Creepypasta Stories

The Doll Cemetery

By: CMT

They called it the doll cemetery. It was a small valley, barren and deserted, behind a hill that hid it from the sight of the town. Nothing grew on its arid soil; the few trees that had tried were long dead, turned into wooden skeletons that stretched their hooked fingers to the sky above.

The reason for that name was clear to anyone who visited the place. It had indeed the grim, gloomy air of old cemeteries, completely uncomforting. However, its guests were not underground, neither walled in narrow recesses. They stood in plain sight, fully exposed to eyes and weather.

There were dolls of every kind and size, of every fashion, style and era. Ancient misses with painted porcelain faces, whose richly embroidered dresses were now reduced to mouldy rags. Cheap ragdolls, or what was left of them, their smiles faded but still visible on their deformed, swollen faces. Elegant catwalk models, ten inches tall, who once possessed clothes and accessories, and now stood naked and twisted into unlikely poses. Child dolls that had once walked, cried or called their mommies, and now laid motionless, silent, often mutilated.

Some of those that had been there longer, were stuck to the ground or tied to the trees with iron wires, now corroded by rust, or with ribbons and strings that time had worn and faded. Most, though, had simply been left on the ground, and many of them had been pushed around by the wind or rain, gathering in some hollow as if in a sad common grave.

No one knew who had placed the first doll there, or why. Even for the eldest of the town it was a question without answer, but somehow it had started a sort of tradition. There were still girls who, forced to separate from their favourite doll, past beyond any chance of repair, asked for her to be brought there, among her peers. But doing it was a task for parents, because no child ever ventured there, not even for a dare.

The doll cemetery was a grim and sad place even in the full light of a summer day, but in the night, or even worst in one of those dull days threatening rain, when clouds cast a grey light over the whole place, it was impossible to walk through it and not be overwhelmed by a feeling of anguish, as if each of those little, abandoned bodies hosted a soul, silently screaming all of its torment to the ears of the living.

Like any respectable graveyard, the doll cemetery had a caretaker, or at least that is what the old homeless man who had found shelter in the badly assembled shack right in the middle of the valley was said to be.

They said that during the day he walked around the place, whispering incomprehensible words to the dolls, as if to comfort them, and that at night he went back to his shack and, behind the window – or in the doorframe in the hot summer nights – stood vigilant as if protecting a sacred place from whatever intruder.

The townsfolk believed he was crazy, but harmless, especially because he never left the valley, and whoever wanted to find him always knew where he was.
But in truth nobody ever wanted to find him.

At least until the girls disappeared.

They were three friends, fifteen years old, always together since nursery school. Once teens, they spent more time together than with their respective families, from the morning meeting to go to school to the late evening goodbye to go to sleep – unless they managed to do that together as well – with short and infrequent interruptions for meals.

The day when their parents could not find them in their rooms, their first thought was that they had secretly left, maybe by the window, to get together and do some of their mischief. It wouldn't have been the first time.

When they weren't back for lunch or dinner, and late at night none of the houses they could go back to had seen them come, worry started to spread in their families, and soon in the whole town.