What the hell...
It's as good a time as any. I am going out with a few guys from work here in a bit, but I will start this story at least... These stories won't be in chronological order, just because I like telling them in the order I heard or saw them.
My mother was the oldest of 3 kids. There was 4 years between her and her middle sister, Robin (bless her fledgling youth... she committed suicide a few years ago). There was 6 years between Robin and the youngest, Jenny.
When Jenny was 11 she broke her leg in 3 places doing a stupid stunt on her brand new bike. As a result she was bedridden in a cast for the first 2 weeks. Due to the accident the bicycle was put into the storage room in the basement. (Yes, THAT storage room)
Now if you do the math, my mother was 21 at this point, meaning my sister was 4, and I was not to be concieved for several months. My father was in Korea at the time serving as a radio tech in the army. So my mom was living in Vienna, Virginia with her parents while he was gone. This would be right about 30 years ago. One night they decided to go out to dinner. Jenny's bedridden and busy reading mounds of comic books they'd gotten to occupy her, so they promised to bring her something back as they weren't going to be gone too long. Nothing fancy, they were just going to some IHOP equivalent. (They are not the most sympathetic family around...)
So here she is alone at home reading away on some Fantastic Four comics. She hears something fall in the kitchen. She yells out to Lassie (yes, they had a border collie named Lassie... they let my mom name her), assuming the dog had gotten into something. Lassie stand up from the foot of the bed and looks at her. It was one of those captain's bed types witht he rows of drawers underneath, so when Lassie laid down on the floor you couldn't see her from the bed. So she yells to the cat (Sassy), assuming it must have been her. Sassy was a normally outside cat, so she'd come and go without anyone really knowing.
So she goes back to reading comics and instead flips to her pile of horror comics. I mean she's 11 years old at home alone at night... of course she's gong for the scare factor, right?
She's halfway through soem ghost story and hears a godawful screeching coming from the basement. Loud enough that the neighbors called to find out what it was. She assured them she was OK, and that everyone else had left so she wasn't sure what it was. They offered to come over and she said the door was probably locked and that she couldn't get out of bed to unlock it. So she told them the restaurant the family was at and asked them to call and try to get hold of them (time before cell phones...). They agreed and she hung up, now quite worried about what the noise was.
Then the singing started. The same type of singing I had heard, the doll's trademark. Nursery rhymes sung at a very high screechy pitch. And she said it was loud, too. Loud enough that it sounded like he was in the kitchen and yelling it out. (The stairs to the basement were just off the kitchen)
She was obviously terrified by this point. Lassie was too, apparently, because she started growling at the doorway and jumped up on the bed to hunker down next to Jenny to protect her. The singing goes on for what seemed like an eternity she said, but was probably only 5 or 10 minutes. Then she heard a loud crash from the basement. The singing stopped and the house went silent. She heard more crashing noises and then the singing started again. Jenny hid under the covers and prayed every prayer she could think of waiting for the family to come home.
They finally get home about 25 minutes later. They hear her crying and screaming for them to help her. Now all they knew was that the neighbors had heard a noise, and that now Jenny was crying and screaming. Naturally they assumed she was fucking around and fell out of bed on her broken leg.
Crying hysterically she tries to tell them what happened. My grandmother hears "doll" and "singing" and begins to berate my grandfather about the need to finally throw that fucking thing away (she cusses like a sailor... you'd like her LOL). He assures everyone that it was probably just Jenny's imagination, but he will go check it out.
My mother, always the ghost hunter, says she'd go with him. The go into the kitchen and find thing #1: Sassy sitting on the floor crying for her dinner, which was up on the counter. She couldn't get to it because her little wooden stepstool was gone. Not like pushed across the kitchen, but like missing.
So they go downstairs. They notice thing #2: there are white scratch marks across the floor leading to the storage room door, which is always kept closed and locked. My grandfather, assuming burglary, goes back upstairs to get a baseball bat they keep in the kitchen breakfast bar thingy. He comes back down with my mom and he readies the bat as she opens the door (which was startingly NOT locked) to let him go in swinging. All they see is the cat's stapladder it he middle of the room. He decides the thief must be in the washroom area so he turns around and crosses the hall to the washroom.
