As The Raven Dreams Podcast - Reddit Ghost Stories (Vol. 31) - A HAUNTED DOLL

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to board of Viarai. Embarked and profite. Embarked and relax. Cirot, bookine. Oh, that also. And profite. Viaray, the voice that we love that we love. Okay.

Starting point is 00:00:25 So I wrote this a long time ago, before I even considered joining Reddit. And the events of this story start 28-ish years ago. It's long-winded, and the first part of an anthology that I wrote, but it's a good read, and true, as far as I can remember it. Some of it may have been hallucinations or a child's imagination, but outside the scope of this story.

Starting point is 00:00:51 I've never been prone to visual or auditory hallucinations, even after falling ten-ish feet into solid cement. Think whatever you want. I stand by this as being 100% true in the first half of a series in the most terrifying encounter, I've ever had. So, this one. This is the beginning of the most terrifying paranormal thing that has ever happened to me.

Starting point is 00:01:20 Technically, this should be titled The Doll, since it spans several years and several locations, and the central theme is a ventriloquist dummy I got as a child. But it all begins in the basement. I lived in a house up in the very northern tip of Idaho, around about 1992, to 1993. The house is still there today, still in exactly the same shape outside, but I hope for the sake of the current owners

Starting point is 00:01:49 that they remodeled and repaired the basement. And that basement wasn't huge. It had a large main room, basically a wide hallway, that had two doors leading to two small bedrooms. There was an uncarpeted cement floor and a little nook under the stairs opposite the two rooms that we used

Starting point is 00:02:09 for storage. In the spring, during the melt, the groundwater would leak into the basement due to faulty sump pumps. Because of that, the whole place would smell of mildew and mold. I'm fairly certain I spent a small chunk of my life living with some sort of mold in my bedroom, probably not healthy, and it could have accounted for the weird things that have happened in that dingy basement. I would believe that if the events that span this tale hadn't taken me into my adult life and several states away. It all started with a puppet, a snail puppet named Snaily. When I was about six, my family gave him to me. He was a glorified sock puppet with a long tube neck for my arm and a shell on the back.

Starting point is 00:03:02 I was very good at making it talk for me and giving it expression. I even figured out how to make him retreat into the shell when he was upset. I really enjoyed it and planned on making a life out of it, so much so that on my seventh birthday, my grandparents gave me a Muppet. He was a gray furry fellow with a big felt mouth and a stick attached to one arm. His leg ended in Velcro-covered feet that could wrap around me and seemed like he was sitting on my hip. I fell in love.

Starting point is 00:03:34 He was an extension of me. Always on my hip, always cracking jokes. I loved that little fuzzball and started looking up ventriloquism at my library. My grandfather caught wind of my interests and decided he would help me by getting me a ventriloquism dummy. It was a cheap replica of Charlie McCarthy, the famous dummy that all Hollywood dummies are based on.

Starting point is 00:04:00 That doll was awesome to the seven-year-old budding ventriloquist inside me. I didn't care that he only had a cheap pull string to make him talk, and that his velvet hat fell off his head every time I moved him. I loved him. When my family split, he ended up going with my father, and I lived with my mom in Utah. Eventually, we bounced from place to place, splitting our time between my mother and father in different states.

Starting point is 00:04:30 Thus, in the final half of fifth grade, I moved back to Idaho, into my father's new home, and into a hellish nightmare that was that basement. When I moved back in, I got a lot of toys my father had been storing, including Charlie. By that time, I was nearly 11, and I had forgotten about my love for ventriloquism. But seeing Charlie again reignited that flame, and I was at it again, until a couple months later when I got my first computer. Suddenly, learning Doss Basic and playing Wolfenstein 3D became my new obsession. I cast Charlie into my moldy closet and moved on to more adult things.

Starting point is 00:05:16 Eventually, he was put away by my father for safekeeping. From the moment I moved into that house, the basement was my greatest fear. When I found out my dad was sticking me in the dingy unfinished basement, basement bedroom with no carpet and mold on the walls, I pitched a fit. Not because it was gross, but because I was terrified of that whole space. The stairs leading up to the house were open-faced. I could see into the small storage space under the stairs, and it always felt like something was back there waiting to grab my legs.

Starting point is 00:05:52 I used to book it up the stairs at top speed in hopes to avoid that fate. The only light in the main room was a single bulb, hanging at the end of a long wire. It wasn't designed to be like that. The wire should have been in the ceiling, and the bulb was hanging from the mount that should have been attached to the ceiling. My father mounted it twice during my stay in that house. Both times it was down and swinging within a week. There was a wood-burning stove in the middle of the main room. It needed to be fed every couple hours during the wood.

