Pizza Time

Just one more year, and it’ll be the right time. I’ll open it again. Just you wait and see.

Sep 05, 2024

Originally posted on Share Your True Ghost Stories discussion board of HauntedOhio.com forum by user [REDACTED], 08/12/2008 19:42:01 UTC

You ever hear of a place called Fat Cat's Pizza N’ Games? If you didn't live in Cuyahoga County in the early 80's, I doubt you have. Even if you did live in Cuyahoga County in the early 80's, I'd still be surprised if you had.

In 1977, a little place called Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theatre opened up in California. I know you know what Chuck. E Cheese is, so, I don't really need to explain what happened next. Doesn't look like they're doing too hot these days, but I'd say they gave it a good run. Better than their competition did, at least.

The only other brand of arcade pizzeria playground place with creepy ass animatronic bands playing shitty music people seem to remember is Showbiz Pizza, which, if you didn't know, came after Chuck E. Cheese when one of the two founders started beefing with the other. But they weren’t the Chuck E. Cheese’s only competition. After seeing the kind if cheddar that dumbass rat was raking in, a whole lot of folks nation-wide started aping the concept. Most of them never got more than one location and were pretty much just making cheap knock-offs that only lasted a few years before the Video Game Crash of 1983 wiped ‘em all out like the dinosaurs. The only reason anyone even remembers Showbiz Pizza is because they were the only other brand outside of Chuck E. Cheese that managed to hang on for a couple more years, and that was only because both of them went bankrupt and the two companies had to merge just to survive. I guess the two founders hated each other less than they hated the idea of being unemployed.

But that all is just a long way of saying there were a lot of people who tried to cash in on the Chuck E. Cheese cash cow. One of them was my dad.

My father was not born into wealth. His father was a car mechanic. He taught him how to fix cars. But my father was not the kind of man who liked to get his hands dirty. He thought it was beneath him to get grease on his fingers. So, he started selling cars, instead of working in a garage or even finishing high school. My grandaddy always told him he’d regret that. He might have, once or twice, but once he opened his first dealership with his name slapped across the front, I don’t think he ever felt too bad about not having a diploma again. That man made a lot of money selling cars. He gave me and my siblings a life that none of his brothers could give our cousins, and I’m grateful for that.

But my father didn’t like what he did. He was good selling cars, but, I’m good at math and I'll be damned if I ever find the cosine of a triangle ever again. Just like my real dream was making free-throws for the Bulls, my father's true passion was to entertain and help kids.

Why? I never really got a good answer. He always said that he loved to make people happy, and no one was easier to please than kids, which I don't know if I agree with. I got kids these days, too, and I can't win for losing with them half the time.

I think the man just wanted to be loved in a certain way that he didn't get from anyone else. He and his parents had a pretty rough relationship. Him and my mom? Oh, man, they'd fight so bad you'd think the god damn world was about to end. Me and my siblings, we all loved him, but we barely ever saw him when we were young. I think the time he did get to spend with us meant a lot to him. And once he had more time for us, we weren't little kids anymore. We were too old to love him in the unconditional way a young child loves a father, and I think a lot of why he did what he did was to try and recapture that feeling of simple, thoughtless, love and affection.

Of course, my mom, she always thought he was just full of himself. And maybe he was. She'd always say, Lord, he thinks he's gonna be the black Walt Disney.

He tried to fund a little amusement park outside of Cleveland. Besides of a cheap little kiddie train that went around a scum-covered pond with some picnic tables scattered around it, that never worked out. He sponsored some Cleveland-area public access shows for kids. When he helped open up a candy store, my mom said he was trying to be a black Willy Wonka, too. The man donated toys to needy children on Christmas, donated books to underprivileged schools, hell, he even played Santa at the church Christmas party.

And, yes, as you have probably guessed, Fat Cat's Pizza N’ Games was another one of these ideas.

