The Doll’s Return

In the sweltering summer of 1987, in a cramped apartment complex in Wahiawa, Oahu, the Nakamura children—twelve-year-old Leilani, her ten-year-old brother Kanoa, and their eight-year-old cousin Miki—found a dusty Ouija board in the back of a communal storage closet. It was a rainy afternoon, and the power was out, so they set up the board on the living room floor, lit a few candles, and began to play. They asked silly questions—’Who will win the school spelling bee?’—and the planchette slid to letters that spelled ‘M-A-L-I-A.’ They’d never heard that name. It gave them a thrill, and they continued until the rain stopped and the lights flickered back on. That night, they put the board away in the closet, but Leilani had a strange dream: a woman with long black hair stood at the foot of her bed, whispering, ‘You opened the door.’

A few days later, while playing with their Barbie dolls in the living room, Leilani placed her favorite doll, a sparkly ‘Mermaid Barbie,’ on the floor and went to grab another doll from the toy box. When she turned back, the Barbie was standing upright, taking slow, deliberate steps across the linoleum. It moved as if it were alive, its plastic knees bending stiffly. The children froze, then screamed, and ran out of the room. When they returned, the doll was lying on its side where it had been. Terrified, they threw the Ouija board into the dumpster behind the building. The next morning, the board was back in the closet, smelling faintly of mold and brine.

Meanwhile, at the Nakamura home, their mother, Elena, had been ill for weeks. She passed away quietly in her sleep, and the family was devastated. A week later, their father, Tomas, was in bed when he heard a woman’s voice crying softly right behind his head. He snapped on the bedside lamp, but the room was empty. The sobbing continued, rising in pitch until it became a wailing moan, and he felt a cold breath on his neck. He yanked the covers over his head and lay there, shaking, until dawn. He never spoke of it again, but he started sleeping in the living room.

Leilani’s grandmother, Malia, was a strong Hawaiian woman who visited often. One evening, she came to the apartment for dinner and suddenly stopped in the doorway, her face pale as death. She stared at a corner of the room where no one was standing, and whispered, ‘I see him. He tells me that your marriage will fall apart.’ Tomas and Elena were still together, but Malia insisted the demon was real. Over the years, Tomas and Elena would have twelve children, proving the prediction wrong, but Malia never set foot in that apartment again.

Years earlier, when Tomas was a boy living in a plantation house in Ewa, he had a terrifying encounter. One stormy night, he woke to see a shimmering figure hovering outside his bedroom window—a woman with hollow eyes and a gaping mouth, her form flickering like a heat haze. She let out a banshee wail that shook the glass panes, and then vanished into the rain. He told his parents, but they dismissed it as a nightmare. After his mother died, he recognized that same wail in the cries he heard in his bedroom.

And then there was the incident with Miki’s grandmother. After she passed away, Miki was staying with her family in a condo in Mililani. One afternoon, she was walking down the hallway when she saw her grandmother’s face peering out from under the table at the end of the corridor. The face smiled, but the eyes were wrong—milky white, like the drowned. Miki ran screaming, but no one else ever saw anything. She refused to go near that end of the hallway again.

Decades later, Leilani, now a mother herself, found the old Ouija board in a box of her childhood belongings in her garage. She recoiled, remembering the walking doll. But her youngest daughter, fascinated by the spooky board, pleaded to try it. Leilani refused, but that night, she dreamed of a woman with long black hair whispering, ‘You can’t throw me away.’ In the morning, the board was gone from the box, and her daughter was playing with a doll that moved on its own. Leilani knew then that the past never truly dies; it just waits for new hands to lead it back into the light.