Merry Returns to the Story Fifteen Years Later

Fifteen years after the Barrett family became infamous, Meredith “Merry” Barrett is the only surviving member of her immediate family. Now 23, she agrees to speak with bestselling true-crime writer Rachel Neville, who is writing a book about what happened inside Merry’s childhood home in Beverly, Massachusetts.

Merry’s account is complicated by the fact that she was only eight when everything happened. Her memories have become tangled with television footage, stories about the case, and the mythology that grew around her family. Interspersed with her recollections are posts from The Last Final Girl, a horror blog written by the anonymous Karen Brissette, who dissects the reality show that made the Barretts famous.

The story Merry remembers begins when her 14-year-old sister, Marjorie Barrett, starts behaving strangely.

Marjorie Begins to Frighten the Family

The Barretts are already under enormous pressure. Their father, John, has been unemployed for more than a year after losing his longtime job at a toy factory, and the family is struggling to keep their house. Their mother, Sarah, works as a bank teller and has become the family’s only reliable source of income.

Against this backdrop, Marjorie’s behavior becomes increasingly disturbing. She tells Merry elaborate and frightening stories, including one about the 1919 Boston Molasses Flood and another about mysterious “growing things” that emerge from the earth and overwhelm humanity. She leaves cryptic notes for Merry and covers Merry’s cardboard playhouse with drawings of green vines.

Soon her behavior goes far beyond creepy stories. Marjorie suffers violent nighttime episodes, screams and speaks in altered voices, punches holes in her bedroom walls, and behaves as though she is losing control of herself. At dinner one night, she vomits green bile onto her plate and begins speaking in a strange voice, predicting that everyone in the house will die. Merry later witnesses an even more disturbing episode in which Marjorie injures herself and behaves sexually on their parents’ bed, leaving blood and bodily fluids behind.

Sarah responds by taking Marjorie to Dr. Hamilton, a psychiatrist who prescribes antipsychotic medication. John, however, increasingly distrusts the medical explanation. He has turned toward fundamentalist Catholicism during his unemployment and begins taking Marjorie to Father David Wanderly without Sarah’s support.

Father Wanderly encourages John’s belief that something supernatural may be happening. Instead of seeing Marjorie simply as a teenager suffering from severe psychiatric problems, John becomes convinced that his daughter may actually be possessed.

The Barretts Turn Their Crisis Into Reality Television

The Barretts are also running out of money, and their financial desperation creates an opportunity that changes everything. John agrees to let a production company film the family for a six-episode reality television series called The Possession.

Soon their home is filled with cameras, lights, crew members, and production equipment. Cameras are mounted throughout the house, and the sunroom becomes a confessional set. The producers even film dramatic reenactments to shape the family’s story into compelling television.

Eight-year-old Merry forms a bond with crew member Ken Fletcher, who treats her kindly, plays soccer with her, and gives her a handheld “Merry-cam” so she can record footage herself.

Away from the adults and cameras, however, Marjorie tells Merry something astonishing: she says the possession is fake.

According to Marjorie, she has deliberately constructed much of her frightening behavior from things she has researched. She borrows ideas from horror fiction, the internet, and the song “Gloomy Sunday,” and even takes the name of her supposed demon, Yidhra, from H.P. Lovecraft. She tells Merry she has been trying to force their parents to confront the family’s problems, resist the medications she hates taking, and bring in enough television money to save their home.

Yet Marjorie’s confession does not solve anything for Merry. Her sister’s behavior remains so extreme and unpredictable that Merry cannot tell where the performance ends. Marjorie may be faking possession, but that does not necessarily mean she is mentally well.

Outside the Barrett house, the spectacle grows. Reporters, religious protesters, and hate groups gather around the property while the family’s private crisis becomes public entertainment.

The Exorcism Turns Violent

Marjorie is eventually evaluated by Dr. Navidson, a Catholic-affiliated psychiatrist. Rather than acting like a helpless possessed child, she challenges and taunts the adults around her. She demonstrates detailed knowledge of Church rules, technology, and the mechanics of exorcisms while displaying deep scratches across her stomach.

Eventually, the regional bishop authorizes an official exorcism.

The production crew prepares Marjorie’s bedroom for maximum effect, cooling it to 39 degrees and surrounding her with candles, crucifixes, cameras, and religious objects. Marjorie is supposed to be restrained on the bed, but Sarah quietly refuses to participate fully in what is being done to her daughter. She only pretends to secure the leather restraints around Marjorie’s wrist and ankle, meaning Marjorie can escape whenever she wants.

Father Wanderly begins the ritual with Father Gavin, a younger priest assisting him. As prayers are recited, apparently supernatural events occur around them. A desk drawer opens and slams on its own, while strange thumping sounds shake the room.

Then Marjorie attacks.

When Father Gavin approaches the bed, she lunges forward and bites deeply into his forearm, tearing his flesh. The room erupts into chaos.

Terrified and overwhelmed, Merry screams at her sister that she hates her and wishes she were dead before running into the hallway. Marjorie breaks free and follows. She climbs onto the railing above the foyer as everyone watches, then throws herself into the open space below.

