Work Text:
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ARCHIVIST:
Statement of Michael Afton, regarding reflections on childhood, Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, and Fazbear’s Fright. Original statement given December 9th, 1994. Audio recording by Vanessa Rojas, Head of the Magnus Institute, New York.
Statement begins.
ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT):
My dad was a weird guy. I mean, I’m sure you know that, right? Everyone does. Being a murder suspect does that to your reputation. There’s this idea floating around that my brother’s death made him like that, that something snapped, and let me tell you, whatever happened to him took place a long time before I was even born.
Anyway - uh. You want to know about Freddy’s. My father and Henry - his best friend, you probably read about him too - ran it from about 1984-1986, then shut down for a bit, opened up in 1988, and then closed down in 1989. It had four animatronics, Freddy the bear, Chica the chicken, Bonnie the bunny, and Foxy the pirate fox. Foxy was the best. He had an eyepatch and everything. I should get back on topic.
Well, look. My dad didn’t like that place very much. I mean, sure, he ran it, and he was interested in it, and he went there and took pictures and fixed up the animatronics, but - I don’t think he was crazy about it. The restaurant before Freddy’s opened, Fredbear’s, he was crazy about that, but apparently Freddy’s didn’t capture the same magic. Maybe because Freddy’s was so much cleaner, and nobody had died there. Died yet.
At Fredbear’s, two kids died. My brother - which I think everyone knows about, at this point - and Charlie, who was Henry’s kid. She was run over behind the restaurant and as far as I remember, the premises weren’t swept and nothing closed down. It would be funny if it weren’t so awful.
Anyway, Freddy’s. Yes, it was great. I didn’t like my father’s restaurants either, after my siblings died - my sister died around 1985, did I mention that? At some rinky-dink experimental place my dad was trying to build. That building’s now a surprisingly delicious Pizza Hut. Uh - I didn’t like them but I posed for pictures and I did just about anything I could to get out of his way. Like I said, my dad was…weird. The type of guy you cross the street to avoid. And Henry, I love him to death, but he was weird, too, murmuring all day and never coming out of the restaurant. So, really, it was amazing to everyone except for me and my dad.
I remember the incident like it was yesterday. I mean, it was a few years ago, so it’s not truly old. You ask people back in Hurricane, and they remember it even more clearly than I do, like it happened a few hours ago, a few minutes ago.
Five kids disappeared - I know their names, here - Jeremy Laurence, Susanne Henney, Fritz Wendle, Cassidy Roberts, and Gabriel Morales. An entire birthday party. One minute they were at a table having birthday cake, and the next, just…gone. Their bags were still there, the animatronics were playing birthday showtapes, their parents were sitting in a booth right next to the table. But, it seems like none of them noticed. You take your eyes off them for a second, and all that.
The place was closed down for three months, while people searched for them. The entire city was combed top to bottom, but again, they just weren’t there. I went out looking for them, too, is the funny thing - I went to a search party after school one day. I felt really bad about the whole thing, and I figured it was the least I could do. I think I was one of the youngest people there, and they kept looking at me sideways and telling me to stay back. I like to think they were looking out for me, but - it was probably because of the whole brother incident. You don’t forget that.
Now, you see, on that search party, I came to the conclusion that my father had something to do with it. I don’t remember why. I was walking and walking and I came to a little clearing, with pecan trees around it, dense, like a forest. Ignoring, of course, we don’t have forests in Utah. And I thought, well, that settles it, my dad’s a murderer.
I know what you’re thinking. How the hell could I even think that in the first place, let alone be so calm about it? The truth is, well - I don’t like confronting this, but I guess I have to, because it’s good for me, and all of that. My dad was the type of guy who handled things by screaming and yelling, and one time he threw a glass at me - a heavy glass cup that really could’ve hurt me if he didn’t miss. I wasn’t the best kid and I think it stressed him out - everything stressed him out. I don’t think he meant to be, but he could get really frightening sometimes, see, of course, the glass incident, and he would lock my little brother in his room all the time. Just to get him out of the way, he said. And then he wondered why I fought with my brother so often.
Anyway, I went back home and thought, I am living with a murderer. And that’s how it went for a few days. My dad wasn’t really there all that much - once again, of course, fiddling with his many inventions and ignoring my presence. As I said, weird guy! I don’t know how much I’ve said that.
It was almost a joke, at first, but it started to get more plausible by day three. He was really avoidant, even more than usual, but he was actually nice the rest of the time - allowed me to go out with my friends and stay up late, that kind of stuff. Our laundry machine was constantly running, and it always seemed to be his clothes that were dirty. His car smelled like blood. That one was just plain inexcusable.
I didn’t know what to do. Everyone thinks they’d know what to do in this situation, and then it happens, and you are suddenly hit with the fact that giving your father to the police means that you won’t have anywhere to stay, have to get to school by yourself, will have to buy yourself groceries. To say nothing, of course, about Utah’s foster care system.
The final straw, I guess, was when I was watching news coverage - I obsessively tracked the case when my dad wasn’t home - and they had finally gotten some evidence. It was a little piece of yellow fuzz, just a little piece of it, found in a single backroom, and it had blood on it. Suspicious enough, but authorities had tested it and figured out that it was, at least, someone related to Susanne Henney, to say nothing of the girl herself. Now, at Fredbear’s - the one restaurant my father actually liked - there were two suits, springlock ones. Fredbear, of course, and Spring Bonnie, who my dad often played. I know, that’s a strange move. The only other yellow animatronic was Chica, but - she wasn’t fuzzy so much as she was covered in feathers. And she didn’t have a suit, springlock or not.
