It looked like an ordinary doll. It wasn’t. The late Mrs Grail sewed it together somewhere in Texas around 1897. She was a very superstitious woman or at least the women of the family who had passed down the story about the doll thought so. The story had it that the doll must be passed down from daughter to daughter or it will bring great misfortune to the daughter who breaks the chain.
Maria Burden, a beautiful young woman with porcelain perfect skin, silky black hair and penetrating dark eyes, was in her room packing a large black duffle bag with everything she could fit into it. Tomorrow she would leave for college in Rockford, NY. She picked up a small, ragged cloth doll that her mother had given her when she was ten and, with a smile of relief, she threw it into a dark plastic bag filled with garbage. Whatever, she thought. Her mother had told her about the doll, but it was one of those things people jokingly talked about at family gatherings. Maria’s mother didn’t believe the story but passed the doll to her daughter more as a matter of tradition than anything else.
The doll was made out of peach-colored cloth, stuffed with stripes of the same, and was wearing a small black dress. The hair was made with two inch strands of black yarn and the eyes were were black sparkling pieces from a very old necklace. Just before Maria was about to twist up the bag and shatter the serenity that had been maintained for years, she heard a very small girl’s piercing scream: “Aaaaaaaaaah!!!” It startled her for the millisecond before she realized it had to be her five year old sister running around in the backyard.
Two weeks after Maria had settled at Nazareth College the history surrounding the ragged little doll started to become a reality. She lived alone in her dorm room and one night, when she returned to her room after dinner, she found the place in shambles. Her clothes were all over the place, her bed was flipped over, laundry detergent was everywhere, the mirrors were smashed to pieces and a large window on the east side of her room was cracked into a spider’s web formation. She knew the door had been locked before she left for dinner.
Immediately, she went to the resident assistant on her floor. The RA was shocked. If the door was locked this could not have happened. Most of the people on Maria’s floor thought that Maria forgot to lock her door, someone from another dorm trashed her room and she told everyone she locked it so she wouldn’t look stupid. What most people didn’t know is why anyone would do that to Maria; she was very well liked. Five of Maria’s friends helped her clean up the room and within a few days the whole incident had been forgotten.
Another incident occurred one week after she found her room a mess, however, this time it was much more bizarre. One night Maria was in the shared bathroom preparing to take a shower. She was in the shower room sitting on a bench opposite the shower stalls. She let down her soft black hair, stood up, disrobed and walked into one of the stalls. She turned on the water and, after it got warm, placed her head under the shower spout.
It was moments after that when the girls in the hallway heard Maria scream. Maria’s eyes were closed under the shower head when she noticed the physical change in the water. It started to feel thick. She opened her eyes and realized that what was coming out of the showerhead was no longer water; it was thick steaming blood. Screaming, she ripped open the shower curtain and the first thing she saw, propped up on the bench in front of her, was the ragged little doll she had thrown out weeks earlier. Then she fainted.
Cathy Scott was the first person to find Maria. She was lying on the shower room floor, stark naked and soaking wet, no blood and no doll. When she came to she told everyone what was happening, about the doll and it’s past, but no one believed her. They glanced quickly back and forth at each other trying to hold back the smiles.
Maria called her mother at home that night, told her what had happened, and asked her if there was any way to get the doll back. Her mother nervously informed her that all the garbage had been burned. Before she went to bed that night she could have sworn she heard a little girl laughing as she squeezed her pillow until her knuckles were white. But there were no little girls around, just big ones, with big responsibilities.
The spell that the late Mrs Grail put on the ragged little doll finally went full force into Maria’s life. Another week passed before any more incidents occurred but every night, moments before she fell asleep, a little girl’s laughing voice filled Maria’s room.
One night, shortly before midnight and still in the little black dress she had worn out on a date, Maria was studying at her desk. Suddenly, she sensed something. She took her eyes off her books and looked around the room. There, sitting on the bed like it always should have been, was the little black-haired doll.
“Leave me alone!”, Maria screamed. Suddenly, a chair from the other side of the room came flying towards her. She jumped out of the way just in time; it smashed onto her desk.
She went screaming for the door. It wouldn’t budge. The knob wouldn’t even turn. She turned around, back and palms against the door, just in time to notice the vase, filled with the flowers her mother had sent her to calm her nerves, flying towards her head. She ducked, the vase smashed above her head and pieces of white ceramic fell into her hair. She ran towards the window, grabbed the lever and slid it all the way open. “Heelllpp meeee!!!”, her blood curdling scream echoed across the parking lot, six stories below. “Make her stop!!!”
It was then that Maria felt two small doll-sized hands dig into the back of her neck and lift her with a strength she had never before experienced. They lifted her up, pushed her outside the window and flung her, like she was a rag doll herself, to the pavement below. She landed next to a dark dumpster with an ear-crumpling crack.
Twenty-four hours later in a dorm room on the other side of campus three male sophomores were watching Monday Night Football. “Hey did you guys hear about that chick that jumped out of Lourdes last night?”, one of them blurted. “Yea, man”, another answered, “Maria Burden. She was a lunatic. She used to smash up her room and tell everyone it was locked before she left.”
“Oh yea,” the third broke in, “Cathy Scott told me she was taking a shower one night and started screaming because she thought the water had turned to blood!” The first one started in again, “You know what’s really weird? The security guard told me she jumped out the window clutching her doll! Can you believe that? Clutching her doll! Man, some people are just born to end up like that.”
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Wow, this was absolutely chilling and terrifying. You have a great mind for horror!
Thanks for all your comments Lindsay!.. Very encouraging.