Scary Teddy

A child's imagination can bring anything to life

Quote by: Migdoel Torres

Back in 1985 when we lived at Ocean Parkway and Beverly Road. I bought my sisters a toy AG Bear which along with Teddy Ruxpin were the crave back then. They were the hottest toys on the market and hard to find. AG Bear was not as big as Teddy Ruxpin who was bigger and it also moved its eyes.

AG Bear didn’t. AG Bear was cuter and cheaper, it was more like a plush teddy bear you give a child, girlfriend, wife, and in my case sister. It was soft and cuddly.

It had a mechanism that controlled its voice. It ran on a 9-volt battery.

My sisters loved the toy bear. But our beautiful Husky dog “Ciji.” did not. It would bark at it whenever it saw it. Especially when it spoke.

Sometimes it would try to attack the toy bear. So it could never be left alone where Ciji could get at it. I thought that she was jealous because he thought it was another sort of pet.

In those days although I had my room, I was never home since those were my party days.

One day I got home and my sisters couldn’t wait to tell me what had happened the night before. I saw that they were nervous and I thought something really bad had happened. But with Ciji in the house, I knew it had nothing to do with someone trying to get into the apartment.

So we sat in the living room and my sisters E.T. and Dalia started telling me about what had happened the night before.

It seems that they were in their beds in the bedrooms asleep when they heard the dog bark. My sister ET told it to shut up and the dog who was on the other side of the closed door ran away.

Dalia told my sister how strange it was for Ciji to bark at night.

They both went back to sleep but about 30 minutes later they heard AG Bear talking from inside the closet.

My sisters were petrified, they froze in bed too scared to move or speak, so neither one knew that the other was going through the same thing. They pulled the covers over their heads and didn’t want to say a word because they thought that if they spoke up, the bear would come out of the closet and attack them.

This went on all night long, both thinking that the other one was asleep. AG bear kept them up all night. My sisters both hoped that it was that the batteries were running out and hoped that the batteries hurried up and died. But they didn’t he kept on talking. They both thought the same thing, they couldn’t wait for sunrise to jump out of bed and take out the batteries. But for now, they had to listen to AG Bear talk every little while.

Finally, it was morning and they both jumped up and noticed they had both gone through a petrifying night.

ET tells Dale, “Did you hear the bear talk all night too.”

Dale told her yes and told her about how scared she was. ET told her that she was scared to not only talk but to move. Dale told her the same as she got out of bed and opened the closet door carefully. She saw AG Bear there. ET got up and held AG Bear while my sister opened the zipper in the back to remove the batteries.

Dale then gets shocked as does ET, “There’s no batteries in it." Dale tells her. ET dropped the bear and they ran to the kitchen where Ciji met them. They then went back to the room with Ciji who now gave them both courage and Dale picked up the bear and ripped out its vocal box. She then threw the bear in the garbage shoot in the hallway.

I sat there in silence and complained, “You know how hard it was for me to find that bear!”

My sisters didn’t care and honestly, neither did I and they knew that when I started to laugh.

It was a long time that anything like that had happened and I wondered that maybe our protection had run out since our mom and dad were now living in Puerto Rico. Soon after that incident, my sister Dale moved in with our parents in Puerto Rico.

Nothing spooky like that ever happened there again besides some other type of scary moments like a cat walking in through the window and we lived five stories up. (We kept the cat named him Nitro. Ciji had passed away at age 4 by then. I want to add that we had a funeral upstate for my baby Ciji. I still miss and love her to this day.

So Nitro was now the new pet. Another scary moment was when my son lit an incense stick in my ex-bedroom that I had given him and walked out. He then walked back into the room to see that a towel that was hanging on the tall wooden closet was on fire from the incense stick that had touched it somehow.

He panicked and quickly went to get water and threw it on the closet that was catching on fire. He then grabbed the towel that was on fire and ran to the bathroom threw it in the bathtub and ran the water. But some of the sparks had fallen on a box on the floor when he was running with the towel and that box was loaded with fireworks.

When he went back into the room fireworks were going off everywhere. He panicked even more so when he saw what was happening. Luckily the fireworks didn’t start another fire and the little flames that were still burning he put out. He did get 3rd-degree burns to both his arms and hands. But we got lucky that day, we could have lost everything and who knows what else could have happened since we lived on the 5th floor of a six-story house that had about 34 families living there.