I’m a detective and yes I know this should not be what I’m doing doing but I need to get this off my chest. I’ve worked for years and I’ve experienced something unlike anything you’ll have ever heard of. It still makes no f***ing sense.

Years ago a friend of mine who also worked at the police station informed me of a case.

NAME: EMILY RHOADES

A 32-year-old woman had gone missing in her home in the south-east side of the town.

Missing peoples cases were rare for me in town but not entirely uncustomary.

My colleague however stated that the woman’s husband wasn’t making any sense with his statement.

Me being me, I decided to go see this man for more clarity on the event even though it wasn’t my case. I approached the door of the man’s house and knocked firmly.

What greeted me was a slow uneasy opening of the door and a middle-aged man who looked like he hadn’t showered in weeks appearing.

I told the man that I’d heard about the disappearance of his wife and wanted to ask a few simple questions.

He took me into his living room and as soon as I stepped in the room I noticed something strange. There was a mannequin of a blonde woman with glasses sitting on his couch.

I tried my best to ignore it and sat on the single-seated couch adjacent to the mannequin.

I didn’t want to be rude and ask but the man didn’t seem to act like anything was unnatural.

The man made us both a cup of tea and came and sat right next to the mannequin.

“So, when did your wife go missing?” I queried.

“It happened 3 days ago, I tried to look for her myself and I couldn’t find her anywhere. On the morning she went missing I came downstairs and I saw this mannequin here.

It…looks just like her? I don’t understand what’s happening. Where is my wife? How did this get here?”

I looked into the eyes of the mannequin and something felt really off about it. For something that was mostly just plastic it looked extremely human-like. I felt very confused about the situation initially.

My rational mind then started to click. In an attempt to make sense of the encounter I assumed the man was crazy. The mannequin was perhaps some sort of coping mechanism after losing his wife who left him.

I explained to him we would try everything in our power to find his wife and that we would try to follow any leads that came our way.

Shortly after leaving the man’s house and his creepy mannequin we did all the regular searches in the local area to find his wife.

Sadly we found nothing. Not a single trace.

A few days pass and another case falls on my lap.

NAME: KEVIN SANDERS

In this instance a 14-year-old boy is reported missing. I thought this was just another missing person case until I read more about the details of the report.

It stated that on the morning of his disappearance his mother tried to wake him up for school.

She entered his room and repeatedly said his name.

No answer.

She could visibly see a lump in the covers so she knew her son was there.

When she went over and pulled the covers off her son, she found that a mannequin that looked just like her son was laying in a sleeping position on his bed.

Again, we did all the standard searches and we could not find the 14-year-old boy. The only thing left was this mannequin that appeared in his home. No explanation of how it got there. I checked everything, if there was a break-in, If the mother had spare keys someone might’ve found.

Nothing.

Naturally, we took the mannequins in for evidence. We had 2 of them in our “collection” now.

The most disturbing thing about these mannequins were just how much they looked like the missing person they’d replaced. They were practically a 1 for 1 look-a-like.

The most notable difference was that lights reflected off the plastic distinctly differently the way it does to human skin.

It made all of us at the station feel incredibly uneasy. We were now definitely aware that something stranger was going on.

2 people gone and 2 mannequins that look like them appearing in a relatively similar part of town.

Obviously not a coincidence.

A week later and we couldn’t fathom what was happening. What started as a few of these cases had grown into a large number very quickly.

I trembled as I flipped through a sizeable pile of files that ended up on my desk on Monday morning.

NAME: BETH HIGGINS

72-year-old woman reported missing by her family. A day later a mannequin that looks just like her was found sat on a bench of the local park she used to visit frequently.

NAME: JUDE LAWRY

41-year-old man reported missing by his brother. Later on this same day, it’s found that there is a mannequin that looks like the man located underneath the truck in the garage. This man was a mechanic and was apparently in the process of repairing his brothers truck which had broken down recently.

NAME: JOSH SOUTTAR

6-month-old baby missing. A mannequin of a baby is found in the crib by the infant’s parents.

After a 3 week period, we found that 9 people in the same town had disappeared and were replaced by a mannequin version of themselves.

We were dealing with a kidnapper. A serial kidnapper who was clearly messed up in the head. Creating mannequins of people’s loved ones to give to their families after abducting them.

Seriously what the f*** was going on?

We tried so hard to find anything about these disappearances and we found nothing. Not a single lead.

It was genuinely just like 11 people were replaced in an instant by a mannequin version of themselves.

Now here’s where this gets really bizarre.

You see, where I’m from we can only hold evidence for 6 months after the time of an offence. In that time period, we found nothing of importance regarding the mannequins. No fingerprints, no loose hairs on them. Nothing ultimately useful to us. Therefore they had to be returned to the place we’d found them.

The dozens of mannequins that had collected up dust in our evidence room therefore had to be given back to their “owners”.

