Voorhees family

"Through a Voorhees was he born... through a Voorhees may he be reborn... and only by the hands of a Voorhees will he die."

- Creighton Duke

The Voorhees family can at best be described as "dysfunctional". Information about the Voorhees family is sparse and some details concerning their history is a matter of conjecture and interpretation. The one thing that is unequivocally true is that this fractured and enigmatic bloodline was responsible for producing one of the most notorious mass murderers ever known - Jason Voorhees.

The earliest known record of a Voorhees family member dates back to the time of the Salem Witch Trials during the late 17th century. Legend has it that a man named Jebediah Voorhees, was a powerful warlock who at one point came into possession of a powerful mystic tome - the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis - "The Book of the Dead". Nothing else is known of this man, but it is known that the Voorhees family were still in possession of the Necronomicon as late as the early 21st century.

In the year 1930, a woman named Pamela was born. As a teenager, Pamela was living in Cadiz, Ohio where she married a miner named Elias Voorhees. Elias was a cruel and abusive man and would often come home from work at the mines and take his frustrations out on Pamela physically. When Pamela discovered that she was pregnant with Elias' child, she began to fear for her life and for the life of her baby. Knowing that the child would be male, she secretly gave him the name Jason during the early stages of her pregnancy. She imagined herself hearing Jason's voice, as if the disembodied spirit of her son was somehow trying to protect her.

One account posits that in early 1946, after suffering one of her regular beatings at the hands of Elias, Pamela decided that she could take no more. Spurned on by the spirit of Jason, Pamela took up an axe and hacked Elias Voorhees to pieces. She burned down the trailer they were living in and buried her husband's remains in a nearby swamp.

Another account however, indicates that Elias was still alive well after the birth of his son. Jason was born with severe physical deformities and was also considered mentally handicapped. Jason's appearance repulsed Elias and he visited upon him the same violent treatment that he casually dispensed to his mother. During one of these beatings, Elias' wife took a machete to him, splitting his head open. [Details of this account are unreliable as Elias' wife was referred to as "Doris", not Pamela during this incident]. Whether Elias truly died at this time is unclear, though it is believed that he survived and was still active as late as the early 1960s.

By 1957, Pamela Voorhees had moved East with her son and had secured enough money to purchase a home in Cunningham County, New Jersey. To supplement her income, she began working as a waitress at a diner in the town of Crystal Lake. She met David and Louise Christy who had been the benefactors of a nearby campground called Camp Crystal Lake. They offered her a job as a cook, serving meals to seventy-five kids, three times a day for five weeks.

It was around this time that Jason's psychopathic tendencies began to manifest themselves. While at work, Pamela received a telephone call from her babysitter Mrs. Cunningham, telling her to hurry home. When she arrived, she found that eleven-year-old Jason had mutilated several cats in their back yard. With the permission of David and Louise Christy, Pamela was allowed to bring Jason to work with her so she could keep an eye on him.

Being a social outcast, Jason did not readily endear himself to any of the other kids, and was often the target of bullying and cruel taunts. On one occasion, Jason had come upon two camp counselors Barry and Claudette having sex in the woods. Jason grunted his displeasure and Barry angrily began chasing after the boy. What occurred next varies depending upon the source. Some sources indicate that Barry chased Jason until he fell off the pier into the lake. Another account shows a group of mean-spirited children tormenting Jason until he accidentally fell into the water. Regardless of whatever source is considered more reliable, the end result is indisputable. Unable to swim, Jason Voorhees drowned in the middle of Crystal Lake. No body was ever found.

For reasons that have never been explained, Jason Voorhees somehow returned to life at some point following the 1957 drowning incident. Nobody knows for sure how this came to be, but many suspect that the answer lies within the supernatural.

It is known that around 1961 Jason's father Elias, apparently still alive, had an affair with another woman and produced a daughter named Diana. Diana grew up in Cunningham County and eventually married a man named David Kimble. Diana and her husband gave birth to a daughter named Jessica.

Throughout the 1960s, the grieving Pamela Voorhees did everything in her power to make sure that Camp Crystal Lake would never be re-opened. Several mysterious fires occurred on the campgrounds and in 1962, when the Christys tried to renovate the camp site, they found that the water was poisoned. No evidence ever turned up linking Pamela Voorhees to these incidents, but it did earn the camp the reputation of having a "death curse".

