'Iris'

They found Iris at the bottom of the well during the summer drought of 1933, when the Whittaker farmhouse was long abandoned and the ground had dried up enough to see clear to the bottom. Her porcelain face was cracked from the fall, head covered with moss, her once-pale dress now a muddied shade of earth. Locals remembered the doll belonging to Margaret Eloise Whittaker, a quiet widow who had inherited the farmhouse after her husband died in a thresher accident. Neighbors whispered that she had changed after his passing - spending hours sitting motionless by the parlor wall, murmuring as if in conversation with someone unseen.

Margaret began writing strange letters to the church - rambling messages about voices in the walls, about her husband not being truly gone, about the doll Iris being “the only one who listens.” In November of 1923, she vanished without a trace. The only clue left behind was the back door left ajar and a faint trail of waterlogged footprints leading toward the old well. Some say Margaret threw the doll down first to silence the whispers. Others believe the doll was what had been whispering all along.