The Mysterious Crying Kiddie

The Mysterious Crying Kiddie, also known as the Ghost of Dark Score Lake, is a recurring haunting identified by the sound of a frightened child sobbing in the dark. For Mike Noonan, it becomes more immediate than the ordinary dangers around him: the voice is heard, fades away, returns on a recording, and is eventually addressed as a possible presence in the house. The episodes make the haunting’s power lie not in a visible apparition but in the gap between what Mike hears and what he can establish.

Identity and First Appearance

After a difficult first evening back in the TR, Mike goes to bed thinking about Kyra and her mother, Mattie. Three hours later, he gets up to use the bathroom and hears a child sobbing somewhere in the darkness. The sound suggests someone lost and frightened, though Mike also allows for the possibility that the fear is being pretended. His unease is physical: standing naked before the toilet, he feels gooseflesh across his back and begs the unseen source not to start again.

The crying diminishes as if carried down a tunnel, as it had before. Mike returns to bed without discovering its source. That recession gives the sound a distinctive pattern: it seems to withdraw rather than resolve, leaving him with an impression of movement through an unseen space and no proof of who, or what, made it.

A Haunting More Convincing Than the Ordinary World

On a later walk, Mike reflects that the crying child seems more real to him than Max Devore’s recent phone call. He knows the call happened, including Devore’s accusation that he was a liar, but finds it easier to believe in the lake’s ghost, known around campfires as the Mysterious Crying Kiddie. The contrast does not establish that the ghost is objectively real; it shows how strongly the unexplained sound occupies Mike’s attention, even beside a concrete confrontation with a wealthy and hostile man.

Mike considers calling Mattie to tell her what happened, then decides against it. He distrusts the simple story of a damsel in distress and a wicked father-in-law, and does not want to complicate his work by entering a potentially ugly dispute. His choice leaves the haunting within his own experience: he recognizes it as frightening but does not yet turn it into a reason to intervene in Mattie’s conflict.

The Voice on the Memo-Scriber

The haunting takes a more personal form when Mike finds the Memo-Scriber’s counter advanced from zero to twelve, though he had set it before going to bed. On playback, a whisper says Mike’s name. The voice recalls what he heard in Jo’s office when a draft rushed past his face, but the recording slows the words enough for him to understand them: the voice says, “Oh Mike,” pauses after a faint click as the machine shuts down for a time, then repeats the words. It is gone after that.

The recording changes the haunting’s emphasis from an unidentified child’s distress to a voice that appears to address Mike. Yet the machine’s counter and playback establish only that a recording is present; they do not identify its source. The scene thus intensifies the supernatural suggestion while preserving the central uncertainty that has marked the crying from the beginning.

The Unseen Presence and the House

Later, Mike hears thudding on the cellar stairs and asks whether the person there is the one who cries at night. The question connects the familiar sobbing to a new, apparently nearby disturbance, but no answer identifies the source. When Mike turns on the lights, the cellar and landing are empty. Dust on the stairs bears only his own tracks, with no sign that anyone had been there to make the sounds.

The temperature briefly supports the sense that something has happened: Mike can see his breath in the cold air, but successive exhales show the chill fading quickly. The empty stairs and disappearing cold offer no visible apparition, while the repeated sounds, recorded address, and unexplained change in temperature resist dismissal as a single ordinary noise. The Mysterious Crying Kiddie remains an unresolved presence whose defining effect is to make the unseen feel close without letting Mike confirm what it is.