Do you have any idea how f***** up it is to return a mannequin of someone’s loved one after several months when YOU are supposed to be the one helping to return their real loved one?

We had to return dozens of mannequins to the people who found them. They reacted to this as you’d expect with a lot of sadness. Anger. Puzzlement.

We didn’t really know what they’d do with the mannequins but we expected that most of them, if not all of them, would simply get rid of them.

A month after returning the mannequins to the victim’s loved ones I received a call from an unknown number.

It turned out to be the man from the first case who’s wife was still missing.

He sounded rather panicked and was mumbling every other word conveyed.

He told me that he put the mannequin in the attic as he understandably couldn’t stand the sight of it.

On one night, he went into his kitchen before he was about to sleep to get a glass of water. He entered the gloomy room and promptly turned on the lights.

When he looked across the kitchen he jumped backwards and fell to the floor.

The man said that the mannequin of his wife. The mannequin that he put in the attic, was standing over the kitchen sink.

It just stood there utterly lifeless however it’s arms had changed position and it somehow had a cloth in its hands. It looked like the plastic humanoid figure was about to clean some dishes.

Stupidly, I downplayed this as at the time because I thought this man was just insane. When I visited him everything about his mannerisms told me this was the case.

A day later I get another call. This time it’s from the mother of the 14-year-old boy who informed me she did something similar with her mannequin.

It was put away in the garage with the intention of destroying it as it reminded her of her missing son which made her extremely depressed.

Over time, she’d forgotten that she’d even received the mannequin again as she almost never went into her garage for anything.

She came home one evening and opened the door to her lonely house.

The mother screamed as she was greeted by the mannequin of her son standing right behind the front door.

Again, the mannequin had seemingly changed its figure. The mother said that when she opened the door, the mannequin of her son was stood in the open hallway pointing directly at the door.

Directly at her.

She looked into it’s eyes and said that she felt a level of fear she’d never experienced before. When I interviewed her after she said it was though the spirit of her son was shaming her. Shaming her for letting him get abducted at such a young age.

When we checked her home the mannequin was indeed in the position she claimed it was.

All of a sudden it was like these pieces of plastic had minds of their own.

Multiple people from previous cases said that the mannequins of their loved ones were moving on their own accord.

In the police station we now believed that the kidnapper, after many months of inactivity, had returned to yet again mess with the loved ones of the victims. This was a trend in the actions of this deranged psychopath.

One of the people said to us that they were in the kitchen making a late evening meal. Halfway through making some chicken teriyaki they glanced over at the open door to the living room.

To their horror, they saw the tilted head of the mannequin of their own sister peering around the doorway. The only thing they could see was the head of the mannequin leaning around whilst the rest of the body was concealed.

It was like the mannequin was menacingly watching her sister cook this meal. This made her scream and run out the back door before she told us about this.

The last call of the week was perhaps the most dangerous and unsettling of all the stories we’d heard about the mannequins.

Remember the brother of the mechanic I mentioned earlier? He too found that the mannequin of his brother was moving around their home when he wasn’t looking. It scared him so much that he took the mannequin outside and tried to burn it.

Burning plastic isn’t exactly effective however he was able to completely disfigure the mannequin and left it’s tatters in garden.

During the night the man awoke in his bedroom and felt something poking against his chest. He reached over to his bed-side light and turned it on with the flick of a switch.

The man yelled and frantically pushed as he ran out of his house with only his pants on.

The man claimed that when he turned on the light, he saw the mannequin of his brother standing over him in his sleep.

The mannequin that was previously left in tatters was somehow completely repaired.

It had a knife going through its hand and it was holding it against the man’s chest.

The scariest thing, was the reported facial expression of the mannequin.

You see, the mannequins all had a tone deaf expression, as you’d expect. When the man turned on the light he said that the mannequin had lowered its head and looked directly into his eyes with the knife on his chest.

It didn’t have a tone-deaf expression.

Instead, it displayed an emotion of anger.

The man saw the plastic face of his own brother looking down on him as though he despised him more than anything else in the world.

Almost like it hated the fact the brother tried to burn the mannequin and wanted revenge.

We knew that we needed to take the mannequins back into evidence as soon as possible. The cases were officially being reopened. Before we could do this, all of the mannequins on what appeared to be the exact same day had disappeared.

They were never seen again.

We had just set up a variety plans to catch the kidnapper too. This included newly set-up CCTV footage to capture who this person was.

The disappearance of the mannequins however meant that the kidnapper also went back into hiding.

To this day I’m left with night terrors about these cases. You have no idea how much it hurts to see these people so upset and you essentially can’t do anything. I’ll never be able to shake this feeling off for the rest of my life.

The people who disappeared before the arrival of the mannequins have been missing for years.

God bless their souls.

Wherever they are.