Amanda’s Army of Decay
Amanda became an outcast. With her father constantly working in the lab, she was left alone in their spacious but creepy mansion on the outskirts of town. Since the death of her brother and her mother’s tragic suicide, Amanda was consumed with grief and guilt over their strained relationships. She felt plagued by unresolved conflicts and was obsessed with contacting their spirits again.
Her desperate longing to fill the profound emptiness left by their loss drove Amanda to pursue dangerous occult magic. She was willing to go to dark extremes in the hope of reconnecting with her deceased family members once more. She tried every spell and incantation she could remember but nothing seemed to work. Her sister wanted nothing to do with the bizarre rituals and haunting chanting echoing from her room each night.
With too much isolation and time, Amanda began exploring the mansion’s extensive libraries, discovering ancient dusty tomes on communicating with spirits and necromancy. She spent her nights hunched over the gruesome texts, learning their secrets of death magic and resurrection.
When not reading, Amanda roamed the rambling graveyard near the mansion, leaving gifts and chanting arcane incantations, desperately trying to contact her deceased mother. Obsessed with the occult, Amanda wanted to master the magic to defeat mortality itself.
Tucked away deep in the mansion’s vast library, Amanda stumbled upon an ancient book simply titled “Arts Obscura.” Bound in cracked leather with iron clasps, the book emitted a faint but unsettling aura.. Scouring through the pages, Amanda uncovered two frightening rituals. One described resurrecting the dead as unnatural plant creatures who would serve the spellcaster. The other detailed summoning cursed insects that would drive victims insane with terror and pain.
In her grieving state, Amanda believed the ritual sacrifice would open a doorway to speak with her deceased mother and brother again. She thought spilling innocent blood could harness dark mystical energies and allow her to contact their spirits.
By committing the ultimate sacrifice, Amanda hoped to demonstrate her devotion and gain the power to breach the divide between the living and dead, if only briefly. In her warped mind, the sinister ritual was the only way to see her lost loved ones again.
When the night of the crimson full moon arrived, Amanda seized the opportunity these alignments provided. She targeted a shy, lonely teenager named Lucy who had just moved to town and struggled to make friends at school. Lucy was excited that Amanda reached out to her as she was eager to have someone to spend time with. Amanda brought Lucy along on questionable adventures like exploring abandoned buildings and sneaking into neighbors’ yards. Lucy knew it was wrong but couldn’t resist the thrill and risk.
Secretly, Amanda saw the innocent, trusting Lucy as the perfect subject for her zombie ritual. Lucy had no other friends or family who would come looking for her. She naively agreed to join Amanda for her special ceremony, not realizing the danger she was in.
Amanda lured Lucy to the fog-filled cemetery along with Raven, who romanticized vampirism and hoped for eternal life, and Willow, a withdrawn, unusual girl who loved snakes. As they held hands around a bloody pentagram, Amanda withdrew a ceremonial dagger and slit Lucy’s throat!
Amanda hauled Lucy’s corpse through the rows of crumbling mausoleums blanketed in nightshade vines. Inside one was an altar prepared for the profane ritual. The girls followed Amanda’s instructions precisely – painting arcane symbols with blood, burning pungent herbs, chanting ominously.
Soon grasping hands burst from the dirt floor as the long dead arose, transformed into plant abominations – writhing vines for limbs, peeling bark flesh, gnarled wooden claws. Amanda commanded her new undead army, seeing them as puppets, not people.
Under the blood moon’s glow, the plant zombies shambled into town to capture more souls for Amanda’s hideous rituals. They broke through barricades, seizing victims with vines coated in deadly nightshade. None could escape as the zombies dragged them to the crypt beneath the mansion where Amanda bled them dry.
But insect swarms were part of Amanda’s plan too. She performed the intricate summoning rites in the mansion’s cavernous basement. From the vortex emerged endless buzzing, skittering legions ready to overwhelm the town on her command.
The sheriff called Old Man Jenkins, the elderly town exterminator. Jenkins had leathery, wrinkled skin, white hair and wore faded blue overall covered in chemical stains from years of hard work. But his tanks of potent pesticides, trusty sprayer gun, and protective gear was no match for Amanda’s unnatural infestations. The last of his sanity slipped away…and he took on a dazed, paranoid look. The poisons Jenkins released indiscriminately soon flowed as freely as the town’s blood.
Watching safely from inside, Amanda happily commanded the zombies and insects destroying the town. But internally she felt only profound loneliness. She hoped the magic would return her family, but it had only brought more desolation.
Cody’s Revenge
Cody Grimley was sick with envy on Halloween as Sarah’s Sinister Circus attracted hordes of frightened patrons. He despised his disturbed sister, Sarah, getting attention for her nightmarish clowns and demented performers. This year, Cody planned his revenge.
