Pamela Voorhees

Pamela Voorhees, more commonly known as Mrs. Voorhees, is the mother of Jason Voorhees.  After his supposed drowning in 1957, Pamela swore revenge on the counselors at Camp Crystal Lake and proceeded to prevent the camp from reopening through murder, water poisoning, and arson.  When Steve Christy sought to reopen Camp Crystal Lake in 1980, Pamela resurfaced to murder the newly hired counselors.  After killing most of them, Pamela was decapitated by counselor, Alice Hardy.  Jason constructed an altar to Pamela's remains and continued killing those who intruded the area to continue her work and avenge her death.  Pamela often appears to her son through visions and hallucinations.  Following her death, her spirit has been known to possess people several times.
Character
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Name:Pamela Voorhees
Gender:Female
Status:Deceased, Resurrected?
Classification:Serial Killer
Birthday:1930
Date of Death:June 13, 1979
Cause of Death:Decapitated with machete
Relatives:Elias Voorhees (Husband)Jason Voorhees (Son)Free Jefferson(Grandson)
Portrayed by:Betsy PalmerMarilyn PoucherPaula ShawNana Visitor
First appearance:Friday the 13th (1980)
==Biography==
===Early Life===
Pamela was born in 1930.  Not much is known about her childhood or family.  As a teenager, Pamela met and married Elias Voorhees, a miner from Ohio.  As the couple lived in a trailer near Camp Crystal Lake, Elias would often abuse Pamela verbally and physically for any perceived misdeed, be it real or imagined.
In 1946, sixteen year old Pamela became aware that she was pregnant with a son.  She named him Jason Voorhees.  She became convinced that the unborn child could speak to her.  One day, Elias arrived home after a long, hard day at work in the mines and, Pamela's nonsensical mumblings, beat and possibly raped her.  Enraged, Pamela went to her husband as he was sleeping and hacked him to pieces with an axe, convinced that this was the only way to protect herself and her son.  Pamela then blew up the trailer and dumped Elias's body in Crystal Lake.
Soon after, Pamela moved into 42 Cars Crash Road, better known as the Voorhees House, after she imagined her son exclaiming how beautiful the house was, despite warnings from Mr. Lasko, the real estate agent, that the building was haunted.  Pamela's son, Jason, was born on June 13, 1946 at Wessex County Marshall.  Pamela proceeded to raise her son apart from the other children in their new house.
===Camp Crystal Lake===
In the summer of 1957, Pamela was offered a job at Camp Crystal Lake as the camp cook by David and Louise Christy.  Taking Jason with her, Pamela attempted to keep her son sheltered from the other children, but her attempts were in vaine.  One night, Jason went swimming by himself in the lake and never came back.  Although the lake was partially dragged, no body was ever recovered.  Pamela proceeded to have a break with reality and spent the next six months in an institution.
Following her release from the hospital, Pamela apparently used the Necromonican to cast a spell to ensure that Jason would return to her alive.  It is unknown whether or not this worked, but Jason emerged alive on the other side of the lake some time after his apparent drowning.
At her own request, the Christys rehire Pamela in the summer of 1958, against their better judgment.  Pamela found she was unable to stop thinking of Jason's drowning, and each night, she went to the children's cabin while the occupants were sleeping to ensure they were safe.  On July 4, while staring at the sleeping children and crying, Pamela heard the counselors singing at the campfire.  Convinced that it was the counselors' fault her son had died, Pamela got a knife from the kitchen and followed counselors, Barry and Claudette, to the barn, where they commenced sexual foreplay.  Pamela sneaked upstairs and caught the teenagers off guard before murdering them both with the knife.  Pamela was never suspected of the crime and Camp Crystal Lake was soon closed down.
In the years that followed, Pamela continued her vendetta to keep the camp closed.  In 1962, she poisoned the water and prevented the camp from opening.  She might have also been responsible for several fires at the campgrounds, but this might also have been accidents caused by Jason.
