Scary Stories - Break In

The episode opens with a thirteen-year-old girl in a tiny Texas town of 393 people—a place with no police force, no stoplight, and a voluntary fire department twenty miles away—who wakes in the middle of the night to discover that her mother, heavily drunk and barely conscious, has brought home a man named Kyle. Kyle is the town's known child molester, the one who had inappropriately touched children including the narrator's next-door neighbor. He knows there are three early teenage girls sleeping in the next room. The girl physically pushes herself between her mother and Kyle, screams at him to get out, and calls the police. It takes them three hours to arrive.

The vulnerability of isolation

The episode's first story establishes a pattern that runs through every account that follows: people in vulnerable positions—alone, asleep, in places where help is far away—confront intruders who have already breached their security. The Texas town had no police presence at all. The narrator's mother was blackout drunk and could not remember the night. The intruder knew exactly how many children were in the house. The narrator, at thirteen, had to become the adult because the actual adult was incapacitated. "My mother could not recall the night," she says. "Because she was so intoxicated at the time."