Part 1: https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/10ev99d/does_anyone_remember_a_kids_show_titled_laughing/

​

The Grinning Man sat on the black sandy beaches of Laughing Island, holding my son up in the air like a prized trophy. My son, David, stood smiling at me, his eyes blank, his body as limp as a ragdoll’s. Behind him, the Grinning Man opened his massive mouth, disengaging his jaw like a snake before sticking my son’s head inside his mouth. As the Grinning Man’s countless shark teeth closed down around his neck, sending out spurts of blood and filling the air with the smell of copper and iron, I woke up screaming.

I was still in the hospital, recovering from an emergency surgery that saved my life after my son had shot me in the leg with my own .45 revolver from my bedroom. The dream lingered in my mind, and I expected to see the characters of the show creep out from underneath the bed at any moment, or jump out of the linen closet. Turning to look around the room, however, I only saw my father, sitting there with a cane by the side of his chair, a slight frown creasing his lips.

“We need to talk,” he said in his gruff voice, his eyes watery and unfocused. “David still isn’t responding. Totally catatonic. He is under psychiatric observation for 72 hours right now.”

“He… shot me…” I said weakly. My father shook his head.

“Whatever took control of him, that wasn’t David. That show, it somehow possesses the kids who watch it, puts something else in control of their minds. And once it is done with them, it often leaves them as hollow shells of people, sometimes in a coma, sometimes catatonic, other times just dead.” He pointed at me. “Except for you.”

“Me?” I asked, confused. He nodded.

“I never told you, but as a child, you too watched that show, talked about the Grinning Man. This was at the beginning of all the deaths, before I really knew the pattern, and at first I dismissed it as just your imaginary friend. You always were a creative child. I thought you just made an entire TV show in your head, and used the black screen of the TV like a sounding board to imagine all the characters. You talked about the Grinning Man puppet, which always creeped me out the most, and Sheriff Hogan, the huge puppet dressed in black military uniform with polished leather boots and a Death Head visor cap. You talked about the Teardrop Lady, a woman in ripped-up clothing who walked around the island, constantly crying blood and asking where her daughter went. I figured you got the Sheriff Hogan stuff from some World War 2 documentary you might’ve seen, even though I never let you watch any of that crap when you were seven years-old.

“But then things started to get really weird. I had heard another child was in custody for killing his parents with a hammer while they slept. Apparently he said the Grinning Man had told him to crush his mother’s Valium and bring it to his parents mixed with hot cocoa, which they both drank before going to bed. They were so zoned out that they probably didn’t even feel the hammer when it crashed into their skulls. At least, I like to think so. But who knows? Maybe they felt everything. Once they were immobilized by strikes to the skull, he started working on their feets, their legs, their hands and arms, bashing away until they had hundreds of fractures throughout their bodies.

“After talking about the Grinning Man, Laughing Island, Sheriff Hogan and the Teardrop Lady for hours, he was involuntarily committed to a juvenile psychiatric unit, where he ended up hanging himself with his bedsheets, a grin still plastered across his face when they found him. He had bitten at his wrists, opening up the wrists, and written in his own blood on the walls of the bathroom. His last words, finger-painted on the white tiles, were, ‘No angry kiddies, no sad kiddies, no evil kiddies and no bad kiddies’. Just like that weird Sheriff Hogan puppet used to sing when he buried real kids alive on the show- at least according to those kids who had seen it.

“The descriptions of the kids on the show ended up matching real missing persons, children who had mysteriously disappeared across the country, children whose bodies we never found. Maybe those bodies were never found because they truly were taken to Laughing Island, buried alive or stabbed or burned alive, or any one of another hundred fates that witnesses stated happened to kids on the show. But at the time, the entire idea seemed absurd. I thought there was no such thing as supernatural phenomena, no such thing as demonic possession or magic shows that made innocent kids into killers.

“But despite not really believing any of it. I left work early that day to check on you. Your mother was visiting your dying grandmother in the hospital down in Florida, and thank God for that. She was thousands of miles away from us when it happened, and that may have saved her life.

“When I came home, you were inches away from the TV, watching a pure black screen. Hell, the damned thing wasn’t even plugged in, but you acted like you saw your favorite show on the screen anyway. Your eyes were totally blank but you had an ear-to-ear grin, like you had just gotten to Disneyworld or received the best present of your life. I called your name softly. ‘Jonny,’ I said, and you turned and looked at me, still smiling. You pointed to the TV and said, ‘The Grinning Man- he’s here. And he loves you daddy. He wants us to come with him to Laughing Island, where everyday feels like Christmas and everyone is always happy, and being sad or angry is illegal.’ Then I saw you holding my personal handgun in your little hands. That gun looked far too big for such tiny hands to handle. I’m not even sure how you got in the gun safe, for as far as I knew you had no idea what the combination was.