===1979 Murder Spree===
In 1979, David and Louise's son, Steve Christy, began fixing up the abandoned camp.  Pamela tried to persuade him to not reopen the camp, but Steve was determined to end the story of the cursed "Camp Blood".  On June 13, 1979, what would have been Jason's thirty-third birthday, the camp was almost ready for reopening, and Pamela decided to take matters into her own hands.  Taking with her a hunting knife, she began to drive towards Camp Crystal Lake in her jeep, set on killing the counselors that Steve had hired and ensure that the camp would never be reopened again.
During the drive, Pamela came upon a young hitchhiking girl named Annie, who was to be the cook at the camp.  Annie boarded the jeep and she and Pamela soon began speaking, each telling the other their life story.  As she recounted her life with Elias and the birth of Jason, Pamela became increasingly unhinged.  When they reached the turn-off for Camp Crystal Lake, Pamela simply continued driving.  Annie at first begged the woman to stop, then leaped out of the passenger seat door.  Pamela got out of the jeep and gave chase, pursuing the injured Annie through the woods.  Pamela eventually caught up with the frightened girl, and slit her throat with the hunting knife, thus killing her.  She then carried the body back to the jeep, set it up in the passenger seat, and and kept conversing with it.
Pamela spent the remainder of the day spying on the remaining counselors as they fixed up the camp.  As night fell, Pamela began dispatching of them, one by one.  First, she lured Ned Rubenstein to his death by standing in the open doorway of a cabin and slitting his throat.  When Jack Burrell and his girlfriend, Marcie Cunningham, came to the same cabin to make love, Pamela hid Ned's body and would lay under the bed.  When Marcie left, after they finished having sex, to go to the bathroom and freshen up, Pamela pushed an arrow through Jack's neck, then followed Marcie to to the bathroom and killed her by smashing the axe into her face.  When Brenda narrowly missed finding Pamela in the bathroom, the deranged woman mimicked the voice of a child, luring Brenda out into the open before Pamela caught her off guard on the archery range.  Finally, Pamela came upon Steve as he returned from town, and stabbed him in the stomach with a hunting knife before tying his body to a tree branch out of site.
There were now only two counselors to dispatch of:  Alice Hardy and Bill.  To ensure that they could not escape, Pamela severed the phone line and disabled Ned's truck.  With the nearest crossroads ten miles away, Alice and Bill were trapped.  Pamela then turned off the generator, prompting Bill to go check on it.  He, too was murdered, Pamela slitting his throat and pinning him to the building's door and stabbing him with multiple arrows.
Alice soon followed Bill and found his dead, mangled body.  Panicked, the girl ran back to the main cabin and barricaded herself in.  Lurking outside, Pamela threw Brenda's beaten corpse through the window and then drove the jeep around to the front of the cabin, greeting Alice in a friendly manner, claiming to have known nothing of what has been going on.  A hysterical Alice showed Pamela the dead body of Brenda, and begged Pamela for her to help her escape.  Pamela became more and more unhinged as she remembered Jason's drowning, finally revealing her true colors, as she accused Alice of letting Jason drown.
Pamela then attacked Alice, but the girl was able to fend her off, and a chase around the camp began.  Pamela suffered several head injuries during the pursuit, including blows to the head from a fireplace poker, a frying pan, and a gun.  All the while, the woman began to talk to herself in Jason's voice, repeating "Kill her mommy!  Kill her!".  The fight came to an end on the lakeshore.  As Pamela and Alice wrestled, the counselor wrenched herself free and proceeded to decapitate Pamela with a machete.
Jason Voorhees still managed to salvage Pamela's severed head, her sweater and pants, as well as the machete that was used to decapitate her.  Pamela's remains were taken and buried at a cemetery located on a roadside leading to Camp Crystal Lake.
===Legacy===
Following Pamela's death, Jason took the remains he had salvaged and to it back to his shack in the woods.  He constructed an altar surrounded by candles and arranged the clothes and the severed head there.