Starting point is 00:06:26 winter to keep the house warm. Of course, as someone who's terrified of the basement, the job of feeding the fire fell on my scrawny little shoulders. So, it was one day in the middle of winter. I was in the basement feeding the fire. Since I had moved in there, I had experienced weird things. Bumps in the night, stuff falling off a shelf while no one was near, the normal. However, this was a little. was the first time I had lived there that something truly terrifying happened to me. As I was struggling to open the door to the stove, I heard a deep, guttural growl from below the stairs to my right. I froze, hoping it was my dog hunting mice and slowly, without looking

Starting point is 00:07:16 at the stairs, loaded the fire with a couple logs. I closed the door to the stove and slowly turned to look at the stairs. When behind me I heard a voice clear as day, whispered in a harsh, deep, male tone. I lost my shit. I screamed and ran up the stairs. I think I only touched

Starting point is 00:07:39 three steps of the 13 leading up to the main house. I ran to the back of the house, a new addition, by new, I mean 40 years old, and huddled under the blankets crying. I never wanted to go back into the basement, but eventually I had to

Starting point is 00:07:55 back to my room. From that point, all, every bump, every scrape, every little sound, had me on edge while I was down there. Time passed. Eventually, I put the voice into the back of my mind, convincing myself that I had imagined it. I always had a rational mind, one that I used to explain away all the strange things that happened to me. Finally, as things tend to do, it was pushing, into the back of my mind, and I lived with just a general fear of the basement again. Until one day, again, while feeding the fire, I got a sense of dread in my chest. Something I couldn't put my finger on, but it got my pulse racing. I began to nope it up the stairs when the one thing I had always feared happened.

Starting point is 00:08:50 Something grabbed my leg from under the stairs. I freaked and went light-headed. I couldn't figure out what was happening. I couldn't decide if this was real life or a dream. I know I jumped backwards. I was nearly at the top of the stairs, and I didn't land on a single step on the way down. The way my body twisted as I pulled away from something holding me

Starting point is 00:09:12 had me land square on my back on solid concrete. I felt the wind rush from my lungs, and then I passed out. I don't know if it was from the impact or fear. I just know I lost consciousness. I don't know how long I was out. I do know when I came to my head hurt more than it ever had in my life. I was dizzy and not fully aware of my surroundings, and I crawled up the stairs and into the main part of the house.

Starting point is 00:09:41 I laid down on the couch and fell asleep. My dad got home a few hours later and woke me up. I told him what happened. He looked me over for any serious injury before telling me it must have been a dream. I was tired and lethargic for a few days after that, but eventually I felt normal, and I ended up deciding that it had to be a dream. Stuff like that doesn't happen in real life. Thinking back on this now, I may have suffered a head injury and should have gone to the hospital, but my dad was very much the walk-it-off type.

Starting point is 00:10:18 My brother knew of my fears. He would torment me as much as possible, jumping out at me. or sending me to get things from the basement just because he knew I was afraid. The worst thing he did to me, though, was move stuff around my room at night. My room didn't have a door, so it was easy to sneak in and move stuff around. He would put my toy chest in front of the doorway, or turn my desk upside down and put my chair on it. Never anything subtle about it.

Starting point is 00:10:50 I didn't want to fuel his behavior, so I never got upset about it. it. I just moved things back. My mom always told me he would grow tired of his pranks if he didn't think they were working. Old school don't feed the trolls moment. Eventually it stopped, or so I thought. One night, my brother's prankster spirit came out in full force. I woke up to a loud knock on my closet wall. I looked over and in the light of the nightlight, I could see my dummy Charlie sitting on top of my toy chest, facing me. I laughed, a little nervous laugh. Charlie had been put away in a garbage bag with all the other stuffed animals I didn't use any longer. The bag was stored in a shed in the backyard. I was proud of my brother for the effort. This had more subtlety in class than his other

Starting point is 00:11:44 pranks. I fell back asleep. A while later, I was awoken to another knock, and I sat up hoping to catch my brother doing something else. This time, Charlie was on the floor sitting upright, facing my bed. I rolled my eyes and sighed. I respected the conviction, but I was too tired to deal with it anymore, so I fell back to sleep. One last time I was woken up, this final time the doll was on my chest. I flipped and ran into my brother's room yelling at him to stop messing with me.

Starting point is 00:12:21 The only problem? that his room was empty, and it slowly dawned on me that he hadn't been home all day, and was planning on spending the night at his friend's Nick's house. I had been alone in the basement all night. It was quite some time later that I discovered he had never moved anything in my room. In fact, by all accounts, my brother did everything he could to not go in my room because he cave him the creeps. I felt like I was going insane. I couldn't fathom how the doll ended up on my chest

Starting point is 00:12:57 or how it got inside in the first place. I ran upstairs crying uncontrollably. My dad's door was locked, so I climbed onto the couch and fell asleep with my face buried in fear. The next day, I woke up on the couch and felt like a dream. Still, I was done with the basement. I started sleeping on the pull-out couch, couch after that. I don't remember the story I told my dad, something about the mold bugging me,

Starting point is 00:13:27 but I never slept in that room again. Luck was on my side, and the basement started to flood heavily the next few months, and my dad eventually moved me into the room upstairs with my sister. I thought my troubles were over, but that was just the beginning of the nightmare that spanned almost 10 years of my life. Lazzangue sur-gillet, puissance-molyne for 15 minutes. We'd say that's the hour

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Starting point is 00:14:15 Depos minimum of $10. Veil to be in a fashion responsible. The conditions apply. Hey, everyone. In 2004, my mom and I moved into my stepdad's house. Some of the craziest, most unbelievable things have happened over the years, and as I was recalling some events to my husband, I realized that I had forgotten some of them.

