I'm calling it: Sammy's part of the lore

Hi folks. Still working on this theory, so I won't make this one of my fancier posts. Interested in opinions, spotting holes, and putting it down before MatPat sucks up all the air next week (frankly, I'm looking forward to it :)

So yeah, I'm going out on a limb and calling it: Sammy exists in the game lore.

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EDIT: I got the impression from a comment that the following point may not be clear, so for clarity, yes, I'm saying Charlie's murder and Sammy's theoretical murder are on the same night.

"That Night"

We see Puppet stuck in its box, presumably by a heavy gift left on top. Charlie somehow got locked out of FFB (or FFD, not settled on which) while the rest of the kids at the night party got their cake. Charlie instead gets ganked by William, who leaves her body in the alley and tears out in his purple car. Puppet finally escapes, tracks Charlie down via bracelet signal, breaks down in the rain while in contact with Charlie, and inadvertently becomes the first haunted animatronic.

William targeted Charlie and murdered her at the first opportunity. He left clues (tire tracks, Charlie's body) while future murders and his experiments with murderbots showed more careful planning and execution, covering his tracks, and using disguises and costumes. This is likely his first or second kill.

"Later That Night"

Henry flies down the highway in a drunken stupor around midnight. He exits onto a country road close to home. However, he can't resist tying one more on. He detours to Jr.'s bar where the doorman turns him away. Either Henry's made trouble here before or the doorman is required to turn away folks that are already drunk (fun fact: many states prohibit bars and restaurants from serving alcohol to inebriated patrons).

Dejected, Henry heads down the lane to home. He passes his burnt out wife who's blasting Johnny Carson on her TV. She tells him to leave "him" alone but does nothing to stop him from trying to enter the mystery person's room. It's locked, and Henry is drunk-mad enough at the defiance that he walks around back of the house in the middle of a rainstorm. He notices the smashed window and possibly the normal set of footprints, but not the animatronic prints. Henry says "he" went "there" again and that "he" will be sorry when he comes back.

What we didn't see: While Henry was getting plastered, William took the opportunity to go after his two kids, Charile and Sammy. While we saw Charlie's murder, we don't know if it occurred before or after Sammy's. Nevertheless, wearing a non-springsuit (these may have been the earlier days of Fazbear Entertainment, so it's believable they'd have some), he somehow lured Sammy out (had William smashed the window in, Sammy likely would have retreated to the living room and his mother, at least). Hating life with his parents, Sammy didn't feel bad about smashing the window. His mother was too distracted or insouciant to care, or maybe too bombarded with TV noise to notice. William backed into the woods and led Sammy to the open field where William murdered and buried him. Note that Sammy in this case doesn't get to possess an animatronic.

"What's your evidence, and how do you tie it together?"

Start with Toy Chica: The High School Years. Not that controversial that she represents William early in his bloody career. When she's set her sights on Puppet, she describes her plot, and part of it overlaps with what we see behind Henry's house: A suit's footprints point to the window, and footsteps leave the window, go by the suit's prints, and into the woods.

Something else I haven't seen discussed: Puppet in TC:THSY is male when we know she's female in the game. She's also the only animatronic that's gender flipped (depending on what you think about FTFoxy, anyway). You could chalk it up to Scott simply deciding that Chica likes only boys. However, why wouldn't he just use a different male animatronic? He specifically picked Puppet. This COULD be a roundabout clue that William targeted Charlie's twin brother. "I just know it!!"

Let's talk about Sammy: We've never seen him or heard his name mentioned in the games. We'd have no reason to deduce his existence except that he's mentioned in the books and because other potential clues in the books have panned out in the game lore. By that standard, he's definitely in play for theories, even if evidence tying him to the game lore remains tenuous at best.

Tenuous evidence?: Sure. Henry's house is a modest affair in the middle of the woods off the highway in the books. The Orange guy's house in the game resembles that description. As I understand it, there was a field right in back of the book's house, and though that might not be the case for Orange Guy's house (we never see one screen up from it), it at least is the case once you cross the driveway to Jr.'s. In other words, there're corroborating clues and nothing to contradict this part of the theory. So we assume this is Henry's house, just like in the books.

We see a mystery person in the house. We know Henry was married at some point according to the books. This could be his wife. I don't recall how she was described in the rundowns I've read of the books, but I recall her being passive and eventually divorcing Henry. The point is, this person fits at least part of that description (passive). If anyone wants to help me glue this part together more satisfyingly, please do.

Orange guy clearly has problems interfering with his life, though not homicidal ones that we can see. He also isn't purple, and as bad form in a mystery as it is to use coincidences (*cough* purple car *cough* (we'll get to that)), I would consider it worse form to have William always be purple pre-springtrap and change that suddenly in part 6 for shits and giggles. So I contend he's not William. And since the house fits, the contents fit (likely an adult in the living room, a boy in the bedroom), and the alcoholism would help explain some known things about Henry, I'm going with Orange guy = Henry.

What young boy would be in Henry's house? Sammy. Who else could it be?

Alcoholism: As I touched on above, Henry would be alcoholic, and this starts to explain some things we know about Henry already.

