Murderous medicine cabinets
In 1992, the film Candyman earned its place as one of the scariest movies of all time.
One of its most famous scenes involves a murderous spirit with a hook for a hand bursting through the heroine’s medicine cabinet.
As if that weren’t scary enough, the idea that an apartment can be breached through its medicine cabinet isn’t just silver-screen fiction—and, in fact, it did happen.
In 1987 Chicago, a woman named Ruthie McCoy was killed by a group of intruders who entered her apartment through the gap in the wall made for the medicine cabinet.
The shabby Grace Abbott housing projects, where McCoy lived, were built with holes in the walls for the medicine cabinets, which provided the only (flimsy) barrier between adjacent apartments.
While Candyman was mostly based off of the short story “The Forbidden,” the filmmakers also drew inspiration form “They Came in Through the Bathroom Mirror,” a detailed journalistic account of the murder and the horror of the housing projects.
This article first appeared on Readers Digest.com. To read the article in full, click here.
