Episode Eight The haunted dollhouse

‘Every little girl deserves a dollhouse,’ Ella’s dad had said, as he placed it down on a large chest by the window, causing his daughter to dance and clap with joy. But the well-intentioned present was to reduce the family to a strange accommodation.

It was Ella, who some weeks later, said her dollhouse was haunted. Houses maybe, said both her parents, but not a toy. And just to reassure Ella, her mother opened the dollhouse and checked inside. The interiors were modelled on Edwardian grandeur, but like an old house needing a bit of a makeover, it was worn and tired, frail and dusty. Ella pointed to the maid in the kitchen, a mummy and daddy in the drawing room, a butler walking up the stairs, and the daughter laying down in her bedroom. ‘But there are no ghosts,’ her mother said reassuringly. ‘Of course not,’ Ella replied, ‘they only come at night.’ 

After failing to convince Ella the supernatural was all make-believe, her dad decided to inspect the dollhouse while she was asleep. He could see Ella had put mummy and daddy in their bed, and the butler and maid at the kitchen table. He was satisfied his adult reasoning was correct, when suddenly, the gas lights flickered in all the miniature rooms. This was odd, because he knew there was no electric for any moving parts. Then he heard his daughter’s voice behind him: ‘I told you there were ghosts!’

Ella’s dad was ready to tell her to go back to sleep, when he heard a loud crack, followed by another, and another. ‘They slam the doors daddy, when they are angry, and they spit at you.’ As Ella said these last few words, he felt an acute stinging pain on the side of his face. But this was only the beginning. More stinging, more spit, came flying out of the dollhouse, burning through his clothes and into his flesh. He grabbed hold of the Edwardian snake-pit, more to protect Ella than himself, but recoiled, screaming out, as he felt both his eyes receive blinding wounds.

It was Ella’s mummy who dragged her husband to the bathroom, whilst Ella calmly closed the doors to the dollhouse. In the morning, after they had returned from A&E, with bandages over both her daddy’s eyes, Ella revealed what she had been told by the residents of the dollhouse.

‘They told me they were really sorry and just want to stay. You must promise to look after them and they won’t do anything wrong. But they said, if you try to sell them like the other family, they will never forgive you.’ And what would happen, Ella’s parents asked, if they did? ‘They wouldn’t say, but it won’t be very nice.’

After much discussion, and the willingness of Ella to play with the dollhouse, and the commitment by the parents to redecorate the interiors, it became part of the family, but cared for more out of fear than love for a potential treasured heirloom.