The Watcher House in New Jersey
Across America, the sleepy, landscaped suburbs are known for their safe, middle-class atmosphere. Families decorate their houses for Christmas, Halloween, and the Fourth of July. Soccer moms drive kids to practices, ballet, and playdates. Children play hide-and-seek in backyards. We think our neighbors are safe. It’s strangers that we need to watch out for. In the suburbs, it seems like nothing bad ever happens. Good neighbors notice when there’s something amiss. When Derek and Marie Broaddus and their family moved into a sage-green house with a Gambrell roof on a quiet, wooded street in Westfield, New Jersey, they didn’t expect someone to watch their every movement so closely. Soon, someone named “The Watcher” began bombarding them with threatening letters.
The History of the Watcher House
Built in 1906, the Dutch colonial revival house on Westfield Street has a bit of a unique past. Originally sold for just a dollar, the house survived a lightning strike, was home to a local mayor, and has a sinister stalker’s presence. In 2014, Derek and Maria Broaddus bought the home for $1.4 million. What they thought of as their dream house soon turned into a nightmare. Before they could move into the house, they started receiving spine-chilling letters. The sender, called The Watcher, claimed that he watched over the house and waited for its “second coming”. The Watcher claimed that his grandfather watched over the house in the 1920s, his father watched it during the 1960s, and now his time had come to watch. The four letters, sent over a space of time, The letters also targeted the couple’s children with terrifying threats. Horrified, the family contacted the police, hired an investigator, and worked with the FBI. According to an FBI profile, The Watcher was likely a male in his 50s or 60s who lived close by. After staking out the area, law enforcement claimed that the neighbors didn’t seem normal. For a week or so, the family stayed on high alert. Derek ended his work trips, while Maria watched her children like a hawk when they went into the yard. If The Watcher intended to scare the new homeowners away, they succeeded. Shaken by the menacing letters and the sense of being watched, the Broaddus family tried to sell the house for 5 years. After renting it to tenants, they finally sold it to Allison and Andrew Carr for $400,000 less.
The “Haunting”
Creaking floors and spooky stories are one thing. Things get real when someone is watching your every move. The Broaddus family felt haunted by their unseen stalker who clearly wanted them gone. “Do you know the history of the house?” The Watcher asked. He also asked them if they knew what lay inside the house’s walls. It sounded like The Watcher knew that murder or some other crime occurred in the house or that someone buried a body in the walls.
At the same time, the sight of workers and remodeling vans made The Watcher go on the attack. He warned that disturbing anything in the place would make the house unhappy. The haunting letters started to get more chilling. He told Derek and Marie to glance out the window at the cars going past. Stripping away the Broaddus’ sense of safety or security, The Watcher claimed that he asked the previous owners to send him some “young blood”. He also asked for the layout of the family’s bedrooms, especially who would sleep in the bedroom facing the street. The parents’ paranoia only increased when The Watcher asked for their children’s names so he could call them to come to him. He’d been waiting, he said, for years for children to return to the 110-year-old house.
“Will the young blood play in the basement?” The Watcher asked in one blood-curdling letter. “Or are they too afraid to go down there alone. I would [be] very afraid . . . It is far away from the rest of the house. If you were upstairs you would never hear them scream.” Many people still think that The Watcher lived in the neighborhood. Michael Langford, an elderly neighbor’s adult son who lived nearby, struggled with schizophrenia. Even his brother admitted that Langford often spooked people who moved into the area. Despite suspicions, no one has ever discovered The Watcher’s identity. A human hand wrote the terrifying letters sent to the Broaddus family. Was it a jealous neighbor? A local predator? A killer who didn’t want Derek and Maria to find something in the house? Or someone who wanted the house to sell at a loss?
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