Starting point is 00:14:46 Probably had a fear. I thought this would be the best place to remember them all, and I'll answer any questions you may have. Also, sorry if this is so long. The first thing I can remember is the freezer door. It was a super innocent event, and we didn't think anything of it at the time. We had gone grocery shopping,

Starting point is 00:15:09 and after putting the frozen foods in the freezer, the door would close just fine, but once you turned your back, it was wide open again. This happened time and time again throughout the rest of the night. We checked multiple times to make sure that a box or something wasn't in the way of the suction. There was no reason for it to open by itself. Second, while watching TV in the living room, the channel would change, constantly. Not up a channel or down a channel either.

Starting point is 00:15:43 For example, if it were on channel 40, it would go to channel 3. or Channel 5. Third, I got a new bed, one of the ones where there are drawers along the bottom of it, three on each side. Because my bedroom was so little, I had the bed pushed up against a wall, meaning that three of the six drawers were inaccessible.

Starting point is 00:16:07 I was in the fourth or fifth grade at the time, aka too weak and little to move the bed by myself. Random items of my mom's started disappearing. one of her slippers, a couple CDs, and some other things that I can't remember. We thought it was my stepbrother playing a dumb prank. One day we decided to rearrange my room, and after the bed was moved, for some reason, we opened up the middle drawer on the inaccessible side, and everything was in there. The slippers, CDs, the most strange thing we found was a Ziploc bag of old,

Starting point is 00:16:47 used wax crayons that I never owned. Fourth, I guess the next thing we noticed was the ceiling fan. My parents had a sailor theme in the living room, and attached to the ceiling fan chain was a lighthouse, which would sometimes swing a little if the fan was on high, but it would swing around as if someone flicked it when the fan wasn't on. Next, my mom, my friend and I were standing in the living room, room, we were talking about the

Starting point is 00:17:19 lighthouse ceiling fan chain, swinging, and I was applying chapstick, which I then put on the coffee table. The moment I put it down, I realized I should have put it in my pocket, but it was missing from the table. I said out loud, where is my chapstick, and,

Starting point is 00:17:37 I kid you not, swear on everything, it appeared in midair above the coffee table and fell straight down, as if someone was holding it and dropped it. We all ran out of the room and none of us really talk about this to this day. Then, my mom approached me one morning and told me not to lie to her and that she wouldn't be mad, just tell the truth. Once she realized I had no clue what she was talking about. She told me how the night before, she woke up and heard a little girl's voice humming in her ear,

Starting point is 00:18:11 as if I was standing next to the bed. my mom checked the entire house, including my room to make sure it wasn't me. I didn't believe her at all. Until years later, while babysitting my grandmother, who then lived with them while they were away, I slept in my mom's bed and awoke to a little girl humming in my ear. It was the scariest moment of my entire life. I was numb from fear and I think I passed out from it, because I don't remember falling back asleep.

Starting point is 00:18:45 I remember being terrified, feeling every hair on my body standing straight up, and then nothing. Morning. I haven't told anybody this happened. Lastly, one night my mom was cooking in the kitchen, down the hall, and I was in my room. I heard the front door open.

Starting point is 00:19:07 My dog jump around, greeting someone. I assumed it was my stepdad, peered down the hall. I saw a man in overalls and a blue-knit hat walking. No sooner than he turned the corner, my mom comes running down the hallway towards me, pale white crying, that she felt someone come in behind her and say hi in her ear, but she was alone in the kitchen. We both ran to the living room, we realized the driveway was empty, and waited in the empty driveway until my stepdad actually came home. To this day, we don't know who the that man was that came into our home.

Starting point is 00:19:45 If I can think of any more occurrences, I'll be sure to let you know. Hey there, friends. I hope you guys enjoyed this, and I just wanted to pop in here and say thank you for listening. I really do appreciate it. And I also wanted to say that if you did enjoy this, I would like more content that is similar or different. Please do consider joining the Nevermore. To do so, all you have to do is hit that subscribe button, bell icon next to it, makes you part of the Nevermore. I would also be greatly appreciative if you would consider following me on any of my social media platforms, and maybe consider supporting the channel through Patreon or coffee.

Starting point is 00:20:28 All of it optional and all of it genuinely appreciated. All patrons do get really access to videos in audio format, typically the day they're released by several hours, or even a few days to several days before they're released, depending on how far ahead I am. Yeah, just, um, I know it's a weird outro. just kind of wanted to say thank you that's all so again thank you for listening if you did enjoy it please do hit that thumbs up button and also consider telling me which story you liked the most

Starting point is 00:20:57 i know there were only two in this one but they're both really good stories so just saying all right i hope you have a fantastic day and i'll see you on the next video but until then sleep well

As The Raven Dreams Podcast - Reddit Ghost Stories (Vol. 31) - A HAUNTED DOLL

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