On opening night, Cody infiltrated the big top tents and sliced down the banners, shredded the costumes, and damaged vital circus equipment. Screams rang out as panicked guests fled from the chaos Cody had unleashed. Sarah wailed as Cody wrecked everything she built.
“I’ll make you pay for this, wretched brother!” Sarah hissed. But the harm was done – local officials banned Sarah’s circus.
One year later, ignoring all warnings, Sarah boldly reopened her circus in the original decaying tent on the edge of town. Her clowns were more demonic than ever with mangled prosthetics, rotting flesh masks, and mouths filled with jagged decaying teeth.
Bree the plumber lurked with her coiled hissing pipes, readying to spray unsuspecting visitors. Sarah’s posse of demented clowns swung bats and chains at anyone passing by. Sinister stage hands snuck up on unsuspecting guests to steal their soul.
Sarah perched on a tattered throne, begging new victims to join her circus family. “Just one prick of my special elixir and you’ll stay forever!” she declared with crazed glee.
Meanwhile, Cody stood guard outside, urging all to turn back. But the bright lights and ominous music compelled curious guests inside. The clowns delighted in tormenting all who entered their domain.
As survivors neared the circus exit, a roar pierced the silence – Dr. Grimley wielding a bloody chainsaw emerged! “You tried stealing my daughter away! Now I’ll take something in return!” he shouted, consumed by Amanda’s profane magic. The circus had warped his mind, and now Dr. Grimley would inflict that evil on anyone nearby.
Cody’s long-simmering jealousy of Sarah’s circus still attracting huge crowds boiled over. His festering rage transformed him physically and mentally. The blood moon triggered his transformation into a monstrous clown-beast.
He rampaged through the remnants of the circus, shredding the big top tents and crushing the bleachers into splinters. The demonic clowns shrieked as he ripped them limb from limb. He overpowered Sarah and dragged her by the hair back to her circus trailer, locking her inside to wallow in the destruction he had wrought.
As dawn broke, Cody collapsed in the rubble. The twisted magic burned away with the rising sun, reverting him to human form. But as Cody stumbled home, the faintest hint of a smile played upon his lips. The circus may have fallen, but the seeds of mayhem had been planted in his soul. The rage continued smoldering within…whispering, plotting, waiting for its moment to emerge again.A battered Sarah climbed from the wreckage and slipped away into the woods, escaping the trailer Cody had locked her inside. As Sarah limped away, wrath simmered in her heart over her brother’s vicious demolition. She began plotting a sinister retaliation to unleash on Cody come the next blood moon.
Read below to discover the full story behind Dr. Grimley and his demented family…
The Story of Dr. Grimley (2021 Theme)
As a child, Charles Grimley was fascinated with anatomy. This led him to medical school where he graduated at the top of his class with a doctorate in surgery. Immediately after graduation, he was offered a position at Groves Hospital in Umatilla, FL.
Beverly was a beautiful young girl who dreamed of becoming a nurse and one day marrying a doctor. After graduating high school, Beverly enrolled in the local nursing program, earned her nursing degree and accepted a nursing position at the local hospital.
Dr. Charles Grimley met Beverly at Groves Hospital in Umatilla, FL. Their love grew deeper each day as they worked together and spent the evenings driving through farmland and gazing into each other’s eyes as they had dinner picnics under the moonlight. A few months later, they got married and vowed to always be together forever.
Dr Grimley’s excellent surgical skills quickly propelled him to president and head surgeon of the hospital. He had a passion for “pushing the limits” of his profession. Every night, after Beverly went to sleep, Charles would slip out of bed, give her a delicate kiss on the forehead, and tiptoe downstairs to his laboratory where he would experiment with ghastly surgical procedures and unethical chemical formulas.
Over the next 6 years, he and Beverly bore three children they adored: Cody, Sarah, and Amanda. Beverly quit her job to raise their children and Charles spent even more of his time at work…leaving little time to focus on their marriage.
Charles pushed his children to follow in his footsteps in the medical profession, but Cody joined a local gang and frequently got caught up in sketchy situations with rival gang members. His defiance immediately drove a wedge in Charles and Cody’s relationship. They stopped speaking.
Sarah was always the life of the party throughout her early childhood and elementary years. Her favorite activity was going to the circus and laughing at the clowns. All of her friends loved her happy and entertaining demeanor and always felt uplifted and positive when hanging out with her.
Amanda was a quiet, bookworm. Everywhere she went, she was face deep in a book…especially loving stories about witches and ghouls. She loved playing pranks on her friends and family…
One early Summer morning, Charles and Beverly got a call that changed their lives forever… Their son Cody had been killed in a gang related incident. They wailed in sorrow as they heard the news, especially Charles as they had never reconciled. Beverly couldn’t cope with the loss and quickly declined into a deep depression. She committed suicide by hanging herself.