In August 1979, Jason took Pamela's severed head with him hiding the head in Alice's refrigerator before murdering her.  He then set up Alice's body at the base of the altar devoted to his mother.
All further murder sprees committed by Jason were done in Pamela's name, continuing what she had started by keeping all intruders out of the Camp Crystal Lake region.
In 1984, Ginny Field discovered the shack while Jason was pursuing her.  She almost managed to trick Jason into thinking she was Pamela by donning her sweater, but Jason was not fooled.  Ginny escaped after splitting open Jason's shoulder with the machete that killed his mother.  The shack was not discovered by the police following Ginny's experience.
Three days after Ginny's encounter with Jason, Chris Higgins would have a nightmare in which the rotted corpse of Pamela Voorhees rose from the lake and dragged her under.  Chris was escorted from Higgins Haven in an unstable state, rambling about a "lady in the lake".
In the summer of 2003, Gretchen Andrews was possessed by Pamela after
coming in contact with Jason.  While possessing Gretchen, Pamela appeared quite sane, only acting violent in the presence of Charles Westenhaus, a fellow Hell escapee who had murdered his mother.  Pamela was seemingly driven from Gretchen's body when the girl was fatally electrocuted alongside Jason, who she had been "playing" in Crystal Lake with.  That fall, Freddy Krueger managed to resurrect Jason by appearing to him as Pamela, commanding him to go to Springwood and kill all the children living on Elm Street.
In June 2005, Jason was in a coma after his battle with Freddy in 2003.  He was showcased Doktor Geistmann's Carnival of Terror as a carnival attraction.  Pamela returned from the dead by possessing others who came into contact with her severed head.  Pamela could bring Jason back to life for brief periods of time by exposing her own severed head to the moonlight, knowing that Jason would remain comatose forever if he did not kill anyone on June 13, his birthday, Pamela claimed five victims that month.
Following his murder spree at Camp Piney Woods, Jason visited her grave, which had been moved next to his at Eternal Peace Cemetery.
When the Jason Strain was spreading across the island where Extreme Elimination 2 was set, Butch Mahan and Alexandra Coyle used holographic technology developed by Helen Cain to capture Jason by making him think that Alexandra was Pamela.
In December 2008, Freddy Krueger once again appeared as Pamela to manipulate Jason into getting the Necromonican to resurrect the dream killer.  Following his battle with both Freddy and Ash Williams, Jason imagined Pamela urging him to continue killing.
Following Jason's release from a cryogenic chamber in space in 2455, Pamela possessed a swarm of nano ants and released Jason from Kristen's imprisonment.  Pamela then led her son to a room full of androids to kill, which frustrated Jason, since these victims weren't real.  Kristen eventually launched Jason into space, prompting a furious Pamela to possess her lover, Neil, and force him to kill both Kristen and himself.  Sometime later, a portion of Jason's DNA formed a clone of himself, resulting in his memories being split between both Jasons.  After defeating his clone, the real Jason regained all his memories of Pamela.
A semi-holographic version of Pamela, resembling a decayed corpse, was created by Armando Castillo in an equally holographic version of Camp Crystal Lake.  This Pamela would lay in an underwater grave and attacked passers-by.  The clone briefly escaped confinement, nearly killing Castillo, who presumably disposed of the creature after escaping it.
===Remake===
Pamela Voorhees was Jason's mother.  In June 1980, Pamela went to work as the camp cook at Camp Crystal Lake.  She brought Jason with her and signed him up as a camper.  On the 13th, Pamela went on a murderous rampage, accusing the counselors of making love while her son drowned.  After killing all the counselors, except the one Camp Counselor, Pamela pursued the surviving girl with a knife, ranting about her murder spree.  The desperate girl ended the pursuit by decapitating her with a machete.
Minutes after Pamela's death, Jason, who had not actually drowned, came up to his mother's body.  He heard her voice, urging him to continue her work.  Jason took his mother's head, the machete that killed her, and a locket containing a picture of himself with Pamela, and took it back with him to the Voorhees House.
