The Doll House

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Let me start by saying this: Impossible things happen to me all the time. I feel like I need to say that out front before we get into this whole thing. You might be the type of person who loves big, crazy stories, who believes in the fantastical and unreal, who spends their days reading old books about UFOs and Bigfoot, who watches grainy YouTube videos about real-­life monsters caught on camera.

If you’re one of these people, you already understand that some people want to believe in the impossible. The rest . . . well, they need some convincing, and that’s where I come in.

My name is Garrett Weathers. As I write this, I’m thirteen years old and I’m constantly being told I’m tall for my age. My mom, June, is only four feet, eight inches tall, but I’m told my dad was over six foot five. I wouldn’t know be­cause I never met the guy. Mom told me, “Some dads aren’t cut out to be dads,” and we just left it at that.

Weird things happen to me constantly, so much so that my buddies at school have started giving me nicknames. Mr. Nonsense. Captain Bullcrap. Or the one that seems to have stuck: the Topper, as in, “Don’t tell a story around the Topper because he’ll just tell a bigger one.”

It’s quite unfair, especially considering all I’m doing is telling the truth. Sure, I might stretch the truth a smidge because the only thing that makes a good story better is a bit of flair. I’ll admit that I can see why I got the nickname, but I stand firm. This stuff really happened, even the most outlandish parts.

So if you’re going to stick with me for this whole story, you’ll have to get on board for some weirdness. How about we start small and work our way up?

Let me tell you how I got my cat, Chester. He’s orange, five years old, quite chunky, and only has three legs. It was the middle of summer, and I was outside, standing next to the trampoline, when I heard a screeching sound overhead unlike anything I’d ever heard in my entire life. I looked up just in time to see . . . something blotting out the sun. I squinted, and to my complete surprise, I saw a kitten falling out of the sky. He hit the trampoline, bounced about twenty feet back into the air, and then landed in my arms. His leg was badly broken, his nerves were frayed beyond comprehension, but he was otherwise fine. The best explanation we got was that he probably crawled into the landing gear of a plane and fell out not long after takeoff. If that’s true, he must have fallen thousands of feet, which would make him the luckiest cat in history, except for his leg having to be amputated. To this day, my mom and I don’t know for sure.

Or how about the time I found a tooth inside a tree? I know, it’s getting out of hand already, but stick with me ’cause we’re just getting started. I was out in the woods a few blocks away from my house, hacking away at a tree with a hatchet because that seemed like a sensible thing to do at the time. Then, suddenly, I saw something glinting inside the dry bark, and after a few seconds of digging around, I was able to pull a shiny gold tooth out from inside. And I do mean inside. No one knew where it came from, but someone must have stuck it in the crook of the tree decades earlier, and the bark just grew up around it. I tried to convince my mom to let us sell it, but she made me put it back, and there it still rests, a relic of some long-­dead stranger, waiting for the next lucky explorer to find it.

Or how about the catfish I caught? I was on a camping trip with my uncle, and I reeled in a blue cat as long as my leg, already an unlikely occurrence in the Florence River, which is more of a creek. The water was quick, and the opposite bank was so close we had to be careful not to cast our lures clear to the other side. At the deepest point, it wasn’t much more than a few feet, but somehow, a monster was hiding in that murk, and it took every bit of my uncle Bobby’s strength to haul it up onto the bank.

All of this sounds made up, but I haven’t even told you the good part yet. As he reached into that cavernous mouth to pull out the hook, what we saw and heard made us both scream.

Bright blue eyes. A pink face. A tuft of blond hair.

That monster catfish had swallowed an entire baby doll, and it had been stuck in its gullet for who knew how long. Bobby pried the doll out, and together, we slipped the grateful catfish back into the water to spend the rest of its days trolling the bottom for hopefully more edible trash. In hindsight, that doll peering out of that huge whiskered mouth feels like a premonition of things to come. I’ve got dozens of similar tales, some even stranger than these, but I told the catfish story for a specific reason. It’s the perfect lead-­up to the real story.

It’s a story about a place I visited a year ago, and even now, it seems more like a dream than real life. There’s a good chance you might have even heard of the Doll House. There are a dozen creepy YouTube videos about it, and in certain corners of the internet, you’ll find people who swear up and down that they know the truth about what happened there. I’ve watched a lot of those videos, curious to see how the rumors have filtered down and how close to the truth any of those talking heads have gotten.

They’re all lying.

I was there. I saw it all happen, and I can tell you right now, even the wildest story you’ll see online is nowhere near the truth. That’s why I’m sitting here typing away. I want to tell you about it, about all of it.

I’ve always been a storyteller, which I suppose makes sense considering all the crazy things that happen to me. Since I was little, I was writing stories, comics, short films, basically anything I could come up with. I think that might be my calling, and this big, incredible story is the perfect place to start.

I want to tell you about the unreal house, about how it felt wrong just walking through the doors of that place, about the dolls and marionettes, about the wooden monstrosities that you couldn’t really call dolls with a straight face.

But most of all, I want to tell you about Marion.

I want to tell this story, not to try to convince you it’s real, because I’m pretty sure that’s not even possible. I want to tell you because some stories just beg to be told. Sometimes the truth burns a hole in you, and if you don’t get it out, you feel half sick. It doesn’t matter if no one believes you. It doesn’t matter if your friends call you the Topper and roll their eyes. It doesn’t even matter if you lie in bed at night trying to convince yourself that the wildest details couldn’t have been true.

In other words, sometimes you tell the impossible story because you have to.

So. Now that we understand each other, let’s talk.