Trick Or Treat: Scaring A 20-Year-Old Is Child's Play

Dolls don't play with boys.

Dude, if you were faced with what you thought was a supernatural occurrence, would you react with bravery or run away hiddly piddly?

Would you wonder if was real? And would you take a chance on the ‘what if’, risking the likelihood that your bravado would come back to bite you in the ass?

My friend King is a tough 20-year-old guy. As tough as they come. He moved into a new home in Manipal earlier this year with two of his friends, Atul and Sahaj. None of these guys, you’d think, would be shaken by the events that I’m going to tell you about.

But as I have learned, you never know. 

The first few days after the move went by without any event of note, until they decided to clean out the house. Atul heard a strange hissing sound in the drawing room he had just started to clean. Slowly inching towards the source, Atul tried to discover where the peculiar noise was coming from. Then, there sitting on a shelf, he saw it – an ancient doll staring unblinkingly back at him.

But all three of them ignored it – they did not give the doll a second thought until a spoon fell down in the kitchen without anyone being there. Slowly, the three guys began to lose their shit over that little doll.

The next day King woke up to notice that the doll had moved from its position on the table, where they had left it overnight, and was now back on the shelf. King was shaken as he started re-imagining the opening scene from The Conjuring. He decided to throw the doll into the dustbin and forget it ever existed (clearly forgetting that this was unsuccessful too when it was tried in The Conjuring.)

A day passed without incident. But, the next night, when King and his roommates came back home, they found that the doll had magically moved again, back onto their kitchen table, with ants crawling out of its eyes. This was some Chucky-level shit!

Sahaj WOULD NOT enter the house, convinced it was cursed. It didn’t take much persuasion on his part to soon have King and Atul also running out of the home with nothing but their blankets flapping in the air behind them. All three huddled together on the cold windy night, in the middle of the road, not daring to reenter their house. Frantically all three whipped out their phones, terrified and at their wit's end. The owner, the broker and their parents were called.

King’s parents advised him to leave the house. They believed the house was haunted and they feared for their son’s safety. One of the dudes’ parents even suggested packing up and leaving Manipal forever. Atul blubbered something about having a pooja to drive away spirits, maybe even donate the doll to a temple to drive away its cursed spirit.

The next morning the broker came to see what the fuss was about. At first he scoffed at them. But later, after having looked at the doll, even he was shit scared about entering the house.

The owner of the house joined them a few minutes later. After the doll was pointed out to him, he told them how it was his daughter’s favorite doll, but said there was no way the place was haunted. The owner and the broker then left the boys alone in the creepy house.

Later, as King was leaving the house to go out, he bumped into his neighbor. For some reason, this neighbor began to guffaw as soon as he saw King.

"Hey, by the way, I found a doll outside in your trash can which you must have thrown out by mistake,” he said between giggles. “So you know what? I put it back on your dining table. He he he… how’d you like my prank?"

It wasn’t a Chuckie-Agatha Christie-Conjuring thingy after all. Just an asshole neighbor having fun at our expense.

A ghost prank – the oldest trick in the book. Why the hell do people think it’s funny to scare the shit out of you? Why do we keep wanting to scare others around us, what’s the bloody fun in it? I mean, come on, grow up!

Okay fine. It was funny later and all. But I really don’t know what I’d have done in King’s place. Do you?

Trick or treat...

By Rahul Bhatt

Photo Credit: olavXO