Your True Tales
April 2006 – Page 9

Face on the TV That Smiled
by Jay F.

Now I know no one is going to even believe this story, but I'll go ahead with it anyway. I hardly believe it myself, but it is true.

I was sitting at home one sunday morning watching TV and one of the sunday morning news programs (I can't remember which one, but I think it was Face the Nation or something similar) when a commercial came on. I had just watched some segment on Hurricane Katrina and they were doing the normal roundtable stuff. Now sometimes you know how in-between commercials the screen will go completely black? There was a commercial and then in the middle of the black part a man's face came up with a weird, grinning, mean smile, but his face was warped sort of to one side. Then it quickly flashed off to another commercial.

I sat there looking at the screen thinking that this was maybe the start of another commercial or something, but it was really strange looking. So I blew it off. The show was over and they rolled the credits and then it went to a commercial. Then between one of the commercials, the exact same man's face came up, but it was making what looked like an ogling monkey-mouthed "oooh" face at me, like an ape. Then the next commercial started up.

I jumped back at that face. It was almost looking right through me. I couldn't believe I was frightened by a TV image, but I was. It jangled my nerves bad. Now here's the really weird thing: my grandfather was in the Mafia (Philly area), and he went to jail for a massacre in the late 1950s when my own father was growing up. He was sent up for the murder of a man, whom I won't name. But about a month ago, I researched it at a large city library, and the face of the older man along with others came up. At the end of the group faces was the very face of the man who was in the television! His nickname was the "junkyard dog," and he was of another crime family.

In doing some rather wary research on him, I found out he was also someone quite dangerous and was alleged to be a hit man, as police reports of the 1950s had indicated. He was sent to prison for trying assassinate a city councilman and was just a very, very bad news kind of guy with eyes that even in the newspaper photo would spook you. The face that I saw in the TV looked so similar to him, it was uncanny. He had a scar on the bottom of his chin that curved up his face onto his left cheek, as I can sort of remember from the television. His eyes were gaunt and light in color in the b+w photograph from the paper; on the TV they were light gray or blue and weird looking. And his hair was neatly quaffed to one side, exactly like the face on the screen had with a very neat appearance, and possibly even the one chipped tooth that I saw with the man on the screen when he smiled.

There's no doubt in my mind the face that I saw on the TV screen on that sunday morning was the face of that hit man that was killed more than 50 years ago by possibly my own grandfather in a Southern New Jersey suburb outside Philadelphia back in 1954. Nobody will ever believe me about it, but it happened. I just don't know what it means. Am I now a target of an age old vendetta? To this date I am still freaked out about watching that TV (not my family though as they don't know anything about it), hence my new interest with the internet now for good reason.

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