Derek and Maria Broaddus were excited when they bought a big house in Westfield, New Jersey, in June 2014. They paid $1.3 million for the six-bedroom home on Boulevard Street. The couple had three young kids and thought this would be the perfect place to raise their family.
But their excitement quickly turned into fear. According to CBS News, a few days after buying the house, a letter showed up in the mailbox. At first, it seemed normal, but then it got really strange.
Someone calling themselves “The Watcher” wrote that they had been keeping an eye on the house for many years. The person said their family had watched this house for a long time, and now it was their turn to watch it.
This is beyond creepy, honestly
The scariest part was what the Watcher wrote about the Broaddus children. The letters talked about the kids in a creepy way, calling them “young blood.”
One letter said, “I am pleased to know your names now and the name of the young blood you have brought to me.” Another letter asked if the kids were going to fill the house. The Watcher even wrote that if the children were playing upstairs, no one would hear them scream from the basement.
The family got four letters in total over about a year and a half. Each one was worse than the one before.
The Watcher seemed to know way too much about them. They knew what the kids were called, even their nicknames. They knew when workers came to fix things at the house. They knew things that you could not see just by walking past the house.
Derek tried everything to feel safe. He put up cameras all around the property. He got a fancy security system installed.
But nothing helped. The family was too afraid to actually live in the house. They never even slept there one night, even though they had spent more than a million dollars on it. They ended up staying with family members instead. The whole situation shows how scary it can be when someone threatens your kids, similar to other frightening situations involving children.
The police tried really hard to figure out who sent the letters. They talked to neighbors and tested DNA from the envelopes. They thought maybe one family in the neighborhood was responsible, but they could not prove it. Even private detectives and people who used to work for the FBI tried to solve it, but nobody could find the Watcher.
The Broaddus family tried to sell the house or rent it out, but it was hard. Finally, in 2019, someone bought it for $959,000. That meant the family lost over $400,000, plus all the money they spent on lawyers and investigators.
The people who bought it have not gotten any weird letters. Nobody knows who the Watcher really is. The whole thing left the family broke and stressed out, kind of like how other families get hurt in unexpected ways.
Netflix made a show about this story in 2022 called The Watcher. Famous actors Naomi Watts and Bobby Cannavale were in it. More than 125 million people watched it in the first week. The Watcher case is still one of the weirdest mysteries in New Jersey that has never been solved.
