The restaurant called Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza was a popular family restaurant and entertainment center when I was growing up. Now, my family could never afford to go there very often. We were definitely not the most affluent family. However, my father was a security guard there, so I remember visiting there a small handful of times for very special treats.
Whatever series of events that forced that once-popular restaurant to eventually close down for good haunts me to this day.
Over the years, there were many unexplained disappearances. First it was the child patrons of the restaurant. Then the security guards of the restaurant started to disappear. The turnover rate of security guards at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza became alarmingly high. The evening news began to mention that if the guards did not disappear, they quit for undisclosed reasons.
I remember for a period of time, Mother often begged Father to resign his security guard job for his safety. “Dear, this restaurant isn’t safe anymore. There’s just so many things going on. What if something happened to you? David and I…we wouldn’t know what to do if you were gone!”
Each time, Father always had a similar response to her, reassuring her with his calm, pale blue eyes. “Catherine, risk has always been a part of my job. I’ve worked here for years. I’ll always think of you and David as I work, so I won’t let anything bad happen to me, I promise.”
Father always refused to quit. For some reason, he stayed at his job, and he remained calm about it. As a young kid I assumed he must have really wanted to support his family. And as Father promised, nothing bad ever happened to him at his job. Mother eventually gave up on imploring him to resign.
Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza closed for good in my early teens. The company simply couldn’t handle the liability of all the unexplained disappearances on their business. Somehow it didn’t bother Father much when he had to get laid off from the restaurant he worked at for many years. This was also around the time that he was often absent from home despite not working anymore. He explained this to Mother and me as searching for another job.
But one day, Father left and never returned. I actually remember the last time I saw and spoke with him. We were in our house’s foyer, and he was just getting ready to leave right as I was coming back home from school.
“Dad, where are you going? Mom and I never see you nowadays. Why do you have to leave just when I’ve gotten home from school?”
Father seemed startled by my inquiry. But then he quickly narrowed his calm pale blue eyes, and smiled back at me as he softly rested his hand on my shoulder. “I’ve just got some errands to do tonight. David, everything will be all right. I’ll see you again soon.” Before I had the chance to reply, Father left out through the door. The bright afternoon sun was shining in my eyes through the window as I watched Father’s silhouette walk further away from our house. If I knew I’d never see him again, I should have stopped him.
Mother got worried after many nights of his absence and sent out a missing persons report. Despite this, no detective or police could ever find any whereabouts of my father. He had barely reached his forties, but he was gone from Mother and me. Without anything of him present, we couldn’t even hold a funeral for him if he had somehow passed.
Now I am a divorcé in my forties. My ex-wife has the main custody of our children. My mother had recently passed away from terminal health problems, most likely complicated from depression from missing her husband. All these years, and especially now in my loneliness and rumination, I often asked to myself, what had happened to Father? What exactly had caused him to leave behind his family, never to return? He never taught me how to drive. He never saw me graduate from high school or college, get married, or have his grandchildren. His absence had caused a void in my life.
But the more that I thought about it, could the condemned restaurant that he worked at for many years be behind his disappearance those many years ago? Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza did have many unexplained disappearances, including security guards like my father. Now that I remembered hard enough, Father did act strangely after he was laid off and the restaurant was closed. His usually calm self even seemed anxious at times. While unemployment was the most likely reason for this, could something else, perhaps the strange occurrences at the restaurant, explain the changes in his behavior?
Thus begun my journey of researching the history of Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza. If anything had to explain my father’s strange behavior and unexplained disappearance, whatever happened at his job years ago must have been the reason.
***
But where would I even start to research? First I did some basic stuff. Since the last time I actually visited Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza was decades ago as a kid, I couldn’t even remember the iconic animatronics’ names correctly. Of course there was Freddy Fazbear, the ursine namesake of the restaurant. But there were a couple other animal friends of his. A chicken, a rabbit, and a fox, I think. I did a quick search of their names. Chica the pizza-loving chicken, Bonnie the purple bunny, and Foxy the pirate fox. Cute.
I went to online newspaper archives to read news articles from over thirty years ago that I barely glanced at as a kid. Besides the articles about the disappearances I remembered from my childhood, I’d also uncovered some strange and disturbing accounts. In the opinion sections of the newspapers particularly, people complained about uncomfortable they felt at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza. The animatronics smelled horrible, like corpses. While the animal characters acted normally around the children, they were vaguely hostile to adults. Not even the day-shift security guards could make the adult patrons feel comfortable and safe at the restaurant. Could these be true? Or were spiteful people just making up scary stories to slander the child-friendly establishment?
To learn more, I researched back into the past as far as the search archives would allow me in order to find a reason for all of these ominous rumors. I eventually came across one article at the very back. It mentioned something about “the Bite of ‘87.” A certain animatronic actually bit into the skull of an adult patron during a child’s birthday party. I know I was in elementary school back then, but why hadn’t I ever heard of this incident? If something so traumatic happened at work one day, Father would have surely mentioned it at home too. Why was such a violent incident hidden so well?
***
Going deeper into my research, I actually looked up old files containing the payrolls of old employees of Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza. Many of them were around my parents’ ages, and if they had not already passed, they were in nursing homes. To get first-hand information about the spooky incidences of the restaurant, I actually looked up the various former employees and called them to interview them. While they were initially receptive and interested in what I had to say, they immediately hung up on me if I mentioned any of the bizarre occurrences at their former workplace. Strange.
I ended up visiting various nursing homes in the area to speak with the former security guards who were still alive; in particular, I was the most interested in what they had to say about the old restaurant anyway. During each visit, the old men each had empty stares of loneliness as they sit in their wheelchairs, thick blankets covering their laps. They were the only former employees who were willing to talk to me about the old restaurant. While the men were glad to have a younger person come in to talk to them, the nursing aides warned me that many of these patients were already suffering from dementia or Alzheimer’s disease, so they could not hold coherent conversations.
