My father was a police officer in the 1990s, and he told me about a strange series of cases throughout New England where the children had apparently killed their parents while the parents slept. Sometimes the kids would slit their parents’ throats while they were sleeping, while other times they would douse the house in gasoline and burn them alive. A couple of the children chopped their parents up with axes while their parents slept. But all of the kids had one thing in common- they said they had watched a show called Laughing Island before committing these horrific crimes.
Now there is no record of a show by this name ever existing, but all of the children described it exactly the same way. It would start with a puppet called the Grinning Man dancing around the screen. The Grinning Man puppet had hundreds of sharp teeth and huge jet-black eyes, and would often start the show by teaching the kids about safety. He would play with lighters and matches and show how playing with these toys could burn down his whole toy neighborhood- laughing the whole time while other puppets would burn, screaming and running around in front of the cameras while on fire. They used canned laughter every time the Grinning Man would accidentally kill the other puppets in his neighborhood, covering up the screams of the puppets with uproarious laughter from the audience.
He would teach the kids about knives by running around the island with the knife pointed out, accidentally skewering any other puppets who got in his way. They would show real blood flowing from the puppet’s wounds, the camera zooming on their screaming faces as the audience laughed.
The Grinning Man would also play hide and seek with the kids on the island, real children who would hide around the set while the Grinning Man put his head down and counted to thirty. When he found a child, he would grab them and the child would start screaming, and never be seen on the show again.
My father told me all of this with a whiskey in his hand, his grizzled salt-and-pepper stubble making him look far older than he actually was. He had retired early with a pension after being shot in the leg by a drug dealer during a traffic stop gone wrong.
“But you know what the craziest part about this whole Laughing Island thing was?” he asked me, his eyes watery and unfocused. I shook my head.
“When the family of the kids went to check on them while they watched the show, they said the kids would just be staring at a black screen. The TV wasn’t even on. Sometimes the TV wasn’t even plugged in. Kids would go up in the attic and watch old TVs that hadn’t worked in years, but they claimed they could see the show, bright as day, and they explained what happened during it. Nearly all of those kids are dead now, though some are still catatonic in mental asylums around the state. They don’t talk, they don’t move, they just sit there like statues, staring off into a world that none of us can see.
“But after the crimes were committed, the kids were full of energy and talking a mile a minute. They were bursting at the seams with joy! They claimed that the Grinning Man had told them they needed to teach their parents a lesson about safety, and that now that they had followed his instructions, he would come for them and take them away to Laughing Island, where every day was like Christmas and it was illegal to be sad or angry.
“If anyone was sad or angry, a massive puppet called Sheriff Hogan would arrive. The way these kids described him, it sounded as if he was dressed like a Nazi SS soldier, with pure black military clothing, polished high leather boots and a gleaming black leather cap. He was ten feet tall and towered over the little children, who often wet themselves out of terror when they saw the Sheriff Hogan puppet arrive. He would take them to the center of the island and bury them alive, telling them in a sing-song voice, ‘No angry kiddies, no sad kiddies, no evil kiddies and no bad kiddies on Laughing Island.’ They would scream the entire time while the puppet threw them in a hole and filled it with sand and dirt, but after a few minutes they would stop screaming. And the rest of the kids knew what would happen to them if they ever got sad or angry on Laughing Island, so they always had forced grins and pretended like they were always happy.”
“Could this have been some sort of mass delusion, like the Salem Witch Trials?” I asked. “Maybe one kid just made up the whole show in his head and told other kids at school about it, and it spread like some sort of urban legend. Maybe it was just a coincidence, like the mentally ill children who would most likely be violent anyways were the ones affected by the urban legend.” My father shook his head, his flabby cheeks shaking as he did so. His bottom lip quivered for a moment, then stilled.
“There was no connection between the children. We checked. They all attended different schools, different daycares, no shared bus routes, no shared friends or family. It was eerie how the Laughing Island thing seemed to spread across the city, and then across the state. The news made it into a moral panic, like the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, but no one knew exactly what to do about it. Then one day, it just stopped.” He looked up at me. “At least, we thought it did. I just got a call from an old cop friend, who is now Captain of the city police, and he said a six year-old kid just drugged his parents and skinned them alive. He butchered the job, but after hours of trying he managed to get most of the skin off. Apparently he was wearing his father’s skin like a mask, running around the streets and laughing when the cruisers found him. And guess what he said?” I shook my head, not even venturing a guess.
“The kid said that the Grinning Man made him do it.”
“That’s… really sick. And sad,” I said, not knowing what else to say. My father nodded grimly.
“It is. I only wish we could find some way to stop it.” I looked out the window and realized it was getting dark.
“Well, dad,” I said, “I have to get going.” My wife was watching our child, but she wanted me home for dinner. He nodded.
“Be careful out there, son,” he said. I drove home through the darkening city streets, thinking about everything he had said. I couldn’t imagine such atrocities being committed in our city, of all places- and by children, at that.
When I got home, I took a few deep breaths in my car, trying to clear the horrifying conversation from my mind before going inside. As I entered the living room, my breath caught in my throat.
I saw my son there, sitting inches away from the TV, watching a totally black screen.