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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/No-Surprise-7210 on 2026-05-28 13:49:21+00:00.

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If you were on paranormal forums in the early 2010s, or those old true crime boards before they all got bought out, you’ve probably seen threads about the Bellhaven Woods murders.

Every October somebody reposts the same blurry newspaper scans or police photos or fake transcripts onto Reddit threads and paranormal forums and YouTube compilations with titles like “The Bellhaven Woods Mystery Explained” or “Top Five Real Demon Possessions.” Iris Mercer’s name shows up constantly on paranormal blogs. Usually beside edited pictures of the woods or screenshots from old local news broadcasts with the contrast turned all the way up so her eyes look black.

Most of those people are working with the same fifteen pieces of publicly available information because there was barely anything released in the first place.

Here's what the public record actually contains. On October 14th, 2009, a high school senior named Malcolm Reyes was found dead in his van, which was parked on a fire road about a quarter mile into the tree line off Route 9. He was the fourth person to die in Belhaven that year under circumstances the sheriff's department described as "under active investigation.” Before Malcolm there had been a woman found at the reservoir, a retired teacher, and a sixteen-year-old boy whose case was closed within a week. All four deaths happened within about a two-mile radius.

Approximately five days after Malcolm's body was discovered, the body of Iris Mercer — at that point the presumed suspect in his death — was found by a search team about half a mile into the woods. Her death was ruled a suicide, though the coroner's report noted that the body showed signs of having been moved from the original place of death.

Local sources described a string of behavior in the weeks leading up to October that didn't make it into any official account. Strange activity around Saint Germaine's Church on the east end of town, where the congregation had tripled in size over the course of about six months and where several longtime members had stopped attending after raising concerns they declined to specify publicly. Three separate noise complaints in the same week about "gatherings" in the woods near the Route 9 fire roads, which the sheriff's department responded to and then filed no report about.

Law enforcement barely spoke about the investigation after the first few weeks. The coroner’s report was partially sealed. Half the witness statements were either lost, withheld, or reduced to one-sentence summaries that raised more questions than they answered. The case was technically closed when Iris died.

You can still find archived forum threads where people argue about details that were never confirmed one way or another. Why Iris’ body had been moved. If Malcolm fought back. Whether there were symbols carved into the trees near the site where she was found. If Saint Germaine’s Church paid to keep certain documents out of public records. Most of it spiraled into conspiracy theories eventually.

Those who were directly involved decided a long time ago to stay quiet. I was one of them. I kept that decision for fifteen years because I didn't think the truth would help anyone, and I think now that I was wrong about that too. My name is Kolby Hatch. I was seventeen years old in the fall of 2009. I moved to Bellhaven the summer before junior year, a little over a year before the deaths. This is what actually happened in that town.

I need to tell you about Jensen before I tell you about any of this, because he is where it starts, and because people who only know my reputation from that year tend to have the wrong idea of it.

Jensen Schaefer was my best friend from sixth grade through the end of junior year. We met because we sat next to each other in earth science and both failed the same quiz and were assigned to redo it together after class, and we spent the whole hour talking, and after that we ate lunch together every day for two years. At the time I had dark curly hair down past my ears because my father had given up trying to make me cut it, and I wore old band shirts so consistently that teachers started recognizing me by them. By sophomore year my nose had already been broken once from a fight at a middle school football game and healed slightly crooked afterward.

In November of our sophomore year, an upperclassman named Wyatt Briggs decided that Jensen was worth tormenting. By March, it had been going on long enough that Jensen went home one Tuesday and swallowed most of a bottle of his mother's Lexapro.

He survived. I found out the next morning when his mother called our house at six a.m.

I don't have a lot to say about the two days between that call and what I did to Wyatt Briggs in the student parking lot. I found Wyatt on a Thursday afternoon and I hit him until someone pulled me off, and when it was over his cheekbone was fractured and I had broken two knuckles. His father was a vice principal in the district, so the whole thing got handled quietly. I left voluntarily as part of an agreement, which kept it off my permanent record and kept Wyatt's family from having to explain why their son had spent months making another kid's life a living hell. What it didn't keep from spreading was the story itself. According to other students, I had apparently put Wyatt in the ICU, which was not true, but you can't correct a rumor.

Needless to say, I was relieved when my father decided to move us across the U.S. a month after.

The town of Bellhaven was three blocks of downtown and then neighborhoods spreading out in every direction, older houses mostly. Two gas stations. A diner called Patsy's that had the same menu it'd had since 1987. A Dollar General. A laundromat that also sold lottery tickets. Six churches, which I didn't count until later, when it started to matter.

That summer was quiet. My aunt lived three houses down on Caldwell Street and came over for dinner twice a week and asked me about my plans. I gave her answers and we got along fine. My dad was relieved to be somewhere smaller and slower, but I think he was also relieved that I seemed to be handling it, or performing handling it convincingly enough that he didn't have to ask. I rode my bike around and learned the town. I stayed out of trouble because there was no trouble available to get into, and that was probably what my dad had been counting on.

The high school was called Bellhaven Regional High and sat on the west end of town with a parking lot full of beat-up cars and a marquee sign out front that still said CONGRATULATIONS CLASS OF 2008 by the time school started in late August. I walked in on the first day and immediately understood that the rumors had arrived before I had.

I had been hoping that four hundred miles of distance might mean starting clean. It did not. A couple seniors asked outright whether the rumors were true within my first week there. One kid in gym class asked if I had ever been arrested before he even asked where I moved from. But honestly, the adults were the worst of it. I remember one teacher stopping me after class during my second week because another student had claimed I threatened him in the parking lot. The threat turned out to be me telling him to move his truck because he was blocking my car in. The teacher still spent ten minutes explaining that Bellhaven High had “zero tolerance policies regarding intimidation.”

Bellhaven was small enough that I probably could have laid low and waited for the story to fade. I was considering doing exactly that when Summer Okeke-Pruitt sat down across from me during the second week of school without asking.

She set her tray down, dropped into the seat, and looked at me across the cafeteria table. Summer wore oversized clothes almost constantly — hoodies with the sleeves pushed halfway over her hands, huge jackets once the weather cooled off, loose jeans — and her long twists were tied back that day with a faded blue bandanna.

“Okay,” she said. “I have a question. Did you actually fracture his orbital socket or were people just being dramatic?”

I blinked. “...It was actually his cheekbone.”

"Okay, I figured." She picked up her fork. "Taylor Breck said orbital socket and Taylor Breck has never been right about anything since the sixth grade, so."

I didn't say anything for a second because I was waiting for the pivot — the ‘so what's wrong with you?’ It didn't come. She just ate and looked around the cafeteria, then looked back at me like she expected us to have a normal conversation, which we did.

We talked about her, mostly, because she kept asking questions and I kept answering them and by the time the bell rang I had learned that she'd been at Bellhaven since freshman year, that she ran cross country badly and did it anyway, that she had a complicated relationship with her parents that she described as a work in progress, and that she had strong opinions about which gas station had the better hot food, which was the Sunoco on Route 9 and not the Shell, no contest.

Summer introduced me to Malcolm two weeks in, on a Friday afternoon, which is when I found out about the van.

It was a 1993 Chevy in a yellowish beige that had oxidized down to something closer to the color of an old newspaper, and it ran about sixty percent of the time. He'd bought it for four hundred dollars from a guy his cousin knew and spent six months making the back of it livable. We sp...

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