I think he was inspired when he heard about a Showbiz Pizza opening up in Solon, which is only a short drive from Cleveland. He wanted to capitalize on it before they moved closer into the city, so he got some help from some other guys and set up shop as quick as he could. You know the old saying, “You can have it cheap, you can have it fast, and you can have it good, but you can only have two”? Well, my old man went with fast and cheap. He rented out a location in a new strip mall in one of the nicer neighborhoods and, within a few months, had the place up and running. On the surface, it looked nice enough. There was a real, commercial kitchen in the back. Stocked the place with honest to God arcade cabinets. And, yeah, they even had an animatronic band to sit up on stage for all the kids to gawk at while they ate pizza. He even called in a favor from a local radio DJ and had him and his friends to do the voices for them.

But the pizza? Oh, it was bad. People say there's no such thing of bad pizza but, trust me, there is. I would know because I made a lot of it. When I turned sixteen, the old man gave me two options - I could work at one of the dealerships, or I could sling dough in Fat Cat’s kitchen. Since I knew I’d just be cleaning cars at the dealership out in the hot summer sun, I went with the latter. Unfortunately, I found out fast that making pizza is about as messy and hot as washing cars in a parking lot. Now, I’ve never been a chef. My ideal meal is one that requires two steps, one being putting it in the oven, and the other taking it out. Being a master pizza chef was never in the cards for me. The other high school kids he hired to work in the kitchen weren’t much better, but those were the only people who accept the pitiful pay he was offering. And, if you’re wondering, he didn’t pay me any better than he did the rest of them. When pay a bunch of kids chump change to make your pizza, mediocre is about the best you can hope for.

The arcade cabinets were the real draw. He got the good ones, and he got a lot of ‘em, too. One of the other investors managed to buy a whole bunch on the cheap when a local arcade went out of business. The only problem was that no one knew how to keep them running if something went wrong with them. Which happened. A lot. It didn’t take long before half the damn things barely worked, if they worked at all.

And the animatronics? He actually tried not to skimp on those. The problem was that there just weren’t that many companies out there that made animatronics. He tried to source his from the same people Chuck E. Cheese did, only to be disappointed when he found out that all of them were made in-house, and they weren’t selling their magic bullets to the competition. So, he went with whoever he could find. I don’t remember the company’s name, but whatever he paid them, he paid too much.

There were three animatronic models. One was, of course, the Fat Cat, who’s name was just… well, Fat Cat. As you can probably guess from the name, he was both a cat, and fat, with yellow fur, a top hat, a vest, and a monocle that was always falling off. The other was a pig named Filthy Rich, who was supposed to be Fat Cat’s assistant, and the last was a fox named Foxy, which was supposed to be some sort of sexy secretary character. My old man, bless his soul, was not going to win any prizes for creativity.

The thing is, the characters themselves were just kind of difficult to like. You got a rich asshole, a rich asshole’s assistant, who’s also an asshole, and a sexy fox lady who’s only gonna hit it to freaks who get their rocks off to Disney movies. I never went to Chuck E. Cheese or Showbiz Pizza, and I never took my kids their, either, so I have no idea what their line-ups looked like, but they must have done something right since they lasted and my dad’s joint didn’t. The other thing about them was that my old man had the radio DJ write the script for what the characters would say in between musical segments. I guess no one told him that the place was supposed to be for kids, because most of the comedy was way above the heads of what children would understand. Most of it was puns about money, stocks, and business, and the rest was all weirdly sexual stuff about the fox lady that I know for a fact the moms bringing their kids to the place did not appreciate. I’d say the animatronics played music, too, but that would be an overstatement. It’s more like they just stood there and jerked around, turning this way, that way, nodding and raising their arms while their mouths flapped randomly while popular music from the 70’s played.

I don’t know how it was supposed to be entertaining. Personally, they creeped the hell out of me. Cleaning up at night, when all the customers were gone and most of the lights were off, I hated going around the main eating area. I always felt like they were watching me with those big, bulging, dead plastic eyes, and that they might suddenly spring to life by themselves and start moving.

And, of course, just like the arcade machines, they started breaking down quick. They needed constant maintenance that my dad and the others just weren’t willing to pay for. After a while, the fake fur on them got grungy and nasty. Little kids weren’t supposed to touch them, but they did anyways, and they got all the pizza grease and sauce and grime all over them. They started creaking and whirring and you could hear the machinery making all these awful noises, even when the music was playing. Pieces of them just stopped moving altogether.