She survives the fall, but suffers a concussion and fractures her ankle.

The production crew packs up and leaves. The exorcism is over, but the damage to the Barrett family is not.

The Show Airs and John Spirals Further

Only two weeks later, The Possession begins airing and becomes a ratings sensation. The Barretts are now nationally famous, with their most painful experiences transformed into entertainment.

After Marjorie returns from the hospital, the family withdraws further into itself. John’s religious obsession intensifies. He spends long periods alone in the basement and communicates with the leader of an extremist Kansas Baptist church. Three days before the tragedy that will destroy the family, the pastor sends John a chilling final message telling him that he knows what he has to do.

Then, six days before Christmas, Marjorie summons Merry to her bedroom.

She shows her little sister news stories about family annihilators—desperate fathers who murdered their wives and children. Marjorie tells Merry that John has become one of them. According to her, their father has obtained a jar of potassium cyanide and intends to poison the entire family.

Marjorie says they have to stop him before he can carry out his plan.

Merry Poisons the Spaghetti Sauce

Marjorie proposes a plan that sounds frightening but survivable to an eight-year-old. Merry will take the jar of white powder and pour it into the red spaghetti sauce while Sarah is preparing dinner. Marjorie assures her that it will not kill their parents. It will only make them sick or unconscious long enough for the sisters to escape, take the jar to the police, and prove what John was planning.

Merry also believes she personally cannot be poisoned because she never eats red sauce. She always has her pasta plain with butter.

Trusting her older sister, Merry puts the potassium cyanide into the green saucepan and stirs it into the sauce.

At dinner, however, Marjorie does something Merry does not expect. Instead of avoiding the poisoned food, she deliberately takes a large amount of the red sauce and spreads it across her pasta.

Then she looks at Merry and winks.

Marjorie eats.

John and Sarah eat the sauce too.

Within minutes, all three begin dying from cyanide poisoning. Merry watches helplessly as her mother, father, and sister suffer fatal respiratory failure at the kitchen table. Whatever Marjorie intended, the escape she promised Merry is never going to happen.

Merry is now the only surviving member of the Barrett family.

Merry Spends Three Days With Her Dead Family

After the poisoning, eight-year-old Merry is left completely alone in the house.

She ventures into the basement, partly expecting to discover evidence of the terrifying world Marjorie had described to her. Instead of supernatural “growing things,” however, she finds only a dirty pewter cross.

Eventually, Merry retreats beneath the kitchen table. Surrounded by the bodies of her family, she stays there for three days, leaning against her mother’s dead legs until police finally enter the house and discover her.

Merry is later raised by John’s younger sister, Auntie Erin, but the story of what happened to the Barrett family never disappears. The Possession becomes a notorious piece of reality television, and the distinction between what actually happened and what audiences saw on television becomes increasingly difficult to untangle.

The Truth Remains Uncertain

Fifteen years later, Merry tells Rachel what she remembers, but even she cannot provide a definitive explanation for everything that happened.

The police investigation produced one particularly troubling piece of evidence: the only identifiable partial fingerprint on the cyanide jar belonged to John.

That means Marjorie did not necessarily invent the story about their father possessing cyanide. John may indeed have obtained the poison. Combined with his increasingly unstable behavior and his disturbing communications before the deaths, the fingerprint leaves open the possibility that Marjorie genuinely believed their father intended to kill them.

But it does not prove that John planned to poison his family.

Marjorie could have discovered the cyanide and misunderstood what John intended to do with it. She could also have deliberately manipulated Merry. By convincing an eight-year-old to put the poison into the sauce, Marjorie ensured that Merry—not Marjorie herself—physically carried out the act. Her decision to knowingly eat the poisoned sauce and wink at Merry before doing so makes her intentions even more disturbing.

Merry is therefore left with a question she can never answer: was Marjorie desperately trying to save them from their father, or did she engineer the deaths of herself and her parents while using her little sister as the instrument?

Even Marjorie’s supposed possession remains tangled in uncertainty. She admitted to fabricating supernatural details and borrowing material from horror stories, music, and internet research, but that confession does not explain whether her underlying behavior came from mental illness, deliberate manipulation, or something Merry still cannot understand.

Finally, Merry gives Rachel one more revelation about how she has dealt with everything that happened.

Karen Brissette, the anonymous writer behind The Last Final Girl, is Merry herself.

All along, the blog posts dissecting The Possession have been Merry’s own attempt to examine the television series and the horror conventions surrounding her family’s story from a distance. As an adult, she can analyze the footage, criticize the way it was constructed, and expose the techniques used to turn her family into entertainment.

But she still cannot reconstruct one objective version of the past.

The only thing Merry knows for certain is what she herself did as an eight-year-old: believing her sister was saving their lives, she poured potassium cyanide into the family’s spaghetti sauce. Her parents and Marjorie ate it and died, leaving Merry alone to survive a tragedy whose full truth remains unresolved fifteen years later.