an april ghost story
please don't let me be misunderstood
No matter what they say—no ghost respects a haunted doll. Every ghost knows it. Sure, sure, “every ghost is special in its own way,” that’s the kind of thing you hear. But ask a ghost to list hauntings it really admires, though, the kind of hauntings that might raise the bar for its own hopes and dreams—ask them those questions and pay attention. Or just say, who do you think is doing something interesting right now. You’ll never hear them mention a doll. It doesn’t happen.
Green ectoplasm billowing down the walls? That requires manifesting matter. Or take a simple, classic trick, like rearranging water droplets on a mirror to write out a message while your victim was showering. So many little details to attend to there (gender, military experience, ventilation of the room) that you might really only have a minute or two to get your words up, and then, naturally, you had to maintain it, keeping your letters strictly clear of droplets. That was a haunting. It took work and if you messed up even a little—misspelled a word or got caught moving around the droplets—you wouldn’t look scary, you’d just be silly.
Or haunting a house, that really takes something. You have to have a real origin story to haunt a house. Not just any ghost can do that.
In comparison, a haunted doll, well, it wasn’t much to speak of, was it? You started a foot or two from the finish line, really, in a doll. Especially if it was an old doll, the kind people found creepy already. Blink a couple times, turn your head once, say mama. Didn’t really seem like anything to brag about, did it?
Then again (a ghost haunting a doll might object) “not just any ghost” describes every ghost. There are no ghost schools, no ghost internships, no ghost cursi honorum. A ghost (the one haunting a doll might go on to say, if anybody cared) is born from intense emotions and attachments and experiences that the living have placed inside specific objects, so, really, every kind of haunting is equally impressive, it’s not merely polite to say so, it is in fact the truth.
Indeed (such a ghost might be tempted to insist, if it had an audience of any kind) surely it’s a mark of distinction for a small and singular object, like a doll, to draw out the emotions necessary to be haunted. A house, in which many people live and which is the site of many comings and goings and small tragedies, could hardly avoid being haunted if it stayed standing long enough. But a doll? A doll was not a guaranteed thing. Something really bad had to happen to haunt a doll.
A haunted doll might think all of these things and might even get halfway to saying them. But what would be the point? Nobody respects a haunted doll. Haunted dolls never even got to commiserate about this lack of respect. They might dream of meeting another haunted doll at a Goodwill or in the home of a collector, but some invisible ghost bureaucracy made sure there was only ever one haunted doll in a given location. Instead, friendless and misunderstood, a ghost inside a haunted doll would have no choice but to sit looking through the doll’s blank eyes in the doll’s blank face, waiting to blink or bobble its head at a passing cat or child or antiques dealer, depending on what sort of doll it was and how long it had been around.
Really (and this is where a ghost in a doll might even allow itself to be exasperated) it all comes down to a misunderstanding. What the other ghosts think, you see, is that, as a doll looks like a person, in other respects, a doll must be made like a person. Unlike the supreme attention and effort that must be sustained if one wants to haunt a house successfully, the ghost that haunts a doll (they assume) must have access to a sort of central nervous system. To haunt a house a ghost must be somehow conscious and coterminous with the whole of the house, must make a body out of this thing that is not a body. But a doll no doubt came with a control center, an easy place of command, for the use of any ghost that inhabited a body that was so clearly a body.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
This is what it’s like to haunt a doll.
Imagine is being positioned behind a great paper-mache head ten or twenty times your height. On your side of the head, the hollow side, over the years, you’ve rigged up ladders and cat walks and pulleys and levers and firemen’s poles. To do anything, you have to scurry up and down, from level to level. So if you want to blink and say “mama,” first you have to run up the ladders up to the eyes, and blink them, pulling first one pulley, then the next—though only somebody going through events on camera frame by frame could catch the delay, it’s still there, no matter how much you practice you still can’t bilocate, more’s the pity—then down the ladders to the mouth (if it moves) and the voice box (if there is one). Up again if you want to blink. Up, down, side to side, down, up, down.…
That’s haunting a doll. But as for talking—mama isn’t hard, sure, especially if it’s programmed in. But if you want to say something else, like your mommy and daddy are waiting for you on the other side, or even good old play with me, that’s a different story.
If you haunt a house you never have to talk. And then if you’re a ghost that re-enacts certain motions over and over, it’s easy for you to talk, you just say your lines. You, however, the ghost in a doll, you have to find the words. And you’ve got no reason to know words, yourself, because you aren’t the ghost of a person, you’re the ghost of an experience, and a child’s experience at that.
So constructing a sentence is like going down deep into a basement, down beneath the gigantic hollow head, you keep going and going and going until you reach a frozen place where the words are kept. It is so cold there the air itself is frozen. You have to hack and slash at the frozen space until you can reach the words you want. Then you must carry them, carefully, up and up and up with you, trying to remember what it was they were for, trying to remember the order they go in, and get them up so you can position yourself at the voice box and deliver each word carefully and precisely and then zoom off to the next part (turning the head, perhaps, it all depends a little on how your victim decides to play things), and sometimes you get up there and you’ve dropped a word, or you’ve forgotten what to say, or they’ve thawed out too much and melted back down the ladder, and you have nothing you can do, the moment passes, you will have to wait and wait for another opportunity.
But then even if you do scare the bejesus out of somebody, hell, even if you get them to kill themselves, it doesn’t change anything, it never gets easier, you’re always scrambling up and down the ladders, always dashing from pulley to pulley, always descending into the frozen basement at the core of the horror that made you to find words. There’s no endgame, there’s just doing this day after day after day until the doll gets destroyed or you get exorcised. Even humans don’t really respect a creepy doll, it’s like clowns, they’re just kitsch, but nevertheless you must move the eyes and the mouth and remember the sequences, over and over, because what else is there to do? So blink, nod. blink, nod. Mama. Try to keep it going. Get the words.
I’m lonely.
can’t
Play with me.
I
I I I I I I
when
it’s
you
it is
I am
don’t
it
pretty
I want
it is
Mama.
I want
I
I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I
I!
look
I!
I want—
I’m Sally. What’s your name?
I want—
Play with me.