In Brief
At the Ocean City Life-Saving Station Museum in Maryland, a six-foot animatronic doll named Laughing Sal sits on the second floor. Press her button and nothing happens. Then she laughs on her own, after hours, with the building empty and no one near the switch.
The Full Story
On the second floor of the Ocean City Life-Saving Station Museum in Maryland stands a six-foot animatronic doll named Laughing Sal. She has a gap-toothed grin and laughs at the push of a button. Or she's supposed to. Visitors press it and nothing happens, press again, still nothing — and then, twenty minutes later, across the room at the shipwreck exhibit, Sal starts cackling on her own.
Staff hear her after closing too, that laugh rolling through an empty building with nobody near the switch. "Sometimes she laughs when you don't push the button," says Mindie Burgoyne, who wrote *Haunted Ocean City and Berlin*. Sal spent decades luring children into Jester's Fun House on the boardwalk before she was donated here in 1980. She may be the largest haunted doll in the world.
The building she stands in had a darker job long before she arrived. It's an 1891 U.S. Life-Saving Service station, Carpenter Gothic, white clapboard with a lookout tower, originally built on Caroline Street and hauled to the tip of the boardwalk in 1977. The men stationed here were surfmen — they earned $1.33 a day and bought their own uniforms, and their work was rowing out into the surf after drowning sailors. The men they couldn't save came in too.
In 1955, while the Coast Guard still ran the place, a family of six from Baltimore capsized boating to a hunting lodge on Assateague Island, and all six drowned. "The bodies were brought to the Life-Saving Station, specifically the large equipment room, so that relatives could identify them," the assistant curator confirms. Visitors in that room report a sudden cold, and some say they sense a little girl.
Near the old life-cart, the rescue boat that carried a handful of survivors at a time, a woman once felt a blast of cold and saw a man in a slicker who "appeared dead, just for an instant, like an apparition," before he was gone.
She isn't the only child here. A blond boy, three or four years old, is the museum's most persistent ghost. "Twice people said they saw a little blond-haired boy running to the gift-shop, when it was locked," a museum aide recalls. "He was seen a few days later coloring in the children's room." After one such sighting, workers repainting the attic stairs found a single small shoe print pressed into the fresh paint at the top.
Nobody pushed any button for that one.
