WHY THE NEIGHBORS MOVED: I was pretty young when this happened so the details won’t be perfect, but the story is otherwise true. I grew up in a coastal town and we had some neighbors whom I really liked. My parents were friends with them, their kids were roughly my age. Wonderful! We played together all the time. One day they very suddenly moved. I was a bit confused as there had been no clue that they were going. I remember some police cars and the moving vans weeks later, but that was it. My mother told me that the kids grandmother had become very ill ( the cops came to tell the family) and they left emergently to care for her and never came back. I was only about 5….. seemed legit. Many years later, as an adult, and long since moved away from that area… my parents and I were reminiscing over our old home. I mentioned that I wondered what ever happened to them. That’s when my mom told me the truth. The parents had gone out that night on a date and left the kids with a 14 yr old babysitter. When they returned home they found the sitter dead. Someone had broken into the home. My mom stated the cops think the sitter pretended to be the only one home to protect the kids. When the parents got home they checked the kids were safe and set them back to sleep. The police obviously immediately came. Once the kids were hard asleep the parents picked them up, put blankets over their heads, asked the cops to be silent as they walked them out, and took them out of the house. They gave the kids the same story my parents told me. Gramma was sick and they were going to live with her. Gramma dutifully played along with the ruse for several weeks until the parents could find a new home to live in. The kids were kept unaware of what had happened just mere feet from them as they didn’t want the kids to be forever terrified of it happening again. Not sure if the kids ever eventually figured out the truth of that one.