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 five year-old son there, sitting inches away from the TV, watching a totally black screen.
“What are you doing, son?” I said. He turned to me, his pupils dilated to cover his whole iris, his mouth a sick grin of pleasure that allowed me to see every one of his baby teeth.
“Just watching the man on the TV, daddy,” he said, He pointed to it, and as his arm neared the black screen, his finger actually went into the TV, as if the black screen were nothing more than liquid. As soon as he did, ripples began to form across the glass, and I saw with horror that something was coming out of the TV.
From my father’s description of him, I knew it was the Grinning Man puppet. The thing stood six feet tall with white, rubbery skin, like some reptile from a cave that has never seen sunlight. Its jet black eyes bulged like golf balls out of its massive head, and its entire head split in half to show a mouth that had hundreds of needle-sharp teeth. My son clapped his hands in delight at the arrival of his TV friend, jumping up and down and singing, “No sad kids! No bad kids! Now we go- to Laughing Island!”
I saw with terror that my son’s hands were not empty. Before I had gotten home, he had gone into my room and stolen my .45 handgun. Now he pointed it at me.
“Sowwy daddy,” my son said, still smiling a grin from ear to ear, “but the Grinning Man says you have to come with us.”
“David,” I said to my son calmly, “put down the gun. You don’t have to do this.” He just shook his head at that, then pulled the trigger.
I felt like I was punched in my leg, a wave of warm pain rising up to my consciousness as I fell back then landed hard on the ground. I looked down and saw my pants were stained in blood, a massive bullet hole having gouged a way out of the right side of my shin. I screamed in pain, crawling away from my son and the Grinning Man.
They came at me then, the Grinning Man lifting me by my shoulders. My son clapped and danced as he carried me towards the TV. As I passed by him, I grabbed him by the hair, and with adrenaline-soaked fury, I grabbed the gun from his little hands. Then I began to fire blindly behind me, where the Grinning Man stood behind me, still carrying me slowly and singing.
I heard a few of the bullets make contact with a meaty thud, felt him drop me, then I started to black out from the blood loss. The last thing I saw before I went was my son’s eyes clearing and his expression returning to normal.
“David, call 911,” I whispered, before falling away from this world in a wave of blackness.
I awoke in the hospital sometime later, my leg bandaged with countless wrappings. A police officer and doctor stood next me to my bed, and behind them I saw my wife, weeping. They told me she had been tied up in the kitchen during the whole ordeal, that my son had drugged her and immobilized her with many layers of ropes, using the knots he learned to tie his shoes with to keep her in place.
They told me if my son hadn’t called 911, I would have bled out within twenty minutes. They had done emergency surgery but I would likely have a limp for the rest of my life.
There was no sign of the Grinning Man, of course, and my son refused to speak to anyone. They said he was catatonic, currently under psychiatric observation, just staring up at the ceiling like a waxen puppet.
I will do everything I can to bring him back to us.
Continue to Part 2: https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/10g9nn5/does_anyone_remember_a_kids_show_called_laughing/