Living as a hermit in the camp's forest, Jason was drawn to the bank of Crystal Lake by the cries of two women fighting. He arrived just in time to witness his long-lost mother's bloody demise and was horribly devastated. Alice, his mother's killer (in self defence), was trying to get over the massacre when Jason attacked her in her home, stabbing her in the head with an ice pick. Jason then returned to the forest. Five years later, a man named Paul Holt opened up a camp counselor training ground near the Camp Crystal Lake site. Jason, wearing a burlap sack (commonly misidentified as a pillow case) on his head to hide his disfigured face, went into the area to drive them out of his home. After dispatching six counselors, he struggled with a girl named Ginny, who drove a machete into Jason's shoulder. Ginny returned to the training ground with Holt and they locked themselves in one of the cabins. A few minutes later, Jason appeared to burst through the window and attacked the two remaining counselors. However, it is disputed whether this was only a hallucination by Ginny, who awoke to find herself being loaded into an ambulance and Holt nowhere to be seen (Making Friday The 13th: The Legend Of Camp Blood by David Grove, states that Holt was killed off camera), or that it really happened.

The next day Jason killed a couple living in a home near Crystal Lake and got new clothes. Then he made his way to a vacationing spot called Higgins Haven and killed 10 vacationing teenagers there. It was there where he replaced the burlap sack with the trademark hockey mask that he took from one of his victims. The one person who survived Jason's rampage, a girl named Chris Higgins, whose parents owned Higgins Haven and was attacked several years before by Jason, took an axe and gashed it into the left side of his head, knocking him out.

Believing Jason to be dead, the paramedics took his body to the Wessex County Morgue, where he soon afterward regained consciousness and promptly killed the coroner, and escaped.