In 1967 my father suffered a psychotic episode. He was sent to Cherry Hospital in October, given shock treatments and remained there for three months. The Halls were living in Hyde County, NC during this time and so were Barbara and Carolyn Love whose mother was Pearl Gibbs. Barbara claimed to have been molested by her father. In 1970, for some reason Kay decided she wanted to be a Lab Technician. She did well in science courses until she had to dissect a frog which she refused to do.
In 1996 she met BR Ward. She learned he had been a patient at Cherry Hospital in 1967, that he had attended ECU majoring in Math and UNC majoring in Music. He also mentioned that his sister was a lab technician.
In 1972 they offered art courses at Mattamuskeet School and Kay became involved in various art projects. She and some other classmates made a trip to UNC in October where she considered attending college. In June of 1973 her father assaulted her hitting her in the nose with his fist. She left home, moved to Asheboro for the summer and worked until school began in the fall. She decided to attend ECU.
In 1974 she joined the US Army. In 1975 she was sexually assaulted by an MP Officer and then kidnapped and assaulted by a car salesman while on leave. Upon returning to base I requested to leave the Army. She was granted an honorable discharge. She was suffering from severe sleep deprivation and had been without sleep many months before joining the US Army. It grew into a serious problem since seeing The Exorcist, in 1974 which is what drove her to join. For 6 months while in the Army, she had less than 4 hours of sleep a night. The less sleep she got the more angry she became over not being allowed to sleep for one reason or another. She felt she had no control over her inability to get adequate sleep and put herself in many risky situations, often unable to resist them. She left the base with D. Parker and traveled by air to Medford, Massachusetts overnight, returning to North Carolina the next day by car.
In 1977 Kay was arrested in Ayden, NC for public drunkenness following an argument with her roommate at a bar 20 miles from their apartment. Her roommate refused to take her home so she decided to walk thinking her roommate would soon follow and pick her up. Her roommate decided to call the Sheriff’s department. The Deputy stopped her and asked if she was ok and Kay said yes. She then proceeded on and a few minutes later the Sheriff stopped her and arrested her. He threw her onto the trunk of the car, cuffed her and shoved her into the backseat. She was jailed overnight and released after paying $35.00.
Later that year, after an evening out at a night club, she had a little more to drink than usual and fell asleep on the sofa. Kay was a bed wetter until aged 12, likely caused by the paregoric or her mother’s epidural during her brother’s birth, and had been admonished for it frequently. She developed repressed memories of these experiences that were expressed as anxiety about falling asleep because of the fear of becoming too relaxed and wetting the bed. As a result, one night after drinking too much, she must have had to go to the bathroom and took a white ceramic ashtray off the coffee table, placed it on the floor and urinated in it.
Her roommate awoke early the next morning and found the ashtray in the floor. When she woke up her roommate pointed it out to her. Kay had no recollection of having done the deed but emptied it anyway. She pondered the matter for several weeks unable to recall what she did. She was employed at Kmart at the time. She later surmised she did it in this manner because prior to the time her father was sent to the psychiatric hospital, they had to use porcelain pots to go to the bathroom as they lived in an old house with no bathroom or running water for several months. This resolved the mechanics of her actions but not the why.
In 2011, she met Dorothy Perly, a new neighbor. Over the course of several months they began to talk. One afternoon Perly communicated to her she had had a drinking problem as Kay did. She also communicated to Kay, during a time of racial unrest, she had been prevented from using the public restroom in a local store in Chapel Hill and was thrown into the street. Perly said she then left the store, got drunk, returned and proceeded to urinate in front of the establishment. This is as she recently related her experience to Kay. She did not tell Kay when this happened. It is clear some Law Official dissociated this experience, and Kay unknowingly re-enacted it. She was subsequently arrested by the police and jailed for one night just as I had been in 1977. Was Perly re-enacting something from someone in Massachusetts?
Kay was completely unconscious of the events before they occurred in her waking life which led to her behavior that night. She is uncertain about what Perly knew beforehand about the incident. She had no knowledge of Ms. Perly at anytime during these experiences. Kay fully believed she was acting of her own free will, except for that night due to the pathological consumption of too much alcohol. She figured out before meeting Ms. Perly, she did act out whenever she drank alcohol, as she was given paregoric in her youth, so one might say she was predisposed to it (other details in my childhood contributed to this behavior).
Since this discovery Kay located Perly Street, in a small town in Massachusetts with the same last name as her neighbor. The story likely goes on further into history, probably pre-Civil War. After writing this, she also discovered Jean Wallace from Massachusetts and Barbara Payton, a Hollywood actress who fell into poverty, prostitution, alcoholism, and stabbed herself, later dying of complications. Kay thought this was interesting as she met Helen a patient at the Psychiatric Hospital she was in in 1989, who also stabbed herself with a matte knife or whatever she could find. Wallace was from Boston, Massachusetts and she located a place on Nielson Street in Everett, Massachusetts which may have been the scene of a child molestation, Kay re-enacted during her childhood.