Charles found her still in the noose as he came back up from his lab the next morning. Losing both their brother and now their mother was too much for Sarah and Amanda. Their overwhelming sadness turned them into a mere shell of their former lively selves. Sarah became withdrawn. She tried dressing up as a clown to cope, but she remained despondent. Amanda became obsessed with death and turned to witchcraft and Ouija boards to find any way she could to communicate with her mother again.
Charles couldn’t handle it. He couldn’t bear the loss of both his son and his wife.
Over the previous decade Charles had become obsessed with death and the afterlife and was consumed with his attempts at re-animating the dead and transferring souls of the living. He went from reanimating test subjects like spiders, mice and lizards to larger animals like goats and pigs. He had successfully re-animated dead animals, but many of his attempts resulted in mangled bodies or grotesque corpses which he would dispose of in the depths of the catacombs he had secretly built under his lab. Charles knew he could bring back his family from the dead. He worked in his lab day and night, formula after formula, until he had just the right concoction to re-animate Cody.
Charles went to the cemetery in the dead of night, and dug up his son’s grave. He brought his lifeless body back to his lab and injected him with his life giving elixir. A few minutes later, Cody’s body began convulsing violently. He appeared to be coming back to life… But, he wasn’t anything like the Cody that Charles had loved for so many years. He was more akin to the creatures Charles had re-animated before, but with an evil demeanor. Cody launched off the gurney in a violent rage and lunged at his Father. Charles ran to escape his son’s wrath. He grabbed his father’s cordless drill off the table and angrily hunted his father.
Charles ran to his kids to save them from the sinister monster he created. But, as soon as he got to them, Cody caught up and started smashing everything. Charles stood in front of the girls, but Cody threw him against the wall like he was a rag doll. With an evil glare, Cody killed both the girls with the drill.
Charles yanked him away from his daughters’ lifeless bloody bodies and exploded in rage as he screeched to Cody, “None of this would have happened if you would have listened to me and followed in my footsteps. Because of you, my beloved Beverly is forever gone and your sisters have also perished… You are dead to me!” After uttering these words, he plunged a syringe of deadly chemicals into Cody’s stomach releasing the poison into his undead body. He gasped his last breath and his body went limp.
Realizing his entire family was gone, Charles crumpled to the floor in sorrow. He couldn’t accept a life alone. He was determined to mix a potion that would bring them all back to life. Day after day, injection after injection, he tested every mixture in their lifeless bodies… Searching for the perfect formula to re-animate his family and live a life happily ever after. The frustration drove Dr. Charles Grimley to insanity for the rest of his days.
Sarah’s Sinister Circus (2022 Theme)
Sarah is one of Dr. Grimley’s 3 children, and this year she has taken over the trail.
Within weeks of being reanimated by her father, Sarah’s demented desires progressed far beyond harmless pranks. She craved inflicting pain, torture, and even murder. She thrived on hacking her victims in the neck with her medieval axe. When she was about to kill, she would stare her target in the eyes and tilt her head to the side…focusing on the neck of her victim where the axe would soon fall.
Sarah’s former friends fled in terror from her. Feeling alone and despondent, Sarah snuck into her father’s lab one night and stole a vial of his reanimation elixir. She used it to bring back her childhood friend Mandi. However, Mandi did not come back as a clown… She came back as a dark evil soul hell bent on getting her revenge. Enraged that Mandi was not a clown, Sarah locked her in her father’s catacombs and thought of a new plan.
When Sarah was a child, she loved dressing up as a clown and sitting on the front row when the circus came to town. She wanted to frolic around with clowns again… Sarah combined the elixir, some spoiled cotton candy (her favorite treat), and a drop of her own blood to create an even more powerful potion. Just a tiny dose of this new concoction immediately turned victims into devious, dangerous and sinister circus clowns.
Butch, Sarah’s high school sweetheart and captain of the baseball team, became the first member of her gang of corrupted clowns. Still heartbroken from his rejection, she snuck up on him and pricked him in the side with her new concoction. Now, this bat bashing clown is never far from her side.
Sarah’s next target was Bree, the plumber invited to their home after their pipes became clogged with the carcasses of small animals reanimated during Dr. Grimley’s grisley tests. Bree loves to distract her victims by balancing a plunger before she goes on the attack.
Next up was Max. He was a construction worker tasked with the job of tearing down the Grimley home after the horrific murders. He could knock down large block walls with a single blow of his sledgehammer. Sarah jabbed him with the potion to morph him into a brutal sledgehammer smashing clown and added him to her sinister squad.
Her evil army of clowns grew as she and her posse attacked anyone who did not laugh at their demented circus tricks. No one was safe from former close friends to complete strangers. One poke from Sarah’s sinister elixir and you become part of… the main attraction… Sarah’s Sinister Circus…