He dropped the bat as he saw the full explanation of what had happened. My mother rounds the doorway and see Jenny's brand new bicycle sitting in the middle of the washroom, kickstand out. There were boxes scattered about everywhere. It was a typical girl's bike, so it had the support bar that goes down from the handlbars to under the seat at a rather steep angle. ON that bar sat the doll. Not propped against the seat, not caught on anything. Balanced there. He had his head and body draped across the bar, and his arms and legs were hanging off the sides.
My grandfather picks him up and proceeds to spend the next 20 minutes trying to reprop the doll there. His natural assumption was that Jenny had been better off than she claimed and had hobbled down to set the doll there. So he set to debunking it. The doll has a wooden head, a stuffed chest, legs, and arms, and wooden hands and feet. The hands and feet do NOT have enough combined weight to act as an anchor for the head, period. While he kept trying that my mother tries to piece together what had happened. Between the storage room and the washroom was a little "tunnel" under the stairs that had a bunch of boxes under it. They boxes were there to block off the storage room from the washroom so that my aunts could go down to do the laundry without the fear of being watched. How that came to be is another story for later.
The boxes under the stairs were the boxes scattered all around the washroom, clearing a nice path between the rooms. The only scenario they can come up with (and believe you me I have tried a dozen or more times to go back and view that night just to find out... no such luck as of yet) is this one, and it seems insane: The doll was locked in the storage room with the bike. He wanted to ride it but couldn't reach. He tried to get out the door but it was locked. So he pushed his way through the tunnel under the stairs and out the washroom, up the stairs to the kitchen. He brought the stepladder back down, unlocked the storage door from the outside and brought the stool in. He climbed up on the bike and started singing to his victory.
Then he must have decided to go for a ride, and rode it under the stairs (plenty of room as the tunnel was like 5 feet high), knocking all the boxes out of his way as he did. Arriving in the washroom he stopped and sang out in joy from the ride and just sat there until they returned.
My grandfather never sat well with the explanation, and insists that someone somehow tied the doll to the bike with some kind of inviisble thread or something, but he tried and tried and could never get the doll to balance on the bar the way it had. There was no signs of adhesive or string remnants, either.
Needless to say, the boxes were put back under the stairs, the doll was put back in the storage closet and locked in. The bike was moved out into the garage. And my grandfather did all the laundry for the next 6 months.
Take it as you will, I have no reason to doubt any of it, even though it seems surreal and crazy. When you've heard more about the doll you may find it a bit less insane as well...
Peace & Light,
+Shawn
My mother was the oldest of 3 kids. There was 4 years between her and her middle sister, Robin (bless her fledgling youth... she committed suicide a few years ago). There was 6 years between Robin and the youngest, Jenny.
When Jenny was 11 she broke her leg in 3 places doing a stupid stunt on her brand new bike. As a result she was bedridden in a cast for the first 2 weeks. Due to the accident the bicycle was put into the storage room in the basement. (Yes, THAT storage room)
Now if you do the math, my mother was 21 at this point, meaning my sister was 4, and I was not to be concieved for several months. My father was in Korea at the time serving as a radio tech in the army. So my mom was living in Vienna, Virginia with her parents while he was gone. This would be right about 30 years ago. One night they decided to go out to dinner. Jenny's bedridden and busy reading mounds of comic books they'd gotten to occupy her, so they promised to bring her something back as they weren't going to be gone too long. Nothing fancy, they were just going to some IHOP equivalent. (They are not the most sympathetic family around...)
So here she is alone at home reading away on some Fantastic Four comics. She hears something fall in the kitchen. She yells out to Lassie (yes, they had a border collie named Lassie... they let my mom name her), assuming the dog had gotten into something. Lassie stand up from the foot of the bed and looks at her. It was one of those captain's bed types witht he rows of drawers underneath, so when Lassie laid down on the floor you couldn't see her from the bed. So she yells to the cat (Sassy), assuming it must have been her. Sassy was a normally outside cat, so she'd come and go without anyone really knowing.
So she goes back to reading comics and instead flips to her pile of horror comics. I mean she's 11 years old at home alone at night... of course she's gong for the scare factor, right?
She's halfway through soem ghost story and hears a godawful screeching coming from the basement. Loud enough that the neighbors called to find out what it was. She assured them she was OK, and that everyone else had left so she wasn't sure what it was. They offered to come over and she said the door was probably locked and that she couldn't get out of bed to unlock it. So she told them the restaurant the family was at and asked them to call and try to get hold of them (time before cell phones...). They agreed and she hung up, now quite worried about what the noise was.