Since the animatronic band was supposed to be the main draw, my dad eventually did hire some local kid to work on them, and the arcade cabinets, too. His name was Marvin. Quiet kid. Didn’t speak much. He had a fascination with video games, computers, electronics, that kind of stuff. My old man just gave him the manual that the company had sent with the animatronics and told him to figure it out. And, somehow, he did.

I think he was just about the only person who actually liked the animatronics. After closing, while the rest of us were cleaning ad getting the place ready for the next day, he’d turn them on and watch them go through their cycles, jerking and bopping around to the music. I even heard him laugh out loud at the dialogue. Sometimes, he’d be the last one out. We’d all leave and he’d still just be sitting there, telling us that he’d lock up when he was done. He always did, so, we didn’t really care. I thought he was messed up to be sitting in there alone with those things, but I also didn’t really care. If that’s what he wanted to do, that was his choice.

Just like every other Chuck E. Cheese wannabe, Fat Cat’s didn’t survive the Video Game Crash of 83. When I say crash, it wasn’t this sudden, apocalyptic event where video game developers and shitty pizza joints all shut down in a day. It was a slow, agonizing death. They all just kind of wasted away. Some faster than others. Gradually, around 1983, video games just kind of fell out of fashion. People stopped coming for them. And, really, the video games were just about the only things at Fat Cat’s that didn’t suck. The pizza sure as hell wasn’t bringing anyone in. No one was coming to watch those janky animatronics spaz out on stage, either.

In 1984, my father had to close the place. It lasted about three years total. I don’t know if it ever made a profit, or if he just burned money on it the whole time. I know that, out of all his failed project, Fat Cat’s closing cut the deepest. It wasn’t just the most ambitious project he’d ever tried, it was the one that he was confident was really gonna take off. There was a time when he was actively planning to open a second location. Even after it shut down, he was adamant that, after a while, it’d come back when the time was right. He was confident of that. So, he never did sell the place. Believe it or not, he bought out all the others that had put money into it and sat on it. He locked up and let it sit. He even kept paying Marvin to go in there and keep it all from falling apart so that, as he put it, when the world was finally ready for Fat Cat’s again, it’d be ready to go.

We all thought he was delusional. Some of my family more than others. One of my brothers, Stephen, he was mad about it. He’d say, Of course I’m mad, and you should be, too. That’s our inheritance he’s wasting on that place!

By the time all this happened, I’d already gone off to college, but every time I saw my dad, I’d try to talk some sense into him. I told him he needed to sell what he could from it before it was all just worthless junk, and every time I did, he’d always tell me the same thing. Just one more year, son. Just one more year, and it’ll be the right time. I’ll open it again. Just you wait and see.

One year turned into two, two turned into three, so on and so forth. Time kept on passing, and with every day that it did, the prospects of a grand re-opening got more and more unlikely. The neighborhood it was in, like so many others around it, started to get worse. Drug dealing. Theft. Gang activity. Crime of all sorts. Eventually, all the businesses in the entire strip mall were gone, and the whole thing was empty. My father ended up boarding up the windows and shoring up the doors with multiple locks to keep people out. He even started hiring Marvin to act as a de facto security guard. The poor guy had nothing else going on in his life, I guess. Or maybe he was just as foolish as my father and had bought into this grand idea that, one day, Fat Cat’s would be as ubiquitous as Chuck E. Cheese. My brothers tried to tell my dad it wasn’t a good idea for Marvin to sit in there. If someone did try to break into the place, what was scrawny little Marvin gonna do to stop them?

We got our answer when Marvin disappeared. No one knew what happened to him. One day, he went into the place and just never came out. We all just assumed that some people who were up to no good managed to get in and, when he tried to stop them… well, he didn’t. And whoever did it took the body and that was that.

At that point, my mother was beyond mad. She said my old man’s dumb idea hadn’t just cost our family hundreds of thousands of dollars, but now, it’d got a man killed. You might think that my father would have finally given up on the whole thing by that point. A more sensible man probably would have. But my old man was nothing if not proud.

He kept that place in his name until 1994, right up until the day he died. It was then and only then that we, as a family, could finally put that disaster of a restaurant behind us.

