Sam and Dean spent their childhood moving from town to town every few weeks while their father hunted supernatural beings, seeking to exact revenge on their mother's killer. Consequently, they lived frugal childhoods and struggled to form long-term connections with others. Sam believed that his mother had died in a car accident and that his father was a traveling salesman, until the age of 8 (1991), when he read John's meticulous hand-written journal entries, describing intricate details of his hunts (as well as creature-related literature and obsessive cataloguing of demonic omens related to Azazel), compelling Dean to confirm the existence of the paranormal. Soon after, Sam seriously considered fleeing his life, as a runaway, with his imaginary friend, Sully (1991), but ultimately rejected the opportunity to escape and expelled Sully from his life. Sam started hunting alongside his brother and father at the age of 8-12, assuming increased responsibilities around the time that Dean left temporary foster care at Sonny's (1995); however, he began wanting a normal life without monsters again. A couple of years later (1997), a teacher, Mr. Wyatt, took interest in Sam, encouraging him to carve out a life away from the "family business" upon reading his writing assignment: a precocious story about a werewolf hunt, which Wyatt interpreted as an allegory and an in-depth character study about family dynamics. Throughout the rest of his teens, he continued to provide support to John and Dean, including in an advisory capacity for a kitsune hunt (1998) which he stumbled into personally in direct connection to meeting teenaged Amy Pond. At nineteen, after a heated argument with John, Sam matriculated into Stanford University, thus finally splintering from his family and their hunting crusade, until the main story events unfolded in Season 1, pulling him back into a role of saving people.