True story time.

When I was growing up I spent a lot of time at my grandmother's home. She had a vast collection of porcelain dolls and furbies. This collection, coupled with her undying love for horror movies, made my childhood a living nightmare.

I wasn't a bad child, but somehow I was threatened every night with the same story, "You need to be good Justin. If you act up the dolls will come alive. That would be unfortunate." She would chuckle and I would stare at the ceiling frozen-eyed for the next 2-3 hours while my ears and eyes play tricks on me.

Then one night I heard it, "The more you play with me, the more I do!". I woke up shocked. The noise was sudden and distant, but I knew it wasn't in my head. My door was closed, so I watched the door handle carefully. I waited for it to happen again--and it did. This time louder: "Peek-a-boo!" The sound was beyond my room and added to eerie ambiance. I grabbed my sheets and pulled them over my face; my lungs hurting from holding my breath.

I glanced through the thin part of my sheets; the figures in the room seemed to all be out of place. As I slowly pulled the sheets down, my eyes relaxed and I realized everything was alright. I decided to fall back into my pillow. But, that didn't last long.

The horror of that night was peaked when I was awoken again by a loud bang. It sounded like it came from the living room. I decided that was enough and moved my way to the bottom of the door; the half-inch crevice acted as my viewport to whatever horror lied outside my room. I looked briefly and saw a lightly dimmed living room with dolls everywhere. There were easily 15-20 dolls scattered across the floor. But, they were not thrown around! They were in their own positions: sitting up, standing next to one another, facedown by the fireplace. It looked like a distraught porcelain museum of horror. The whole scene was amplified by that damn furby. It was standing between the door frames of the bathroom. All I could do was jump back into bed and stay awake, for what seemed like, forever. I didn't hear another noise and eventually caught sleep.

When I got up the next morning I was careful to leave my room. But, to my surprise, everything was fine. The room was clean, the dolls were in place, and the furby was sitting on top of the dresser. I couldn't believe my self and so I chalked it up to the bad dreams. It seemed reasonable since we often were forced into watching horror movies with my grandma, which made for interesting dreams at night.

Well, 17 years later my grandmother was sitting at the dinner table with the family and out of the blue she remarked how "she scared us good" and that she "would move the dolls around at night" to keep us from leaving our rooms.

My grandma was fucking strange.