I would have been happy to just sell the building to whoever would take it and wash my hands of it. It was Stephen who suggested that we try to get a little money out of it. He convinced me and one of my other brothers, Lawrence, to go with him and check the place out. See if there was anything in there that we could salvage. Maybe the arcade cabinets could be worth some money. I thought it was a long shot, since they’d been neglected for years at that point, but, after all the money my dad wasted on that place, I guessed that it was worth taking a look at. We managed to find the keys to the place in my dad’s things and the three of us drove out.

Like I said, the strip mall it was in was barely even a shell of what it had been. The stucco exterior had stained an ugly gray from the elements been baked brittle beneath the sun and patches of the stuff had peeled away, revealing the rotting wood frame underneath. You could still see the faded outlines from where the signs of the old businesses used to be. Only Fat Cat’s remained. Though the sign was long gone, the boards over the windows held firm and the door was still shut with a number of chains and padlocks. We couldn’t find the keys to those, so we just took a pair of bolt cutters, snapped them off, and let ourselves in.

When we opened the door, a wave of hot, musty air washed over us. It smelled like mold and mildew and more than anything, dust. Inside, it was even worse. The smell of dust was strong enough to choke you. The only thing I can compare it to is if you took the lint out of your dryer and just stuffed it up your nose.

Inside, we found that my father’s security measures had somehow held up. The place was basically untouched. All the tables were still there, and all the chairs were still neatly arranged around them, just waiting for the grand re-opening that was never going to happen. There were rows and rows of arcade cabinets, all neatly lined up in the darkness like tombstones in a graveyard. The animatronics were still there, too. They leaned at odd angles, heads lolled back and jaws gaping open. Patches of the fake fur and skin had rotted and peeled away, and you could see the rusted metal skeletons and frayed wires underneath.

With the windows boarded and the electricity cut off, the only light came from the long stretch of sunlight that spilled through the open front door. It lead like a carpet right up to Fat Cat himself still stood in the center, the whole top half leaned forward at the waist with its arms dangling by his sides and a moth-eaten top hat laying at his feet. When we shut the door behind us, the place was darker than dark. You couldn't even see the outlines of the cabinets or furniture, nothing. We'd come knowing that the lights wouldn't turn on, so we'd all brought flashlights. Without saying much more than muttered Damn's and taking the Lord's name in vain, all three of us wandered away from each other.

I know Stephen and Lawrence felt the same awful knot in their guts that I did. For as much of a headache Fat Cat's had been for our family, it was surreal to return to it. To see it covered in a thick layer of dust, forgotten, left to sit for years, but still there. Lawrence said once that he felt like it was as if he was walking through a half-remembered dream. I always thought it was more like stepping into a tomb for my father's dream. Like I said, he'd had such high hopes for that place. He wanted it to mean something. Despite all his success, he wanted to be more than just another car salesman. And what had all his efforts come to?

We were looking at it.

I found myself wandering up and down the rows of arcade cabinets. Aside from the dust and dead screens, they were all intact. All still exactly as I remembered them. I wiped a hand across the screen of a Super Mario Brothers cabinet ans got a thick film of dust on my hand that refused to come off.

Even though I wasn't much of a video game guy myself, I'd played a lot of these games. After we closed up the joint, some of us employees would stay a bit and play some of the games, enjoying the fact that we could play whatever we want without having to worry about lines.

I remembered that I used to go around while I cleaned up, wiping down all the cabinets with a wet rag to keep them from developing a layer of grease and grime on them from all the different hands that would touch them. As I did, I methodically checked each and every coin return slot to look for extra change.

Maybe it was nostalgia, or maybe it was just old habits coming back up, but I crouched down and stuck my finger into the flap. I yanked it out just as quick. It felt like something had pricked me. I looked at my finger under the flashlight and saw it wasn't bleeding. There was no hole where anything stuck me, but I could feel the tip pulsing as if something had.

Behind me, I heard footsteps. Not regular footsteps, either, but quick, hurried ones. The same kind I always hear when I go upstairs to tell my kids to go to bed after they were already supposed to be asleep. The kind of footsteps of someone small, running to hide. I turned around and aimed my flashlight down the row of arcade cabinets. No one was there.