Then the singing started. The same type of singing I had heard, the doll's trademark. Nursery rhymes sung at a very high screechy pitch. And she said it was loud, too. Loud enough that it sounded like he was in the kitchen and yelling it out. (The stairs to the basement were just off the kitchen)
She was obviously terrified by this point. Lassie was too, apparently, because she started growling at the doorway and jumped up on the bed to hunker down next to Jenny to protect her. The singing goes on for what seemed like an eternity she said, but was probably only 5 or 10 minutes. Then she heard a loud crash from the basement. The singing stopped and the house went silent. She heard more crashing noises and then the singing started again. Jenny hid under the covers and prayed every prayer she could think of waiting for the family to come home.
They finally get home about 25 minutes later. They hear her crying and screaming for them to help her. Now all they knew was that the neighbors had heard a noise, and that now Jenny was crying and screaming. Naturally they assumed she was fucking around and fell out of bed on her broken leg.
Crying hysterically she tries to tell them what happened. My grandmother hears "doll" and "singing" and begins to berate my grandfather about the need to finally throw that fucking thing away (she cusses like a sailor... you'd like her LOL). He assures everyone that it was probably just Jenny's imagination, but he will go check it out.
My mother, always the ghost hunter, says she'd go with him. The go into the kitchen and find thing #1: Sassy sitting on the floor crying for her dinner, which was up on the counter. She couldn't get to it because her little wooden stepstool was gone. Not like pushed across the kitchen, but like missing.
So they go downstairs. They notice thing #2: there are white scratch marks across the floor leading to the storage room door, which is always kept closed and locked. My grandfather, assuming burglary, goes back upstairs to get a baseball bat they keep in the kitchen breakfast bar thingy. He comes back down with my mom and he readies the bat as she opens the door (which was startingly NOT locked) to let him go in swinging. All they see is the cat's stapladder it he middle of the room. He decides the thief must be in the washroom area so he turns around and crosses the hall to the washroom.
He dropped the bat as he saw the full explanation of what had happened. My mother rounds the doorway and see Jenny's brand new bicycle sitting in the middle of the washroom, kickstand out. There were boxes scattered about everywhere. It was a typical girl's bike, so it had the support bar that goes down from the handlbars to under the seat at a rather steep angle. ON that bar sat the doll. Not propped against the seat, not caught on anything. Balanced there. He had his head and body draped across the bar, and his arms and legs were hanging off the sides.
My grandfather picks him up and proceeds to spend the next 20 minutes trying to reprop the doll there. His natural assumption was that Jenny had been better off than she claimed and had hobbled down to set the doll there. So he set to debunking it. The doll has a wooden head, a stuffed chest, legs, and arms, and wooden hands and feet. The hands and feet do NOT have enough combined weight to act as an anchor for the head, period. While he kept trying that my mother tries to piece together what had happened. Between the storage room and the washroom was a little "tunnel" under the stairs that had a bunch of boxes under it. They boxes were there to block off the storage room from the washroom so that my aunts could go down to do the laundry without the fear of being watched. How that came to be is another story for later.
The boxes under the stairs were the boxes scattered all around the washroom, clearing a nice path between the rooms. The only scenario they can come up with (and believe you me I have tried a dozen or more times to go back and view that night just to find out... no such luck as of yet) is this one, and it seems insane: The doll was locked in the storage room with the bike. He wanted to ride it but couldn't reach. He tried to get out the door but it was locked. So he pushed his way through the tunnel under the stairs and out the washroom, up the stairs to the kitchen. He brought the stepladder back down, unlocked the storage door from the outside and brought the stool in. He climbed up on the bike and started singing to his victory.
Then he must have decided to go for a ride, and rode it under the stairs (plenty of room as the tunnel was like 5 feet high), knocking all the boxes out of his way as he did. Arriving in the washroom he stopped and sang out in joy from the ride and just sat there until they returned.
My grandfather never sat well with the explanation, and insists that someone somehow tied the doll to the bike with some kind of inviisble thread or something, but he tried and tried and could never get the doll to balance on the bar the way it had. There was no signs of adhesive or string remnants, either.
Needless to say, the boxes were put back under the stairs, the doll was put back in the storage closet and locked in. The bike was moved out into the garage. And my grandfather did all the laundry for the next 6 months.
Take it as you will, I have no reason to doubt any of it, even though it seems surreal and crazy. When you've heard more about the doll you may find it a bit less insane as well...
Peace & Light,
+Shawn