“As you aimed it at me, something started coming out of the black TV screen. It was sickly white, like some worm in a cave that hasn’t seen sunlight in millions of years. The arms were thin and far longer than any human’s arms could ever be. Slender fingers with too many joints on them began gripping at the border of the TV, pulling itself out with immense speed, as if I were watching a video that had been fast-forwarded. The blackness of the TV rippled like a pond of black ink as its head came out, showing the Grinning Man with his hundreds of vicious teeth across his smile and his protuberant black eyes. He grabbed your shoulders like he was massaging you, and whispered something in your ear. You started laughing and pulled the trigger.

“Luckily, you were just a little kid and didn’t know much about aiming or focusing on center mass, so you hit me in the leg instead. I fell instantly, feeling sick waves of pain rush over my body, the sticky blood soaking through my pant leg in a matter of seconds. I knew I had almost no time to react if I wanted to survive this, so I did the only thing I could think to do. I was, at the time, still in my cop uniform, so I had my service pistol on me. I took it out and began shooting at the TV and the Grinning Man. As soon as the TV blew apart in a shower of sparks, you seemed to come back, dropping the gun instantly and running over to me, sobbing and screaming as you saw all the blood. The Grinning Man had crawled back into the TV and it was just you and me again. I told you to call 911, and you did, and I was saved. Just like you with your son. It is almost like the story repeats itself throughout the generations, as if we’re being targeted by the Grinning Man and all his friends.” My father heaved a deep sigh.

“So you were never actually shot in the leg by a drug dealer?” I asked, stunned by all the revelations he had shared. I didn’t remember a single second of that horrible day. Maybe I had blocked it all out to maintain my sanity, or maybe the Grinning Man had somehow wiped my memory around the events. Either way, it made me sick to my stomach to realize I had tried to kill my own loving father.

“No, that injury was from you, though you know it wasn’t your fault. Not at all. None of those children were responsible for what they did to their parents. You need to always remember that. David is not responsible for shooting you, either.”

“So what happened after all that?” I asked, not really wanting to know, but still needing to know regardless.

“You were totally catatonic by the time I woke up from emergency surgery on my leg. It was like you slipped into a coma, but your eyes were still open, still blankly staring at the ceiling and moving around, as if you saw something there. Nothing helped at first. All the medications they tried to give you, the therapy, even the electroshock, all had zero effect. I eventually got you discharged from the hospital and started homecare on you, with your mother’s help. We looked for help, and your mother heard stories about a Buddhist monk who had dealt with similar possessions and spirit infestations in his home country. We were able to pay for his airfare and brought him to see you.

“We weren’t allowed to see what he did, but he locked himself in your room with you for three days and nights, chanting. He had an ancient leather tome, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, written in the original language by some Tibetan saint centuries ago. He talked to you in English sometimes- we could hear him outside the door, trying to guide your mind back to your body. He would say something like ‘Your mind is in a luminous state between worlds now. Do not follow the smoky red light to rebirth in the animal world. Do not follow the black lights to the Hell world. Follow the white light, and follow the sound of my voice. Come back to the human world. Come back to your family and those who love you.’

“After three days and nights, he opened the door, and you were just sitting up in bed, as if you had woken from a fever dream. You were rubbing your eyes, confused, and didn't remember anything that had happened. That’s when I made up the lie about getting shot in the leg by a drug dealer and forced to retire, to make you feel better. I didn’t want you blaming yourself.” My father heaved a deep sigh.

“So you’re saying there are people that can bring back David?” I asked, the first rays of hope shining through the suffocating despair.

“I’ll make some calls,” he said. After that, I received another dose of morphine for my leg from the nurse and fell back asleep, dreaming of the Grinning Man and children being buried alive in the white sands of a far-away island.

Sadly, it turned out the Buddhist monk who had rescued me had long ago died of old age. My father still had connections, though, and while we couldn’t find anyone with the power of the old Tibetan monk, one of his friends recommended an old Siberian shaman who had dealt with similar cases of demonic possession and catatonia. Within a few days, we had David discharged from the hospital, back in his own room, and the ancient shaman standing in the kitchen with us. He introduced himself as Ayangat. He had bronze skin, huge eyes and a shaved head. For a man in his seventies, he had almost no wrinkles and looked and acted much younger. His body language radiated peace and calmness, and when he shook my hand, I felt a tremendous heat radiating from his flesh.

“We have little time to waste,” Ayangat said, frowning slightly. “Your son has been gone, lost in the place between worlds for too long. Every minute we delay, he gets farther away from us. We must begin immediately.” Ayangat pulled out a clear glass bottle, filled with some brown liquid. I saw glittery particulate matter floating throughout the deepness of the elixir.