I called their names. Only my own echo. At the time, I didn’t believe in ghosts. I wasn’t even too sure if God existed. Still, I felt myself getting the creeps. Goosebumps. The whole nine yards. And I don’t scare easy.

I thought that my brothers must have stepped outside since it was so quiet I would have heard them walking around, but I didn’t hear anything but my own breathing. Until I heard it again. The quick little footsteps. They were behind me, so I swung around and pointed my flashlight in the direction of the sound.

No one.

Now, I was convinced my brothers must have been screwing with me. I messed with them a lot when we were young, so I thought maybe they were getting some payback.

I told them if they didn’t knock it off, I’d knock their lights out. We were grown men, but they weren’t above an ass kicking.

I didn’t get a response, which only proved what I thought. I turned around, planning to leave and ready to deck one of them in the face if they jumped out from behind one of the cabinets and shout.

I was the one that shouted, though, because at the end of the row, standing right where it ended, there was someone that I was not expecting to see.

It was a kid. A little girl with blonde hair tied up in pig tails, wearing a hat that looked like it would belong to an army general and a old black leather coat that was way too big for her, with the sleeves hanging off her arms and the back dragging across the floor. Under that, she was wearing this filthy pink skirt with straps that came over a shirt that looked like it had been white at one point. I don’t know how old she was. She looked twelve or thirteen maybe, but she acted a lot younger, like no one ever told her how to act her age. She looked like she’d been sleeping in the rough for a while, with black smudges on her face and oily hair like she hadn't seen a shower in a while. She was looking at me like I was the one who wasn’t supposed to be there. All I could think was that she was some street kid who’d managed to make her way inside somehow, and must have been using it for shelter.

I said some words I would normally not say in front of a child as I tried to get myself together after my soul damn near jumped out of my mouth. I knew that Stephen and Lawrence had to have to left, because otherwise, they’d have come running, or they would be laughing their asses off, and I didn’t hear either.

After a few Oh My God's and Jesus Christ’s, I managed to ask her what the hell she was doing there.

She put her hands on her hips and asked me what I was doing there.

I told her that it wasn’t any of her business, and she told me that it was, since I was in her place. I said that, legally, it was my place, so, she was the one not supposed to be there.

And wouldn’t you know it, this little girl had the nerve to lean forward and sneer at me, saying, “I don’t see your name on it.”

If I’d ever talked to an adult like that, I don’t know who I would have been more afraid of whipping my ass - them or my mom. Since I’m not in the business of whooping random kids, no matter how rude they are, I just asked her again what she was doing in there. I added, “Are you living in here, or something?”

She spread her arms out and started spinning in place. She said something like, “I live in all places like this.” She also said that’s why I was the one that needed to tell her what I was doing there. Just to get her to make some damn sense, I told her that my dad used to own the joint and since he was dead, it belonged to me and my brothers.

When I said that, her expression changed. She looked surprised, at first, then she started smiling in a way I didn’t like very much.

She said, “Oh. So you’re one of those boys.”

By this point, I was as confused as I was angry at this little girl talking down to me. I said, “I don't know what you're talking about, but you need to go.”

Again, she gave me that nasty little sneer and said, “And what if I don't?”

I straight up told her I'd get the police involved.

She said that the police couldn't get rid of her. She said I couldn't, either. She said something like she'd be there and she'd always be there and that places like that were her home. It didn't make much sense and I wasn't in the mood to hear it. I was about to tell her to shut up and give her one last chance to leave before she'd be sorry when she got this little look in her eye. The same kinda look I've seen in my kids right before they do something they know they shouldn't do and know it's gonna make me mad.

She said that she wasn't the only one there. She said that if I was gonna make her leave, I'd have to make him leave, too. I didn't know who she meant by him, but I got a bad feeling about it. She said, “Come on. I'll show you.”

And then she ran off into the dark. I told her to come back, but I just heard her giggling. It was mischievous. Mean.

I thought about leaving but, instead, I followed her, hoping that Stephen and Lawrence would show back up and help me get this kid out somehow. I saw her by the stage, just at the end of where my flashlight reached. She darted off again, and I kept following. I kept finding her with my light, and she'd run off again, laughing like we were playing a game.

