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| “ | Five children are now linked to the incident at Freddy Fazbear's Pizza, where a man dressed as a cartoon mascot lured them into a back room. While the suspect has been charged, the bodies themselves were never found. Freddy Fazbear's Pizza has been fighting an uphill battle ever since to convince families to return to the pizzeria. | „ |
| ~ A newspaper report on the murders. |
| “ | Why did you reopen? Everyone remembers what happened to those kids. | „ |
| ~ A customer complaint found in Freddy Fazbear's Mega PizzaPlex, possibly referring to the Missing Children's Incident decades ago. |
The Missing Children are major antagonists in the Five Nights at Freddy's franchise.
They are the ghosts of William Afton's victims who were lured into the backroom of Freddy Fazbear's Pizza, and murdered. However the Puppet stuffed the kids into suits of the animatronics and gave them a chance for revenge, by allowing their souls to possess the animatronics. The first five possessed animal animatronics Freddy, Bonnie, Chica, Foxy and Golden Freddy become dangerous ghosts.
After their resurrections, and due to their deaths, the spirits of the five children became consumed with anger and vengeance. Because they were blinded by rage, they began mistaking adults, including Jeremy Fitzgerald, Fritz Smith, Phone Guy, and Michael Afton/Mike Schmidt, for William Afton. Because they are driven by a hunger for revenge, they will stop at nothing until they kill the man who is responsible for murdering them. Eventually, Afton returned and destroyed the animatronics the five children were possessing, which would backfire as he awoken and freed their spirits, causing them to make an attempt to attack him, which led him to his own death when he tried to hide in a springlock Spring Bonnie suit.
After the events of FNaF 3 their souls were finally put to rest by Charlotte Emily.
Appearance[]
Aside from Susie and Cassidy, it is currently unknown what the children physically looked like before their deaths and possession of the animatronics. However, as ghosts, they are depicted in minigames as white silhouettes with black eyes and dark grey tears streaming from them. In the "Happiest Day" minigame, the spirits wear masks of the respective animatronics they possess.
History[]
All the tour posters about The Missing Children.
On June 26, 1985, five kids named Gabriel, Jeremy, Susie, Fritz and Cassidy went to Freddy Fazbear's Pizza for a day of fun, food and excitement. However unknown to them the co-owner of the restaurant William Afton, had malicious plans. Afton donned his Spring Bonnie costume and pretended to be one of the company’s mascots to gain the children's trust. One by one, William lured the kids into the backroom of the pizzeria and then cruelly murdered them all without remorse.
However the Puppet, a animatronic possessed by Afton’s first victim Charlotte Emily saved the children's souls by stuffing their corpses into the restaurants animatronics: Gabriel into Freddy Fazbear, Jeremy into Bonnie the Bunny, Susie into Chica the Chicken, Fritz into Foxy the Pirate Fox, and Cassidy into Fredbear, who eventually become known as Golden Freddy. The sprits would then be consumed by grief, rage and agony vowing to kill Afton for taking their lives away. However the spirits were blinded by that same hatred and ended up killing any adults they saw in the pizzeria after hours, however they were quite protective and affable towards children and wanted to keep them from suffering a similar fate to theirs.
Although William was arrested for his crimes he was let go due to a lack of viable evidence. As the corpses of the five children were left inside the animatronics, they would apparently begin to fester and decompose as blood and mucus seeped from them and through the animatronics suits they were placed in, which in turn, caused the animatronics to emit a foul smell. This was noticed by parents, who proceeded to file a complaint to the health department which promptly shut the restaurant down.
Two years later in 1987, the animatronics had been decommissioned and left to wither in the Parts & Service room of the newly opened successor to the original pizzeria with the more advanced Toy Animatronics taking their place. However, William returned and killed another five children, although Freddy and the Puppet attempted to save them their efforts were futile with William himself even spitefully mocking them for it. However Afton’s new victims would haunt the Toy animatronics. Both the toys and classics would then team-up in an attempt to kill the night guard Jeremy Fitzgerald and later his successor Fritz Smith due to mistaking them for William. Later on the restaurant was closed due to an incident dubbed the Bite of 87 where one of the animatronics bite off a persons frontal lobe. Consequently the toys were scrapped but the original animatronics were kept by the company.