And boy, did what they say to me indicate their mental decline. “What was working at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza like?” I asked each of them.
Their languid eyes suddenly widen and become full of paranoia. “The night…night shift…the animals, they can think. They know you. They…they don’t want you here. They watch you… and they always move.”
This was along the lines of what all of the men had told me about their time working at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza. Despite the madness of their words, I could not ignore the fact that each former security guard I visited had all independently told me pretty much the same thing. Between the newspaper sources and these accounts, there was no doubt. Somehow, as the security guards worked their night shifts all those years ago, the restaurant’s animatronics did indeed move by themselves and had sentience. And for whatever reason, the animatronics were hostile to all adults.
***
I continued my perusal of newspaper and internet articles concerning Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, but my searches had gone cold. I was beginning to find nothing else of interest. But one day when I had almost given up research, I came across a surprisingly recent posting online. There was a nearby new attraction opening up, called “Fazbear’s Fright.” The attraction based itself on the unsolved mysteries of the former restaurant. If the owners were researching the restaurant’s past like I was, perhaps some of my research could come from them?
The place also had some job openings with minimal job descriptions. The openings didn’t have the best pay rates, but I was already well-off from my late mother’s estate. Perhaps if I were hired onto an opening, I could better gather information about the old restaurant. I decided to call the new attraction’s phone number to inquire about the openings.
“Hi, I’m calling back about the job openings you had posted online…”
An overly eager kid replied to me from the other end. He sounded like he couldn’t have been much older than a young adult. “Oh yeah, your name’s David Corcoran, isn’t it? Yeah, you were asking about that job opening we posted!”
I was taken aback by how upbeat this person sounded, considering their establishment was based on a collection of ominous unsolved mysteries. “Uh, yeah. Recently I’ve had a deep interest in the restaurant’s past, just like your establishment does. And you know, my father was actually a security guard at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza during my childhood. His name was-“
“Oh that’s great! You’re hired! Come in for Monday night, your first night, where I’ll show you around! You’ll get paid for the training too!” The guy on the other end of the phone hung up.
Well, that was an easy hiring process.
***
The follow-up email I received from the Fazbear’s Fright employers instructed me to arrive slightly before midnight on Sunday to clock in for the Monday shift. As I walked in through the door, I saw that the place looked like a dump. Everything was dimly lit, and the interior of the building looked like it was falling apart. Old “relics” from the former pizzeria, including posters and old children’s drawings, were haphazardly placed all over the hallway walls. In the corner of the office where I was stationed, there was a cardboard box of old animatronic parts I assumed that the owners hadn’t decided what to do with yet.
Like instructed, I had suited up into my security guard costume provided and I stayed stationed near the “office” area, near the building’s exit. The person who hired me did immediately call me at midnight to give me a “tutorial” of the area. Mostly, to me it was excuses for why the building’s ventilation and wiring were dangerously falling apart. Apparently, the establishment looked like a dump so make it “spooky”, or something. I mostly let the guy on the other end of the line talk my ear off throughout the night, and before I knew it, the night was over.
***
On the second night of my employment, the last time I had heard from that guy on the phone was when he was instructing me to listen to some Freddy Fazbear restaurant’s old employee instruction tapes. Before he left, the last thing he mentioned was that he and his crew had managed to find an actual intact animatronic from the old Freddy Fazbear restaurants. He had quit talking to me because he had misplaced it and had to go look for it.
So the owners managed to find an intact animatronic, but they were too scatterbrained to even keep track of where they had put it. Somehow, with the amount of professionalism the owners demonstrated to me so far, I was not surprised. With nothing better to do, I looked through the grainy cameras to try and find it. Eventually I spotted it. Was it a…rabbit? Like the Bonnie character? The animatronic looked to be in very bad condition. It certainly didn’t have a very child-friendly appearance anymore. In many places the metal endoskeleton poked through the fabric exterior, particularly on the animatronic’s limbs. One of the ears was torn off at the half. In any case, if this thing moved around and hated adults like the other animatronics I had researched, I had to keep it away from me for my own safety. But how would I even do that?
***
Before I knew it, the rabbit-like thing was staring at me unblinkingly from the office doorway. I was starting to get lightheaded from the possible carbon monoxide leakage of this place. I didn’t want to take my sights off of the thing, since I didn’t know what it would do if I did. But I also didn’t want to pass out from carbon monoxide poisoning. Perhaps if I pulled up the control panel on my tablet to reboot the shitty ventilation system quickly enough, maybe I’d still have time to outrun it if it attacked me...
But as soon as I put my tablet down, I saw the wretched animatronic now at my desk and leaning toward me, grinning. Its movements were surprisingly fluid for a defunct machine. Up close to me, I noticed that it smelled like death, and it had the disgusting greenish-yellow color of a mummified corpse. Was it going to be hostile to me, like animatronics had been to security guards in the past? Did it want to maim me? I could vaguely hear it hissing at me, as if in pain.
This thing…now that I listened in closer, I think it was hissing my name. But how did it know my name? I wasn’t wearing a name tag on my security guard costume. The animatronic and I had never even met before, until this unfortunate moment.
But then I looked closer at its wild eyes, eager and illuminated by the scarce light of this place. For an aged animatronic, the eyes were strangely human…and familiar. Even if these were the eyes of a monster, I actually remembered seeing those eyes a very long time ago. While the sclera were bloodshot, the gleaming irises were a pale blue color. A pale blue color that matched my own.
The mechanical abomination seemed to grin wider as I came to this realization. Face to face with this animatronic, I’d met Father again at last.
