Real Ghost Story: The Disappearing Doll – Realizing as a teen that the house I grew up in was haunted, this is my earliest memory of an occurrence that, as a child, I didn’t understand. I was born in 1977, four minutes later than my identical twin sister. Growing up, we did everything together.
When we were around five years old, Santa Claus left us each a doll under the Christmas tree. My sister’s wore a red satin dress and mine wore a satin blue. When you tilted them back, they cried and their eyes would close. Tilt them forward and the eyes would open.
One Saturday, we were playing on Mama and Daddy’s double bed. Mama always made the bed every single morning… You could bounce a quarter off of it. The comforter was tucked neatly under the pillows and the end was tucked tight between the mattress and footboard. To a couple of five year olds, the double bed felt like a King size. We had plenty of room to color, draw, play with our dolls, etc.
Mama was hanging out clothes that day, leaving us inside to play. We kept each other company and basically out of trouble. A couple of sheets of paper, a worn out box of crayons and my sister’s doll made the day spectacular playing on the ‘King size bed’. We were playing on top of the covers and other than a few wrinkles from us crawling around on top, the bed was still pristine.
We both had to use the bathroom, we always went together, so we walked out of the bedroom… Down the hall. We left behind the paper, the crayons and her doll. We weren’t gone two or three minutes at the most. We entered the bedroom at the same time and my sister turned to me and asked this simple question: “What did you do with my doll?” I told her I hadn’t done anything with her. We both looked on the bed, she wasn’t there. We looked on the floor, she wasn’t there. We climbed back on the bed that looked no different than when we left, except for the doll being gone.
While moving around, I found a lump at the foot of the bed. I slowly got off the bed. Lifted the comforter, couldn’t see the doll. Lifted the top sheet, couldn’t see the doll. Pulled the fitted sheet from the under the mattress, reached underneath and pulled the doll out. She was under the fitted sheet! I had to practically unmake the bed to get her out.
We ran to the backdoor only to find Mama halfway down the clothesline, still hanging out clothes. As children, we accused each other of hiding the doll. I knew I didn’t do it and she knew she didn’t do it, but in our minds, we were the only ones that could have. It wasn’t until we were half grown that we looked back at this encounter and realized that neither of us had hid the doll… This would be the start of strange occurrences for the next 15 years that we lived in the house…