A year later in 1988, after the second location was closed, the animatronics would be modified and retrofitted as they once again became the mascots of the reopened Freddy Fazbear's Pizza. From 1988 to 1993, they would kill numerous night guards working at the establishment, including Phone Guy. Michael Afton, William's son, would work at the location under a fake name, presumably to try to uncover the mysteries. However, the animatronics, mistaking him for his father, spent seven nights trying to get to Michael before he was fired for tampering with them and bad odor.
William scared against the ghosts.
After Michael's firing, the pizzeria would go out of business and close down for good, with the animatronics being abandoned in the establishment. Sometime afterwards, the animatronics were lured to the pizzeria's backroom by Shadow Freddy one by one, only to be ambushed and destroyed by William himself. This would be a fatal mistake, however, as the ghosts of the Missing Children were freed from the animatronic endoskeletons and chased William into the safe room. He equipped the Spring Bonnie costume in an attempt to protect himself, only for the springlocks inside the suit to malfunction, fatally crushing and mutilating his entire body, thus finally facing justice for his atrocities. With William destroyed and their vengeance finally satisfied, the spirits disappear, though unbeknownst to them, he would eventually become the undead, animatronic hybrid, Springtrap.
Decades later in 2023, with the help of the Fazbear's Fright night guard (the identity of whom is heavily implied to be Michael), Shadow Bonnie, and 8-bit versions of Balloon Boy, Mangle, Toy Chica, and Fredbear, the Puppet would organize a spiritual birthday party called the "Happiest Day" for the Missing Children, allowing their souls to finally move on to the afterlife in peace.
However, the souls of both Cassidy and Charlotte would refuse to move on. Charlotte presumably knew Afton was still alive and intended to continue to keep children safe from his machinations. Eventually, Charlotte would be kidnapped and trapped inside of an animatronic known as Lefty, a construct built by her father Henry. Charlotte would then go to Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza Place where she encountered William (now known as Scraptrap), William’s daughter Elizabeth (now haunting Scrap Baby) as well as Afton’s old creations the Funtime animatronics who fused into one being known as Molten Freddy.
Charlotte and the others then spend an entire week trying to hunt down and kill Michael in the labyrinth underneath the pizzeria. Eventually on Saturday, Henry finally reveals himself and explains that the pizzeria was nothing more than a trap to lure the remaining animatronics to be incinerated and set free. Ultimately, Lefty burns alongside the rest of the animatronics which subsequently free’s Charile’s soul at last allowing her to rest in the afterlife along with her father and the children she herself freed.
However the spirit of Cassidy utterly refused to move on from their hatred and vengeance. Cassidy then kept William alive and tortured him in his nightmares for his unspeakable crimes. Despite the efforts of Old Man Consequences trying to convince Cassidy to let go of their hatred and rest their own soul, Cassidy refused and continued to torture William for all eternity.
Trivia[]
- According to evidence from both the Novel Trilogy and the Fazbear Frights series, the Missing Children Incident took place in 1985.
- The Week Before establishes that the Missing Children are painfully aware of their condition and even remember their names, having the capacity of sharing that information with people through some sort of telepathy, as both Ralph and Bronwen had the names "Susie" and "Jeremy" pop into their head as they were interacting with Chica and Bonnie respectively.
- Chica in particular seems to have painful memories relating to her birthday, as she seems to have a slight moment of lucidity when she sees a cupcake with a birthday candle lit on its head. When Ralph sang her Happy Birthday, she let out an agonizing scream and smashed the cupcake, leaving the kitchen while crying. This might indicate that Susie was killed in her birthday party.
- It is theorized that the children that the Crying Child meets in Five Nights at Freddy's 4 minigames, are the missing children before being killed by William, Crying Child's father. Almost all of the kids match (the boy wearing a shirt with a heart on it and holding a Spring Bonnie finger trap being Jeremy, the older boy laughing and one of bullies wearing the Freddy mask being Gabriel, the girl playing with toys of the Fazbear gang being Susie, and another boy wearing a red shirt and holding a balloon being Fritz), except for another girl who resembles Circus Baby, possibly Elizabeth Afton. One evidence to back this up is that the girl playing with the toys bears resemblance to Susie. This could mean that the missing children incident happened after 1983, possibly indicating that they died in 1985 as suggested in Fazbear Frights: Into the Pit and the Novel Trilogy.
