All Dolled Up!

Charlie

I had set it up so that Charlotte could open the room up from inside if she absolutely had to, but no one should’ve been able to get in from the outside. I had even pulled the curtains over the window in case they decided to place a camera outside and it happened to be near her room.

I think Sam’s crew had expected me to go to sleep, but I explained to them that I would probably be staying awake as given I was so used to the night shift.

After spending time setting up things like cameras and motion detectors, as well as temperature-activated cameras (James explained that ghosts tend to drop the temperature wherever they walk), they set to work.

I, on the other hand, went looking through the research material that Cathy had left on the kitchen counter.

The house was built in 1834, and had not belonged to the Evergreens then, but to another family. The Evergreens had bought the house in 1866 when their textile business began to really take off, and from what they could find the house didn’t have any significant incidents like any sudden deaths or the like. Turns out the house also wasn’t built on an ancient Native American burial ground like I’d once theorized.

There was apparently a butler at one point who was a convicted murderer and was caught later during his employment, but that had occurred before Charlotte’s time.

I didn’t see Charlotte mentioned by name anywhere, but they did write that ‘certain members had died of consumption, now known as tuberculosis.’ That seemed to imply that others in the house had passed away of tuberculosis as well, though it looked like Charlotte had probably been the first.

Given the communicable nature of the disease, it made sense, though I don’t think that Charlotte would have been happy to hear that. I considered tearing that part away or just saying that that page got ‘lost’ when I gave it to her, but then reconsidered, thinking that she deserved to know the truth. I also didn’t want to hide things from her.

As for Sam saying that many people ‘died in mysterious ways', it seemed like a bit of an exaggeration. Some deaths were from tuberculosis, one was from a freak accident in a circus (that at least seemed mysterious), but most of them were from rather mundane causes. It looked like Sam was playing that part up.

The house was sold in 1922 as part of a bankruptcy deal, but there was a bit of a legal issue which caused the sale to drag on for another four years. The man who had been in the house before it had been sold was Gregory Evergreen, and I thought I had heard Charlotte mention his name earlier, though I would have to speak to her about that later regarding who that was.

Gregory Evergreen died of liver failure brought on by years of alcohol abuse, and there was no immediate family to fight the case for him after he passed, so the house did end up being sold off six months after his death.

I wished there was more information on this time period, as that’s likely when Charlotte became what she was. Throughout the rest of the papers, there was nothing about a doll that wandered the halls of the house.

It went into a bunch of accounts of ‘spooky stuff’ from that point on, so if I had to wager a guess, Charlotte had probably turned into a doll at this time. Though this would mean there was nearly a two decade gap between her actual death and her rebirth as a doll.

Why so long though? Charlotte didn’t remember seeing her uncle when she ‘woke up’ again so to speak, so that did line up with what I knew, but the huge time gap was something I couldn’t wrap my head around.

Even if it was some kind of curse that someone had put on her, why wait twenty years to go ahead and do it? And if it was some sort of natural process and no one was involved in it, it made little sense for it to take that long, especially given that it had not happened to anyone aside from Charlotte.

The ‘spooky things’ described were standard things that Charlotte had told me she had done - such as twisting spoons in the kitchen, knocking on doors before disappearing, and leaving messages carved into the furniture.

Reading it from her victim’s perspective did unnerve me a bit, but I rationalized it as Charlotte doing what she felt was necessary at the time. Some of them described a ‘monster’ that seemed to appear in the corner of their vision before disappearing. I wondered if it was their imaginations playing tricks on them - or if they had actually caught glimpses of Charlotte.

All in all, aside from the family history, there wasn’t much that was very useful in these papers.

At that moment, my phone buzzed. It was a message from Charlotte: ‘How is it going? Did you find any demons or ghosts yet?’

I answered: ‘I think we saw some fairies fly through the window, but they tend to do that every Saturday night so nothing out of the ordinary.’

There was a pause as ‘…’ appeared on the screen while she thought of something to reply: ‘Do you want me to do something to spice things up?’

I answered: ‘In what way?’

‘I could make thing scary - I could run out of here and move things around, or make sounds.’

‘But, why would you want to do that?’ I messaged back.

‘I don’t know - I’m bored, and don’t you want something to happen so you might be able to sell some of the footage for a higher price?’ she asked.

‘Well, no, if something happens, people might actually get suspicious. Again, I want things to be boring.’ I told her.

I could almost imagine her rolling her eyes as she typed back: ‘Fine then. I just wish this would get over sooner.’

‘I know, it’s annoying, but I did manage to find a few things. I’ll share them with you later.’ I messaged her back.

Having finished reading through things, I decided to check up on how Sam and his crew were doing.

The answer to that was that they had all fallen asleep, save for Sam, who was editing footage on his laptop.

“Told you I was a night owl,” he whispered to me as I pulled up a chair to sit beside him.

“Do you want me to make us some coffee?”

He shook his head. “No, I do want to try to fall asleep sometime tonight.”

“Did you happen to find anything?”

“Nothing of interest as of yet…”

“...do you… well, I wanted to ask…”

“If I really believed in this stuff?”

“No, I wanted to know if you’d seen anything up till now that you could really, honestly, consider something that wasn’t explainable,” I asked.

“...I’ve heard a few things that sounded incredible, and witnessed some things I still can’t find an explanation for. Haven’t caught anything like that on tape though,” he said with a chuckle.

“What would you even do if you succeeded?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, if you actually found a ghost floating through the wall over there, what would you do?”

“Well, I’d like to say that that would change our understanding of how the world works, but… one of the cornerstones of science is that what you do should be reproducible. Even if a ghost floated through, and I caught it on footage, how am I going to convince people it wasn’t CGI or something? Unless the ghost is willing to talk to me and stick around, that is,” he said.

“And what do you think people would do then?”

“Hmm? I don’t understand?”

“I mean, say the ghost walked in, revealed who he was, and sat down, and let people come in to talk to him, what then? What do you think the reaction of the world would be?”

“I… I don’t know. I guess they’d become a celebrity, the biggest tourist trap in the nation would be that place, people - especially religious people would flock from all over the world,” Sam said. “That, or scientists would walk in and examine every facet of what that ghost was.”

“So… why bother with this then? I mean, even if you catch something on footage, you wouldn’t change anything,” I told him.

“Okay, let me ask you this - do you believe?”

If he had asked me before meeting Charlotte, I would have given him a flat-out ‘no’ but I very well couldn’t say anything like that now. “I do think there’s something else out there we don’t know, but I don’t know how we’d find it.”

“Well, this is step one, isn’t it?” he asked. “And who knows, maybe that ghost will come along and have a cup of tea with me.” He then sighed. “But, if you really are interested… I won’t go into the details, but yes, I saw something that I think might’ve been the real thing. It was only once… but I’m convinced what I saw was real. No camera on hand though - and that’s as much as I’ll say to a stranger, but… I hope to one day see something like that again.”

“Alright,” I said, and wandered off back to the kitchen.

An hour and a half later, I went back to see that even Sam had fallen asleep.

I looked out the window - the sky was going to be lightening up soon. I took the papers I had and then stealthily walked over to Charlotte’s room. Even if the cameras caught me, I wasn’t worried. There were a number of excuses I could make as to why I had to wander around the house. And thankfully, none of them were near Charlotte’s room which meant that none of them would catch me walking in to meet with her.