#THE WATCHER HOUSE FULL#
#THE WATCHER HOUSE SERIES#

There was a basement, but the Broadduses never found tunnels, and they had obviously done a thorough home inspection. Pasta sauce and stained marble - is that a thing? As far as I know, there was no marble countertop being replaced with a butcher block.ĭid the house’s architectural quirks and secrets mirror 657 Boulevard? Was there an underground labyrinth of tunnels or stair passageways? No Carrara marble was being replaced with wood in the kitchen? Once they got that, it was like, Okay, well, we’re certainly not going to go to sleep here. They got the first letter two days or so after the closing. They weren’t planning to start living there immediately. They were heading over to 657 Boulevard, dropping stuff off. They weren’t New Yorkers leaving the city they had been living in Westfield for a few years at a house nearby and were still staying there while the renovations were happening. I know they were installing a French drain, for instance, in the basement.

It was more like, This is an old house, and there are a few things that need fixing up structurally. I don’t believe a new kitchen island was part of the renovations. They had contractors working on the basement. How close did the Broadduses get to living in their dream house? The family buys and moves into 657 Boulevard quickly in the premiere. A nefarious real-estate agent didn’t leak the story to “Page Six,” but it did go viral before my piece, and the family did have to deal with that.

#THE WATCHER HOUSE FULL#

It was kind of like, “That was weird, and it never got resolved, so let’s see if we can solve it.” At the very least, we’ll be able to give a full accounting of what happened and what life was like in this town. It happened around the time the local story had gone viral in 2015. To give credit where it’s due, Alexis Swerdloff, who was editing The Strategist at the time, had the idea. How did this story fall into your orbit all those years ago? “For them, it’s been a balance between obsessing for years about the case and who did this to them but also trying to get on with their lives.” They don’t want a lot about their lives out there,” he says. Now he’s fact-checking the most notable aspects of series, including the fate of the Broadduses: “They just want to move on. Wiedeman, a features reporter, has been the authority on the Watcher case ever since he began his investigation. Their story, with many creative flourishes from Ryan Murphy, is now the subject of the Netflix miniseries The Watcher.

(You know, normal stuff.) Derek Broaddus, Maria Broaddus, and their three kids never moved into 657 Boulevard because of the increasingly erratic threats they spent the ensuing years trying to sell the house, despite its now-tainted reputation, and figure out the culprit’s identity.

Branding themself “The Watcher,” the author of these screeds wrote that they were “put in charge of watching and waiting” for the house’s “second coming” and requested “young blood” for it in the form of children.

#THE WATCHER HOUSE SERIES#

”īack in 2018, New York Magazine published a story by Reeves Wiedeman filled with nightmare fuel for homeowners: An unknown menace was terrorizing a family in Westfield, New Jersey, with a series of letters about them and their newly purchased $1.3 million home. The following interview discusses the entirety of the Netflix series The Watcher as well as the New York Magazine articles “ The Haunting of a Dream House ” and “ Taking Another Look at The Watcher. “A hope of mine is we put the handwriting out there and somebody notices something,” says Wiedeman.

The watcher house