vanishing twin.”
Vanishing twin syndrome sounds ghostly enough as it is, let alone relating this story to the history of Norman and our current situation.
My girlfriend lost a son that she never knew she was even going to have in the first place. I can only imagine the emotional overload that was at that time.
It was good news, however, to learn that the surviving daughter was healthy as can be and suffered from no health issues deriving from the car wreck.
On July 5, 2001, Christina went into labor. Hannah was born without issue. And she was born without the brother nobody knew she was even going to have.
And fifteen years later, Hannah finally learned the truth of her own birth and her brother’s death. Fifteen years later, that brother arrived.
Learning that my girlfriend shared the same story as the spirit that resided in Norman and the surviving sister was a little more than disturbing. This newfound knowledge lent more credence to our theories on the haunted doll and his motives.
We now had two mothers who were pregnant with twins, lost their boys, and gave birth to girls. We now had two mothers with a daughter who ended up with Matty, or as we now know him, Norman.
I just couldn’t help but keep putting all of the little pieces of the puzzle together.
It was amazing. It was perfect. It was like a screenplay full of twists and turns.
There was a thirty-nine-year difference between the original twin tragedy and this one. The original birth took place in July 1962. Hannah’s birth took place in July 2001. We discovered the doll at the antique shop in July.
This was uncanny.
At the time of writing this, I turned thirty-nine years old, and Norman was attempting to erase me.
This was like a bad case of the best synchronicity one could ask for.
Where was Carl Jung when you needed him? Carl Jung was a psychoanalyst that first introduced the concept of synchronicity in the early 1920s. He explained synchronicity as events that were “meaningful coincidences” if they happened with no causal relationship. He further added that these occurrences with no causal relationship held more validity by definition if they appeared to be meaningfully related.
That could not explain our current situation any better.
Nor Christina or myself had any causal relationship with the original tragedy in 1962, the girl, or the doll, yet what was happening to us fell firmly within the realm of being meaningfully related.
Our lives were haunted by the spirit trapped inside a doll. Not only were we reliving his story, but he was attempting to rewrite it.
So the mystery kept unfolding. Only it wasn’t a mystery at this point; this was life, in whatever form it was choosing to take.
With everything going on inside our home, there needed to be no secrets. The haunting, the fear, Norman, and history rewriting itself left no room for any of us to hide anything.
You always hear people say they are haunted by the past.
With us, we were haunted by the past and the present and whatever the future was going to bring with our sinister, smiling little pal.
The holy grail of evidence was coming, and it was going to be handed to me by a couple of kids.