Anyone living in the small town of Amity Park, Michigan could tell you that the Fords were crazy. It wasn't just the fact that Carrie Ford often wore pink hazmat suits to the local grocery, or that Mark Ford could be seen tinkering on a hovercraft every Saturday morning while most men washed their hotrods. It wasn't that they didn't go to the First Baptist Church every Sunday like the rest of the town, or that they didn't stop to gossip with their next door neighbors; it wasn't even the fact that they were the only two paranormal investigators in the whole county. They were just odd. More than once someone had testified to violent green and blinding purple lights streaming from their basement windows at two in the morning; a giant telescope protruded from their roof, and once, back when they were making love not war and Carrie was dating "crazy Mark Ford" only to anger her mother, they had exhumed the three-day dead corpse of the mayor's wife because they believed her to be an alien.
Yes, the Fords were ostracized in Amity Park in the way only a small town can ostracize; Girl Scouts knew not to sell cookies at the foreboding half-lab/half-brownstone they called home; balls that bounced into their yard went unfetched; somehow even the dogs knew better than to wiz on Mrs. Ford's rhubarb. For the most part, this did not bother the Fords. They got along fine and were at peace with the world, up until their oldest daughter Madison turned five and started kindergarten.
Maddie came home from her first day of school with a black eye. "Mommy," she sobbed, "Dore Baxter beat me up. He said his mommy told him the Fords were a 'bomination to Amity Park...whatever that means." Maddie's first day of school set the tone for her sister Alicia's, and later for their younger brother Harry's.
While the Ford adults could live with the occasional behind-the-back whisper at the grocery store, the children had to live with the constant teasing at school. The Fords kept their children in school however; they decided it prepared the children for the real world, and there really hadn't been any more physical violence since three-year old Alicia had crossed the street all by herself to get to Dore Baxter's house and decked the child a good one after he had beat up Maddie. But still, things took their toll, and they all yearned for a time when they could be accepted into the crowd.
Maddie escaped first, heading off to the University of Wisconsin to study biology. It was there that she made the biggest mistake of all, in Alicia's opinion. She had met up with two ghost hunters and dated each of them on and off for two years before finally choosing Jack Fenton. And becoming a ghost hunter, of all things, before moving back to Amity Park and starting her own life as a town freak. "That Maddie Ford," the pharmacist was heard to whisper to the owner of the local Shell station, "I always knew she'd turn out wonky."
Alicia escaped the old-fashioned way: she got pregnant at age sixteen by some fool she didn't care one whit for, and they moved into a cramped apartment over the UPS store that was said to be haunted. But she lost that baby and two more before she decided that it was time to move on; Andrew Lancer hadn't provided her with anything but heartbreak and a job at the Nasty Burger, and his Shakespeare boxers and back hair were a real turn-off anyway.
It was then she began globehopping in search of love and a place to belong, leaving nothing but broken hearts and miscarriages behind; to Pennsylvania (Hiram Strong) to France (Francois Fache) to Russia (Dmitri Romanov) and back to the United States, and it wasn't until her fifth (soon-to-be-ex) husband and her 12th miscarriage, in a hick town called Spitoon, Arkansas, that she became tired of men. It wasn't that she hated them; she just couldn't be chuffed to find another one, and she had been disappointed so many times. Maybe it was just her luck in picking men, but they were all looking for one thing and one thing only: sex. Not one of them had ever loved her. All she wanted was a little one to call her own, one who would love her unconditionally, and she was being denied even of that.
And it was in Spitoon that she divorced her fifth and (she thought) final husband, a slightly effeminate man named Buford Pickford who owned the local tobacco store, and moved out to the wilderness by herself three miles from town.
And she lived out there for ten years, accepting the role of "bitter single woman who is butch and possibly a lesbian".
Until last year, when her sister Maddie stopped by with her husband and her children, and she saw how happy Maddie was even though her husband was an idiot and her children were maladjusted. Alicia didn't know why, but Maddie really did love that lug of a man Jack Fenton. Alicia realized what she had wanted all along was exactly what her sister had.
Since then, she has taken up with a man from the local Outback Steakhouse, and moved back into town. He provides her with all the love and free steak she needs. They hope to be married in November.