Jul 08 2024 70 mins 1
What if your dream home turned into your worst nightmare home?
For the Broaddus family, their 2014 purchase of 657 Boulevard in Westfield, New Jersey, turned into nothing short of a shared nightmare.
Just days after purchasing their idyllic new home, the Broaddus family began to receive a series of unsettling letters from a stalker calling themselves "The Watcher" of the home. These letters contained disturbing details about the family and the history of the house, as well as thinly-veiled threats against their children, leaving the Broadduses shaking with fear and questioning who was behind it. The police were just as baffled as anyone else, and ultimately could not identify the source of the shocking letters.
In the end, they were forced to sell the house off at a steep loss several years later, without ever having moved in, and the letter writer is still out there, somewhere in the ether, having never been identified or brought to justice.
Join Ivan and Nate on this most excellent episode as they attempt to figure who the Westfield Watcher was, and what his or her motives were.
SOURCES
https://www.thecut.com/article/the-haunting-of-657-boulevard-in-westfield-new-jersey.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20221101080219/https://www.thecut.com/2022/10/the-watcher-657-boulevard-update.html
https://people.com/crime/the-watcher-netflix-new-jersey-westfield-home/
https://nypost.com/2022/11/01/watcher-house-owners-made-58-calls-to-police-since-moving-in/
https://www.housebeautiful.com/lifestyle/a41503769/the-watcher-true-story-behind-haunted-house/
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/netflix-the-watcher-based-on-a-true-story-westfield-nj-house/
https://www.today.com/popculture/tv/the-watcher-real-letters-read-rcna51754
https://www.newsweek.com/watcher-real-letters-netflix-brannock-1751435
