The haunted doll on my lap’s name is Molly.
My friend had texted me a photo of her tied up to a milk crate on the side of the highway roughly thirty minutes ago. “HAUNTED DOLL FOR SALE” was scrawled on a torn piece of cardboard beside her. “LEGIT SCAREY AF [sic].”
“Corner of eighth and Redland,” he also included. “Thought of you.”
My friends should know better.
They know I have no self-control when it comes to this sort of thing.
They should’ve known I would get my shoes on and grab my keys, peel out of the driveway, weave fanatically in and out of rush hour traffic, locate the discarded oddity and check for bugs, hypodermic needles, or the makings of a pipe bomb, and promptly bring that thing back to my apartment for a thorough inspection and a seance.
I text him back a photo of the doll now in my possession, who is, most notably, missing part of her face.
She also has some leaves in her hair.
His response was immediate, succinct, and an accurate reflection of the situation: “LOL.”
I’ve started collecting “haunted” items in my paranormal adventures, road trips, urban exploring, and stuff that relatives “don’t want in their house anymore” for reasons unknown.
Nothing bad has happened. To my knowledge, things haven’t wandered across the living room on their own.
Yet.
“If anything happens to me,” I text my friend. “It was in the name of RESEARCH!”
I get a thumbs-up emoji.
I like dead peoples’ things. Some of them have a good and cozy backstory (the cast-iron donut maker that has been passed down in my family for generations), others a more sinister previous life (the chipped glass top of a mid-1800s morphine bottle from the fields of Gettysburg).
A lock hair from an old German Bible.
Antler sheddings from a legendary haunted forest.
The 1930s ventriloquist dummy whose jaw dislocates at random.
When you inherit an object, you inherit its memories, its journey. And I like things that have a story, preferably a spooky story. A story beyond fresh paint, shrink-wrapped, factory-direct. A story like Molly’s. What incredibly absurd, complicated, and potentially nefarious sequence of events had to have occurred for her to get herself in that predicament on the highway?
We’ll never know.
So, like every other piece of curiosity paraphernalia, skeletal decor, and series of candle scraps throughout my apartment, Molly will probably get placed in a spot that will ultimately become Just Another Oddity to Dust Off.
(Upon entering my homestead for the first time, it is worth noting that it may be unclear to the visitor whether I am a Good Witch or a Bad Witch based on my chosen cozy-macabre aesthetic. I often think of this when the maintenance man arrives to repair yet another blown fuse.)
I’ve always loved the paranormal culture. I love our fascination with black, with ink, with the latest app to communicate with the dead. We are people who have been through things that are still a little taboo and worrisome to talk openly about yet we create conventions and opportunities to collectively indulge in our shared weirdness. At one such event, I talked to an expert on shadow people, got my chakras cleansed, purchased an EMF detector, and took a selfie with a life-size alien statue all in the diameter of fifty feet (and for a chunk of change).
The inn where I stayed for said convention had its own paranormal activity to boot: a disembodied sneeze outside my door in the middle of the night (“Gesundheit,” I said to no one in particular), and a stack of coins left on my bedside table in the morning.
None of the paranormal activity in my life has made sense. Often, I’ve found it to be absurd, benign, and sometimes just plain annoying. When I’m driving home late at night and a large and lumbering pixelated monster of a wolf blurs past the front of my car and disappears into a grove of trees, I find myself under the prickly impression that had I hit this “creature,” I would have driven right through it.
Who do you go to when you experience something that’s miraculous and strange (or maybe traumatic) that cannot be explained by conventional laws of physics? What professional help is out there that will not hand you a rosary or a prescription for Seroquel?
Not everyone who asks their mom why Grandma is still walking through the house six months after she died gets the response, “Yeah, Grandma does that sometimes.”
They get: “You’re imagining things.”
Or: “It was just a dream.”
Or worse: “Stop it.”
They get rejection of their own awareness and a refusal to discuss the matter any further.
I’m fortunate to have grown up in a home where talking about weird death-stuff was commonplace, if not outright encouraged. The existence of the supernatural was of frequent discussion at dinnertime, and I had been to over half a dozen funerals by the time I was ten.
At 38, I got the cremains of my beloved cat tattooed onto my wrist. The day after I put her down, I binge-watched serial killer documentaries. I guess we deal with death in our own weird ways.
But how do we deal with life?
The paranormal culture is one of curious souls whose only recourse is to research the paranormal world for ourselves, thank you very much. There’s no 9-1-1 for a paranormal encounter. There’s no one to confide in but each other. We have to reflect on our mindscapes and others of similar darkness. We investigate, we write, we befriend people who will text us about an abandoned creepy doll on the side of the highway.
We deal with life as strangely as we want to.
The haunted doll on my lap is nothing more than a writing prompt. This story wouldn’t exist without hers. A bizarre set of circumstances indeed, but does that make her haunted, or just another oddity to dust off?
I brush a leaf out of Molly’s hair and confide in her that I am merely a lazy ghosthunter who boldly accumulates items of questionable backstories for the sake of a good story to tell. Ligrothism with a morbid twist.
I leave Molly on the back patio propped against an old flower pot. The rusty railroad spike I place across her lap comes from an abandoned stretch of old track that’s notorious for sightings of a phantom train.
Can’t be too careful.
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About the Author
Always on the lookout for the next weirdest thing to add to her obituary, Kjersti goes through life with her heart on her sleeve, her head in the clouds, and her cat on her shoulders. Her essays have appeared in Haunted Magazine, American Paranormal Magazine, and The Feminine Macabre. She is a State Toastmasters Champion (2023) and is the newest addition to Mad City Ghost Walks (“The Scariest Tour in Town!”). Kjersti enjoys having a foot in both worlds and advocates for the continued research of the paranormal (and leaving the world a little weirder than you found it). Follow her on Instagram @kjee83
