Spooky Toys

Is it just me or does your toy box come alive at night?

Admittedly I’m talking about the not-so-distant past when the toy box took centre stage in the living area. It was down a level but that didn’t stop me hearing toys going off randomly. It usually happened as I was just drifting off after a night-time feed (the babies – not me) and served as a form of torture to my poor sleep-deprived brain.

The main culprit came in the form of a shape sorting snail, which played out a happy little tune at the push of a button. When it played repeatedly, I assumed the button had got stuck so I got up and removed it from the toy box.

What do you know, just as I was drifting off again, away it started.

I got back up with the intention of ripping out the batteries, only to discover it didn’t have any. The snail was subsequently thrown down yet another level to the garage with the door slammed and where it could play its gay old tune all night long.

I have no idea what the next culprit was but it put me off the song “Oh Susanna” for life.

This was all forgotten until the other day I received a text from a friend saying: “The house is dead quiet, Mayson’s at care, Sasha asleep, when one of Mayson’s teddy’s pipes up and says “Sing with me hahaha” without it having any buttons pressed. Creepy!!”

A year or so earlier we’d swapped our own spooky encounters with kids’ toys. A tune had started up from her three-month-old’s play gym mat one night. She assumed the cat had walked over it but it went off again. After a while she walked downstairs to investigate but there was no cat in sight. Deciding the cat had gone outside, she went back upstairs and, as she did, the music started playing a third time. The tune was a haunting piece from Mozart and she fled back to bed.

Because we’d both recently lost a close family member we did wonder if they were messages from beyond.

Then again, it could be like the Toy Story where all the toys come alive at night time. They just hadn’t factored in an insomniac catching them out.

Since then other stories have come to light: There’s the mother who, as a child, had a Barney the Dinosaur toy which would start up each night saying “Hahaha, I’m a magic dinosaur.” She can still clearly hear those words today and they have the ability to make her shudder. Barney ended up being thrown out the window.

Then there’s the bath toy that freaked out both the mum and dad. “… one night, for several hours it insisted on randomly going off. We kept turning it off, it would seemingly wait till we were about to drift off, then start up again. We ended up opening the front door and hiffing it into the dark!”

So is it spooky or are they just faulty toys? One thing’s for sure, it’s annoying and most of them end up on the lawn.

And as for the snail? I imagine I gave it away to a charity shop and it will now be wrecking havoc on some other poor person’s sleep.