The Laughing Doll

It was a humid Tuesday night in late July, and the old farmhouse my family had rented for the summer creaked and groaned like a tired beast. I was seventeen, staying in the attic bedroom that smelled of mothballs and old pine. The digital clock on the nightstand glowed 10:37 PM, and sleep refused to come. I lay on my back, staring at the exposed beams, tracing the water stains that looked like faces. A floorboard popped somewhere below, then silence. Then, from just outside my door — which was closed, I swear — came a sound that made my blood run cold: a high-pitched, tittering giggle, like a small child playing a game. But there were no kids in the house; my aunt and uncle were downstairs watching a muted horror film on the laptop, and my cousins were in college. The giggle was followed by a clatter, as if a handful of marbles had spilled on the wood floor. My heart slammed against my ribs. I didn’t move, didn’t breathe.

The laughter swelled, filling the hallway, but it wasn’t just one child. It was a chorus, a dozen children laughing together, their voices overlapping in a chaotic, gleeful harmony. I choked on my own spit and curled into a ball under the thin sheet. My brain conjured an image against my will: a girl of about four, with a dark bob and bangs, dressed in a yellow sundress, sitting cross-legged on the landing. She was surrounded by antique dolls — porcelain faces, cracked lips, button eyes. She was making them dance, and they were laughing with her, their tiny wooden joints clicking like castanets. The image was so vivid it felt like a memory. The laughter grew so loud that I thought my eardrums would burst. Then, as abruptly as it started, it stopped. A final, single giggle, then nothing. The hallway was silent, save for the hum of the old refrigerator humming two floors below.

I stayed frozen for what felt like an hour, my eyes fixed on the gap under the door. No shadows moved. The air was still and heavy. When I finally managed to breathe, I felt a wave of exhaustion wash over me, and I fell asleep with the light on.

The next morning, I asked my aunt if she had any visitors. She said no. She saw the fear on my face and asked what had happened. I told her the truth. She paled and went to the kitchen, returning with a dusty photograph album. ‘This was my grandmother’s house before she died,’ she said, flipping through the pages. She stopped at a faded picture from the 1950s. It showed a little girl with a dark bob and bangs, wearing a yellow dress, sitting in a rocking chair, holding a porcelain doll. My blood ran cold again. ‘That’s your great-aunt Mary,’ she said softly. ‘She died of scarlet fever when she was four, right in the hallway outside your room. My grandmother kept her dolls in a trunk in the attic. They’re still up there, in the corner.’ I didn’t sleep a wink that night. But what I found the next morning made the laughter seem like a blessing. Behind the trunk, in the dust, was a small handprint — too small for any adult — pressed into the floorboards, as if someone had been playing a game of tag, and had just barely gotten away.