This is all very suspicious, but - what I thought proved it, really proved it, was that we had the Spring Bonnie suit in our garage. Right there, standing upright, waiting to be used. Still in mint condition. My dad hosed the thing down every Saturday morning.
I placed an anonymous call, but everyone knew it was me. The police showed up, and I was so anxious, I think I almost fainted. They took me to Henry’s house and said that he was legal next-of-kin. He ordered pizza that night, which tasted really bad. I’m not sure why I remember that.
My dad spent a few weeks in jail and then they let him go. By that point, he’d been questioned top-to-bottom, and they couldn’t find any evidence. He hadn’t admitted to anything, and his lawyer was very nice about the whole thing. You’d think that’d be it.
Well, look. About a week after my father came back, he disappeared, too. He didn’t take anything with him, so I know he didn’t abandon me, he hadn’t said anything to me, either, which I was expecting, but it was jarring nonetheless. He just left. I’ll come back to this later.
Point is, I was in the foster care system for two years and then I went to college and tried to get on with my life. It didn’t work, for the most part - I was still the guy whose entire family was at the center of one of the most horrible disappearances of the last century, not to mention the guy who killed his brother, and the guy who had no friends, and the guy who got really angry. I’m a man of many talents.
I was ready to move out of Utah when Henry called me. That’s when they get you, you know, when you’re about to move out. Henry wanted me to babysit Freddy’s for a little - just a week, to make sure the place was stable enough to tear down. It’s funny how that works. He said he’d pay me, which I figured - okay, fine. Why not? I was going to stay with some family, anyway, and they could put up with me dropping by a bit later.
The place was fucking freaky. An abandoned building in the middle of a strip mall off the highway, with peeling signs in the windows. It was darker than dark in there - I couldn’t see two steps in front of me without my flashlight. Kind of creepy, considering arcade game cabinets and stained-glass separators and pipe organs all reflect light, and I saw those on the cameras.
I fumbled my way to the security desk and the animatronics started moving. There is no other way to say it. They started walking off the stage and down hallways, stopping in the middle of the party room, looking at me through the cameras. I had doors I could close, and lights to see outside, but other than that, I was pretty much powerless. Literally, the power for the lights and doors was super faulty. I could try hitting them with my flashlight, but I wanted to keep said flashlight with me for as long as possible, and I couldn’t just up and run away - Henry was calling me every night, and while I could muffle him, he could still hear everything that was going on while, you know, the animatronics were trying to kill me. If you get him here, he’ll say that he just told me that the animatronics would stuff me into one of their suits. Didn’t say they’d kill me. Bastard.
I don’t like thinking about the animatronics, the Freddy’s ones. I know you want me to talk about them, that’s what this whole thing is for, but I just - they tried to breathe but they couldn’t, it was all wheezing. They always smelled like blood. The two times they managed to get close to my office, they were just staring at me - like they were forced to stare at me. Like there was nothing they could do.
Let me tell you about something else, this happened after Freddy’s closed down. You didn’t sign up for this. But I don’t care.
I was back in Utah for a funeral. A distant relative's funeral, which I couldn’t really find sad. So many people had died by that point, or might as well have been dead, it was like more logs on the fire. Watch it roar, and everything.
I saw an advertisement for something called Fazbear’s Fright. It was a haunted house based around the ‘rumors’ of Freddy Fazbear’s, which is something so awful I couldn’t even comprehend. I took the job, just so some random kid wouldn’t think they were tough for going. Place’s even more rundown than Freddy’s - really bad ventilation, the entire place smells like shit, I’m performing maintenance on the camera and air systems, like that’s in the job description. It’s so hot, I’m hallucinating, all of these animatronics seem to jump out at me and every time that happens something breaks and I’m moving all night. And on top of that - well, my father’s there. But he’s really not my father.
You know that Spring Bonnie suit that I mentioned? Yellow fuzz with blood on it? He’s dead, but somehow, he’s still moving in that suit. Stumbling down the hallway with dried blood caked all over, guts falling out of his stomach, eyes wide and always staring. Like - like the animatronics at Freddy’s, but he wasn’t just trying to kill me. He was ready to tear me limb from limb. His heart still beat - very faintly, but you could see it through the suit, making the fur go up and down and the exposed metal shift and then click back into place.
I’m not sure he figured out it was me, but he did at some point. He kept standing in front of my office window to look at me. Cocking his head like a dog, and the suit’s ears creaking. I nearly vomited. I think I did, at some point.
The only way to get him away was - get this - audio lures. Make him think there are children in the building and rush over to - do whatever he did with them. Kill them, I assume. Torture. The usual serial killer stuff.
I left around the fifth night, as usual. The place caught fire a few days after due to faulty electrical wiring. I hope - no, I’m not gonna finish that sentence.
I hope you have your information. I’m leaving.
ARCHIVIST
Final comments: Mr. Afton declined to give us any more information.
We reached out to Fazbear Entertainment for comment, which they have not replied to. New location run by this parent company set to open next fall, will send someone to look at it.
Recording ends.
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