To recap, we know that being in partnership with William is stressful and that Henry's aided or ignored William's more evil acts on several occasions, but we never know why. If you take Candy Cadet's parables as talking about Henry and William's relationship, it would suggest Henry is a good person with poor or impaired judgment. His tapes in FNaF 6 show him as someone very much in control of his life (he'd have at least 25 years to sober up), that's thinking clearly, recognizing that anything he'd done before to rationalize his actions were misguided and ineffective, and decisively ending the terror that he'd helped create.

But alcoholism begins to answer the why of all this. I know some functional alcoholics. Orange guy doesn't seem to be one of them in the little we see. If it's Henry, he was out drinking all night while his daughter was murdered at his restaurant, which he and/or his wife should have probably been at anyway. But he's clearly a stereotypical mean drunk, and someone in that state needs to stay the hell away from his business till he dries up.

Whether he drinks to medicate or he just got addicted, Henry can't run Fazbear Entertainment by himself. He needs a capable partner, someone with a steady hand that can be the people person and steer the business while Henry can focus on animatronics during his productive days. William can fit that bill, and it's a bonus that William was either an excellent cross-trainer in animatronics (for when you need to fix something but the genius is at Jr.'s) or a prior colleague in robotics.

Unfortunately, we know William is evil, if not sociopathic. He takes advantage of Henry. Though they're partners, William probably handles the books, so he takes the lion's share of profits for himself: there are clues that William has means enough in the early 80s to run a couple of successful restaurants and, independent of Henry, a state-of-the-art display bunker and animatronic workshop, plus he owns or rents three different houses (judging by the SL map, though I know some people think each house is actually a different floor of the same house). That's serious resources. Orange guy Henry, though, lived in a relative hovel in the woods.

Alcoholism does *not* completely explain Henry's behavior vis-a-vis William, as far as I can tell. Henry becomes functional enough to do some sci-fi animatronics, after all, and you'd think in those moments of clarity that he might finally decide hey, this guy that I lean on for business reasons has killed people, even my own kids, so 911, dammit! (Oh, we know that even if Henry didn't know who killed Charlie at first, he at least figured it out later. That'd be from his FNaF 6 monologues.) . But alcoholism is good at weakening reasoning and resolve in all facets of life, so it would make him more vulnerable to whatever other leverage William held over him.

Why's Charlie at FFB Without Mom or Dad?: Charlie may have been invited to the party and not just foisted on Henry's employees and Puppet (I suspect Henry uses them like that regularly for Charlie and Sammy while he goes sloshing and Mom . . . does whatever she does or doesn't do). The party would explain why Charlie's there without Sammy if she were invited and he wasn't.

How was Sammy lured out?: Again, I doubt William broke the window and entered judging by the footprints and by what would've happened otherwise. Maybe Sammy looooved Fredbear, Freddy, or Bonnie; William would've known if that were so, and that would be the reason he wore the suit. If Charlie's murder happened close to the date of MCI, then mind control discs are also an option: I believe it's likely one was used in Susie's case since it would explain the decaying audio quality of Fruity Maze, its increasingly disturbing (and relevant to Susie) imagery, the video game "talking" to her, and her growing sorrow. Fruity Maze and Midnight Motorist also appear in FNaF 6 and so after the books introduced the discs.

Any other evidence?: Yep. "Later That Night", of course (the file that Midnight Motorist is located in). Rain (an instance where you could forgive coincidence, but I'm pretty sure it's not when combined with "Later That Night"). Also, TC:THSY has seven victims. If you include Sammy and only the murders William directly performed early in his career, we know of seven victims by 1983 (William's "early" career).

"Any counter evidence or weaknesses?"

The minigame drivers drive on the left side of the road. If that wasn't an oversight, this theory goes straight to pot and we're into Grandpa Afton territory.

Other than that, I've only come up with one potential clue against, but coincidence explains it away (keep reading before you go AHA! and jump straight to comments). Again, any proof positive that part or all of this theory must be wrong is welcome.

"Henry's" car is purple and resembles William's. I suspect that's coincidental, a red herring to keep everyone from reaching the truth too easily. If it is, shame on you, Scott! :P . I have another theory about the two purple cars, but first a note on coincidences and mysteries. I looked into the subject a bit.

Lots--if not most--mystery fans aren't thrilled with coincidences, and most editors encourage their writers to keep them to a minimum. That doesn't stop even some of the greats (Agatha Christie, for instance) from using them. Therefore, I wouldn't put it past Scott to have thrown some into FNaF, including the partners both having purple cars.

The closest I've come to a plausible alternate theory is that William could have jacked Henry's car from wherever Henry was sloshing it and used it at Charlie's murder. The skids at the scene would point suspicion straight at Henry. The problem is this theory relies on the cops being none too swift (though there's evidence that FNaF cops are indeed a bit slow), otherwise the suspicion would quickly turn to William.

Above all, the purple car does not disprove this theory at this point. Could be coincidence. Could be a frame job. Other plausible, easy scenarios may exist.

Any other weaknesses: Of course. This theory's another case where mostly circumstantial evidence builds a picture. Like so many other FNaF controversies, lack of hard evidence for or against it leaves it in play but not unimpeachable.

So why did William kill Charlie and Sammy?: That's still a mystery. It probably had more meaning than just wanting to kill kids. He targeted Charlie. He targeted Sammy. Oddly, if Henry figured out what had happened quickly, he didn't turn on William. As confusing as that is, it's not any more confusing than where we were before, though. We were just down a Sammy.

Kudos if you hung in there. Hopefully there's something to all this.