Hello Dolly!

I may have mentioned that several weeks ago my wife’s family was in town. That included her 7-year-old niece. For the most part, she hung out with our 17-year-old daughter, who is really great with kids. Our daughter brought out her old dolls for her to play with, including a collectible American Girl doll. The quality of those dolls is pretty amazing and incredibly lifelike.

After they all left, the doll wound up in our bedroom, and was on our computer desk chair under some clothes. It stayed there until recently, when my wife told our daughter to put the doll back in her room. Our daughter refused, as she had just seen the horror movie Annabelle, which is about some kind of haunted doll.

That sounded pretty creepy to me, as I’ve never liked dolls since I was a little kid. But I put up a good front and told our daughter not to be silly and to put the doll away. I left it in the living room, expecting her to comply before she went to bed.

That night, as my wife and I went into our room, I was about to jump in bed when I stepped on what felt like hair.

Sure enough, I was stepping on the American Girl doll, which was under my side of the bed! I jumped back and yelled for our daughter.

“Did you put this under the bed?” I asked her. “No, Dad, I promise, I didn’t touch the doll,” she replied.

I looked at my wife and she said she didn’t do it. The only explanation was that our dog, Buddy, grabbed it from the living room and brought it into our room.

I picked up the doll and took it into the garage and left it on the washing machine. I was kind of edgy, so I decided to go upstairs and watch something on Netflix. I fell asleep, woke, saw that it was 2 a.m. and went back downstairs to go to bed. As I walked past the living room couch, I saw that the American Girl doll was sitting on the couch staring at me.

All the hair on the back of my neck stood up, and I started freaking out. I woke up my wife and told her I put the doll into the garage and that it made its way back into the house. She groggily said I was dreaming and for me to go to bed.

The next morning, we were talking about it in the kitchen. I hadn’t slept all night and I decided we were going to donate the doll to Goodwill.

That’s when my mom walked in asking why we left the doll in the garage, explaining that she brought it back in the house for our daughter.

rnagasawa@midweek.com