In May 2008, Whitney Miller and her boyfriend, Mike, found the mummified remains of Pamela's decapitated head in a hole in the bathroom wall in the dilapidated Voorhees House.  As Mike pulled the head out and saw it, he dropped it into the sink below the hole in shock and disgust.
Jason kidnapped Whitney Miller after murdering her boyfriend, Mike, and the rest of her friends, as she bore a strong physical resemblance to Pamela.  Whitney was presented with the locket, eventually figuring out its' meaning.  When Whitney's brother, Clay Miller, came to rescue her in June, the pair defeated Jason and tossed the locket into Crystal Lake with him.
==Alternate Versions==
In the comic Jason vs.Leatherface, Pamela appears as Doris and is shown murdering her husband, Elias, with a machete.  This comic is not considered canon for these and other reasons.
In the novel, Friday the 13th:  Mother's Day, Pamela's severed head led hunter, Joe Travers to Jason's hockey mask, which led him to be possessed by Jason's spirit.  Pamela's hold was broken when Carly McDonnell shot the head to pieces.  This novel is a part of the Crystal Lake Books series, which makes the plot for Freddy vs. Jason impossible.
==Trivia==
*Pamela Voorhees is the first killer in the entire Friday the 13th series.
*She is the only killer in the entire series, excluding Part 5, where Jason isn't the main killer.
*Pamela Voorhees was only seen for thirteen minutes in the entire film of Friday the 13th (1980) and that makes her the only character being billed as the main cast to have a very limited role in the entire film.  She was played by Betsy Palmer in this role.
*Pamela Voorhees is the one of two characters of the original film in 1980 to appear in the sequel, Part 2, along with Alice Hardy.  Her appearance, however, was either flashbacks or her severed head on Jason's shrine.
*Pamela's death is the only reason Jason began his mass killing spree and killed about 200 or more teens and adults.  If Pamela was never killed by Alice Hardy, then all those others that were killed by Jason would still be alive.
*In Elder Scrolls 4:  Oblivion, there's a lighthouse with a basement.  During one of the Dark Brotherhood quests, you get access to the basement where the player finds a decapitated head in a state of decay sitting on a plate called "Mother's Head", which is a reference to Pamela Voorhees being she was decapitated and put in a shrine.
==Appearances==
===Films===
*Friday the 13th (1980)
*Friday the 13th Part 2 (Corpse, hallucinations, and flashbacks only)
*Friday the 13th Part 3 (Hallucinations only)
*Friday the 13th Part 4: The Final Chapter (Flashbacks and tombstone only)
*Freddy vs. Jason (Hallucinations only)
*Friday the 13th (2009)
===Comics===
*Jason vs.Leatherface (1995; Flashbacks as Doris Voorhees, non-canonical only)
*Jason X Special (2005)
*Friday the 13th:  Jason vs. Jason X (2006; Flashbacks only)
*Friday the 13th (2006 to 2007; Flashbacks only)
*Friday the 13th:  Pamela's Tale (2007)
*Friday the 13th:  How I Spent My Summer Vacation (2007; Flashbacks and tombstone only)
*Freddy vs. Jason vs. Ash (2007 to 2008; Hallucinations only)
*Freddy vs. Jason vs. Ash:  The Nightmare Warriors (2009; Hallucinations only)
===Novels===
*Friday the 13th (1987)
*Friday the 13th Part 2 (1988; Corpse and hallucinations only)
*Friday the 13th Part 3 (1988; Hallucinations only)
*Friday the 13th:  Mother's Day (1994; Non-canonical only)
*Freddy vs. Jason (2003; Hallucinations only)
*Jason X:  Death Moon (2005; Hologram only)
*Friday the 13th:  Hell Lake (2005)
*Friday the 13th:  The Jason Strain (2006; Hologram only)
*Friday the 13th:  Carnival of Maniacs (2006)
===Video Games===
*Friday the 13th (1989; A decapitated floating head and a hidden boss)