Eventually, we got to the back of the place. She was half-hiding behind the wall, where the stairs went down to the basement that we used to use as storage. She told me to wait a second and she disappeared, and I could hear her running down the stairs. I didn't wait. My patience was done. I started following her again, telling her that she was gonna be in trouble if she didn't get back.

That was when it happened. I heard her run back up the stairs, but it wasn't the little girl that came out from behind the wall. It was the upper half of a body. It leaned out from behind the wall right into the beam of my flashlight. A corpse. Decayed. Rotten. Arms dangling limp by the sides and jaw hanging open, just like the damn animatronics. The whole right side of the skull was caved in and it was wearing a busted pair of glasses over empty eyes and a ruined blue shirt. One of the arms raised. It was barely held together by bits of rotten meat and muscle, and I could see the little girl's hand on its elbow, raising it up like it was a puppet. She even spoke for it, using a weird cartoon voice to say, “Hey there! It's me! Marvin! Don't you remember me?”

The arm stayed raised as the little girl stepped out from behind the wall. She was grinning ear to ear.

She said, “Look! It's Marvin!”

Never in my life had I ever been so scared. I couldn't think. I couldn't move. All I could do was stand there and stare at Marvin's body, standing by itself with that little demon girl standing right next to it, not even touching it.

I remember the little girl frowning and saying, “Aren't you happy to see him again? Because he's real happy to see you.”

I watched as Marvin's body lurched to the side on a twisted leg. It shambled out, just like a zombie you'd see in a movie, walking with short, jerky steps. I finally found it in me to take a step back, but I couldn’t look away. I couldn’t turn around because I was too afraid of what it might do if I didn’t keep my eyes on it.

The little girl started laughing, and I swear, there was evil in it. She just stood there, laughing like she was watching the funniest thing she’d ever seen in her life, the sound as loud as it would be if she was standing right next to my ear.

I heard her say “Why don’t you give him a big hug!”

Her laughter kept going as Marvin’s body stumbled towards me and I stumbled back and back and back until I hit a wall. I lost my balance, I dropped the flashlight, and I fell down to the ground, so terrified that I couldn't even think about anything but how Marvin was getting closer and closer and closer and that I was never going to leave that God forsaken place.

My brothers found me there, flat on my ass and pressed up against the wall. They’d lost sight of me at some point and couldn’t find me right up until they heard the sound of my flashlight hit the ground. Then, they heard me screaming bloody murder.

To me, it all ended like a movie scene cutting off in the middle. One moment, Marvin’s body was right over me. The next, Stephen and Lawrence are on either side of me, shaking me and yelling, trying to get me to stop hollering.

There was no zombie Marvin. There was no little demon girl, either. It was just us.

I couldn’t tell them what I’d seen. I couldn’t even speak. They had to drag my ass, and I mean literally drag, outside. I was in such a bad way that I just kept saying, “Marvin. Marvin. Marvin.”

After they took me out, they went down into the basement. Down there, they found a little door that led into a sub-basement that no one even knew was down there. That’s where they found Marvin. I wasn’t surprised when they told me. I already knew he was still somewhere in there.

The police came in and did their thing. They said that the right side of Marvin’s skull had been crushed. Based on the way the Fat Cat animatronic was positioned, they guessed he had been messing it while he was alone, something went wrong, and the top half of the thing came down right on his head.

As to how he got down in the sub-basement, we all know the body didn’t put itself down there. There’s really only logical answer. The cops can’t prove anything, and even if they could, there’s no one left to arrest. Lawrence swears up and down it had to be someone who broke in who moved the body down there. I think he knows what we all know, he just doesn’t want to admit it. And I don’t blame him. I don’t want to either.

I’ll be honest with you. I have no idea what happened in there that day. Did I see Marvin's ghost? Was that what made me see what I saw? Was the little girl some kind of vengeful spirit or a demon that was punishing me for what my father did? Did I go straight crazy for a minute? Has anyone else had an experience like this? I’d like to know if you have. I’d also like to know how you make yourself forget about it, because I still have dreams about that day, every now and then. I have dreams where I’m back there in the dark. I can’t see her, but I can hear that girl’s evil laughter coming from all sides as that dead zombie Marvin gets closer and closer. And in those dreams, my brothers aren’t there to stop it.