In 1979, Steve Christy, son of David and Louise, inherited the management of the campgrounds and tried to re-open it. He invested $25,000 into the renovation efforts and hired several counselors to help out with refurbishing some of the cabins. On the night of her dead son's birthday, Pamela came to the camp and systematically slaughtered six of the seven hired hands as well as Christy himself. One counselor, Alice Hardy, managed to fight back against Pamela's onslaught and decapitated her on the shore of the lake. It is believed that her son Jason, still alive all these years, was present that night and watched his mother get beheaded. He collected his mother's severed head and built a shrine to her inside his private shack in the middle of the woods.

Two months later, Jason tracked down the woman responsible for his mother's death and murdered her in her home. He brought Alice Hardy's body back to his cabin and laid it as the foot of his shrine to Pamela.

In 1982, Jason Voorhees continued to prowl the surrounding environs near Camp Crystal Lake. He attacked a young woman named Chris Higgins out near her family's summer home. Fortunately, Higgins managed to escape.

Two years later, efforts were once again underway to re-open the camp. Across the lake, senior coordinator Paul Holt began hiring a fresh group of counselors at the Packanack Lodge Counselor Training Center. Like his mother five years earlier, Jason set about slaughtering every camp counselor he could find. A young woman named Ginny Field, the only confirmed survivor of Jason's initial slaughter (not counting the counselors who left the campground for a night on the town), nearly killed him by driving a machete into his shoulder. Jason survived though and continued his murder spree at nearby Higgins Haven - the site where he first attacked Chris Higgins two years earlier.

Where Ginny Field may have failed to put a stop to Jason Voorhees, a young boy named Tommy Doyle proved to be more successful. Jason had raided the Jarvis family home in an effort to kill both Tommy and his older sister Trish. Tommy distracted Jason by making himself appear as Jason did when he was a young boy, then butchered him with the maniac's own machete. Jason Voorhees was dead.

Though it remains unverified, rumor has it that Elias Voorhees, armed with knowledge of the supernatural, arranged for Jason to be buried (not cremated) at the Eternal Peace Cemetery.

Several years later, a bolt of lightning struck the grave where Jason's body had been buried, resurrecting him as a monstrous, undead zombie. Jason continued to carve a path of destruction that led him back to Camp Crystal Lake and a rematch with Tommy Jarvis.

Meanwhile, Diana Kimble's daughter Jessica, now in her early twenties, became romantically involved with a man named Steven Freeman. Jessica became pregnant and gave birth to Steven's daughter Stephanie. It is implied that the pregnancy was unexpected and Steven abandoned Jessica and her newborn. Shortly after her birth however, Steven tried to insinuate his way back into their lives.

Around this time, an encounter between Jason Voorhees and federal agents resulted in Jason being blown to pieces as part of a sting operation. Though his body was mostly destroyed, his heart lived on. The remains were sent to a coroner's office in Youngstown, Ohio. The essence of Jason Voorhees, alive through his still-beating heart, took possession of the body of a County Coroner. The coroner made his way back to Jason's old stomping grounds body-hopping from one form to another as needed. Instinctively, Jason knew that he could only be reborn through the blood of a family member. While possessing the body of a sheriff's deputy named Josh, Jason found his half-sister Diana and murdered her. After several more body-swaps, Jason's spirit entered Diana's body and the corpse physically gave birth to a revitalized Jason. Moments after his resurrection however, Jason was sent to Hell by his niece Jessica.

Jason eventually escaped from Hell and continued claiming lives, but at some point in the early 21st century, he was captured and placed into cryogenic suspended animation. He remained frozen for more than four-hundred and fifty years. He was revived in the year 2455. By this point, Earth had become so polluted that its population relocated to a planet dubbed Earth II. A scientist from one of Earth II's moons named Professor Claude Bardox used genetic material taken from Jason Voorhees and used it to impregnate a woman named London Jefferson. London gave birth to Jason's son, Free Jefferson. Free grew up unaware of his sinister parentage, but eventually learned the truth, resulting in an encounter with his father that led him to abandon Jason on one of Earth II's uninhabited moons.

Family Tree
Jebediah Voorhees |                                          |                                           ?                                           |                                           |                                           |         Pamela Voorhees --m-- Elias Voorhees |          |                               |           --- Unknown woman |                        |                               |                         |      London Jefferson -- Jason Voorhees       Diana Kimble--m--Unknown |                                           |                      |                                            |                      |                                            |                      |              Steven Freeman -- Jessica Kimble |                                 |                      |                                  |                      |                          Stephanie Kimble |                                       |                                        |               Free Jefferson

Notes & Trivia

 * The name Voorhees was created by screenwriter Victor Miller who once dated a girl named Van Voorhees. He liked the name because he felt it sounded ominous.


 * One of the actresses from Friday the 13th: A New Beginning is Debi Sue Voorhees, though obviously she has no real connection to the fictional Voorhees family.