Melissa Strickland

*"Rachel, there is a center to Ashford Falls, and you're not it!!" - Melissa Strickland*

**Melissa Strickland** is a native of Ashford Falls, the daughter of Carolyn Strickland, whose family hails from nearby Troy, New York. She also has a sister named Samantha Strickland and family in Collinsport, Maine.

Born in 1960, Melissa's family was once very wealthy, but a series of bad investments destroyed the family fortune and the rest was taken by corrupt lawyers ironically hired to restrain the damage. To survive, Carolyn moved with her parents to Ashford Falls to take residence in one of the few family homes still in the possession of the family. Located at the end of Owens Street, the home was once on the outskirts of town near Haverstraw Canyon where Melissa and her sister once ran loose over a rural countryside of distant and dilapidated houses, but her father sold off sections of the property to Lincoln Hedison to build suburban homes along what is now Haverstraw Road, turning what was once completely rural into modern suburban homes during the Early Seventies property boom.

In her youth, Melissa was well know to her family to be talkative and given to a wild imagination, often telling wild stories from details she saw or experienced in town. While Samantha was a young beauty queen at eight, Melissa was exaggerating stories about herself, claiming she was psychic or secretly a costumed crime-fighter. She is possibly behind many of the haunting legends to come from the Hathaway Mansion, Winchester Cathedral and Haverstraw Canyon itself. Attending Ashford Falls High School, her stories turned into rumors about her classmates, particularly Rachel Hedison, her high school rival, who she accused of dabbling in witchcraft and sleeping in a coffin. As a Halloween prank, she encouraged Russell Coleman and Danny Featherstone to help her steal a coffin from the Conway Funeral Home to put in the school basement as "proof" of her claims against Rachel. She was also friends with Bobbi Pierce and Maddie Harrington.

In high school, Melissa dated Danny on and off until he started seeing Janet Dubois. She later turned to seeing William Coleman, Russell's younger brother, in order to get on the high school paper, "The Badger." Despite her effort, she wasn't interested in journalism and instead had interests in becoming a writer and film-maker. After high school, she followed Nikki Baldwin to California, where she dabbled briefly in acting classes, but the anxiety of the industry eventually got to her and she fled back home with money from her mother.

As per her mother's wishes, Melissa took classes at Ashford Falls Christian Normal trying to determine her life path. Connecting with William again, she got a job handling the circulation of the local newspaper, Ashford Falls Gazette, which later expanded in 1986 into its own TV news outlet through WTEN News out of Albany, with on-air talent like Quentin Baldwin, Deborah Nordoff and Diana Freeling. When Freeling left for a higher paying job in Albany, Melissa talked William into letting her cover the Ashford Falls Second Bicentennial Founders Day in 1988 during which time local mechanic Len Snedeker outed himself as a cross-dresser. Competing with Deborah for field work, Melissa mostly covered the local fluff pieces, like Halloween events at the Hathaway Mansion, Fourth of July picnics at the Ashford Falls Scenic Lookout and the 1991 Ashford Falls Public Library auction when Jack Gates auctioned off then bought back his own Ferrari. Eventually feeling she was undervalued and unappreciated, a year later, she locked Deborah in the TV news crew in order to cover the fire at the home of Helen Caldwell for the TV news, getting punched out on air by Deborah afterward.

Effervescent and animated, Melissa became a small local "celebrity" in Ashford Falls due to her on-air antics, curbed only by her sister, Samantha Strickland, the local deputy sheriff. Her ability to stymie and insert comedic overtures in her features, particularly during the activities of the Children of the Sun in town and the later trial of Carter Hedison complicit in his wife's murder. Melissa also used her local notoriety to heavily endorse Sabrina Collins for mayor in 1995, pulling support from Ted Shaw, Danny Featherstone, Russell Coleman and Daniel Waverly.