“This is a concoction of my own making I refer to as the ‘Holy Trinity’. Three sacred mushrooms from around the world, extracted and brewed to a very high concentration. Namely, I use psilocybin mushrooms from the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, Amanita muscaria from Siberia and reishi mushrooms from the highlands of China. The reishi will have a calming effect and strengthen your heart and aura for the ceremony. The psilocybin will open your third eye and allow you to see the unseen, and the Amanita muscaria will allow you to go out of your body and enter another part of spacetime, the part inhabited by your boy currently. By focusing, we can push your consciousness to the dimension where your son is trapped, and you may be able to bring him back. I say ‘may’ because there is a very real chance this will not work. You must be prepared for the possibility that not only will you not retrieve your son, but that in the process of rescuing him, you may become trapped yourself.” I shook my head, barely believing I was about to go through with this, but remembering my son’s blanken, waxy face, I strengthened my resolve.

We entered David’s room. Drool puddled on his pillow from his gaping mouth, his eyes unblinking and unseeing as we passed in front of him. The shaman poured some of the mushroom concoction into the skull of a deer he had fashioned into a cup, and handed it over to me.

“Say a prayer to whatever God or gods you believe in,” the shaman said, “and drink deeply.” Looking down, I asked God for help, then drank the dark elixir in one huge gulp. It tasted absolutely disgusting, like old gym socks and mushrooms left outside to ferment, with undertones of pure bitterness. I made a face, revolted, but managed to keep it down. The shaman nodded at me, smiling for the first time. He sat me down in a chair next to my son’s bed, then pulled what looked like a hand-mirror from his bag, except instead of a reflective mirror, it had polished obsidian stone. It was so smooth and glossy I could almost see my own reflection in the blackness of it.

“Now stare into the sacred mirror,” he said, “and listen to my voice.” I stared into the mirror, at first not feeling anything. Suddenly a wave overtook my body, and the mirror started to expand and pulse with its own heartbeat. Within seconds, all I could see was the black stone covering my entire vision, sending out rainbows of light and iridescent sparks from every corner. As I stared deeper into it, the blackness became a tunnel, and I felt myself being sucked into it.

As I neared the end of the tunnel, I could hear maniacal laughing and see the white sands of a beach approaching. The shaman’s voice came through, muted and sounding far-away.

“Follow the tunnel to the place where your son lies,” he said, “and strengthen your heart for the battle to come.” Then his voice disappeared entirely and I felt myself falling. I landed hard on a sandy beach, looking up into the bright summer sun. I tried to remember where I was or what I was doing, but my mind felt fuzzy. I looked around and saw David, sitting at the ocean’s edge, staring off into the horizon.

“David!” I yelled, and he turned towards me. Tears streamed down his face, but he said nothing. “Come to me, David. We must get out of here immediately. There are evil things on this island. Let me take you home.” I saw a flash of white out of the corner of my eye, and turning, realized the Grinning Man was running out of the palm trees of the island. His wicked smile and insane eyes were all I could see before he plowed into me, sending me sprawling. Before I could recover, he bent down, disengaging his jaw like a snake’s, and came towards me. Instinctively I reached up with my right arm to push him away, but he bit it off at the wrist, shaking it from side to side like a rabid dog. Blood spurted from the stump and I cried out in pain and shock.

David ran at the Grinning Man from the side, pushing him off balance. It gave me a moment to try to recover. I sat up, groggy, my vision blackening from the blood loss, but the adrenaline gave me the strength to act. Pushing myself up with my good arm, I began to kick at the Grinning Man’s neck with my good leg, then stomp on it. His insane black eyes just stared up at me, blood streaming down his sickly white skin, my hand already swallowed and forever gone. David joined me, kicking at the Grinning Man’s eyes until blood ran down his face like crimson tears. I felt myself weakening, stumbling, and I grabbed David’s hand with my one remaining hand.

“We need to go,” I said, dragging him towards the black tunnel I had come through. At the end, I saw a pinpoint of white light. I never loosened my grip on David, and together we followed the white light back into his room.

I fell out of the tunnel, holding my spurting arm and getting blood all over the wooden floors of David’s room. For the second time in a month, the blood loss was putting me to sleep. I heard the shaman’s voice, still calm, as he called an ambulance, then I fell asleep.

Like deja vu, I woke back up in the hospital. I had a feeling they must be getting sick of me. Now not only would I have a permanently damaged leg, but I was also missing my right hand. I had torn open the stitches on my leg in the process of rescuing David, requiring the surgeon to open up the bandages and fix all the new damage I had done. But none of that bothered me, because David was back.

He sat next to my bedside, holding my hand, looking so small and helpless. His large brown eyes regarded me sadly.

“Do you think the Grinning Man is gone?” he asked me. I looked at him for a moment.

“I think we’re safe now,” I said, not answering his question.