Full Script

PROLOGUE

One of the greatest ironies of work travel is this – sometimes you just don’t care where you are. You just want to get to your hotel, eat, sleep, Uber to your meetings, get back to the hotel and then get home.  When that mood strikes, what sits outside the conference center or hotel room is irrelevant.  It could be a strip mall or the Eiffel Tower…neither is sufficiently enticing to make you get out and explore.

Sadly, this is exactly how I felt for the first few days on my first trip to Singapore. All the glories of this multicultural island couldn’t shake me out of this travel malaise.

Fortunately, with just a couple of days left, that fatigue wore off and I set out to explore the downtown area, which features the astonishing triple tower known as the Marina Bay Sands. This iconic resort building is the most expensive standalone casino property in the world. You might have seen it in the film Crazy Rich Asians, it’s really three separate buildings, unified on the roof level with what’s known as the SkyPark. This spectacular playground, 55 stories off the ground, can entertain as many as 4,000 people at once with swimming pools, gardens, and restaurants. You don’t have to be interested in gambling to appreciate this magnificent sight; it reminded me a little bit of the strip of engineered Earth in the classic videogame Halo – minus the whole ring-world concept. 

So, as I started walking for the downtown area, I was forced to stop. A large park abutted the sidewalk on my route. The park is known as the Haw Par Villa, an expansive theme park filled with over 1,000 statues, and hundreds of detailed three-dimensional dioramas. Of course, lots of parks have statues and memorials of people from history. But these dioramas set Haw Par Villa apart; and make it a much wilder, much stranger place than a visitor like me expects to find on a casual stroll.

At the epicenter of the park is the Ten Courts of Hell. It’s a self-guided tour through, well, the experiences one would expect from hell. Or at least, the Hell imagined by the multicultural mythology that makes Singapore so unique. When it was built, it was intended to show children the consequences of their bad behavior; but even for an adult like me, the effect was chilling.

You enter through a dark tunnel, guarded on either side by mythological creatures which gaze at you ominously. And then, each of the ten courts was designed to represent how a specific set of sins results in a very specific torment. For example, in the Second Court, people who steal or gamble are frozen in blocks of ice. If you cheat in school or swear, you’ll be sent to the Sixth Court of Hell, where you’ll be hurled onto a tree made of knives. The Ninth Court of Hell seems to cover any law-breaking that isn’t specifically called out earlier….but you haven’t caught a break here. In the Ninth Court of Hell, you’re both decapitated and delimbed by a greenish monster with immense eyes who can control ghosts and devils.

The park’s history actually starts in China, and with a specialist in herbal medicine named Aw Chu Kin, who served at the court of the Emperor. He was originally from what was then called Burma, now Myanmar, and he had lived all over Southeast Asia, learning about the medicinal properties of various plants. With this knowledge he produced a special cream which relieved the Emperor’s aches and pains.

Now, we don’t know why, but at some point he left the Emperor’s service and, in the late 1870’s, moved back to his birthplace of Yangon in Burma, where he opened a shop specializing in traditional Chinese medicines, including his own special pain relief cream. When he passed away and his two sons inherited the business, they made his invention famous throughout Southeast Asia under the name it still goes by today, Tiger Balm.

In 1926, they moved their thriving company to Singapore where their headquarters remains today. It was they who built this theme park, which they called Tiger Balm Gardens. They wanted it to be a fun, exciting place where children could learn about Buddhist, Confucian and Taoist mythologies. But their vision didn’t last long. The park was abandoned at the start of World War II, and it was eventually seized by Japanese forces, because of its excellent vantage point to watch ships at sea.  

Nowadays, the park is once again available to stimulate, illuminate, and, if you’ve got a guilty conscience, intimidate. With the graphic dioramas of the Ten Courts of Hell, it’s not surprising that ghost stories have haunted Haw Par Villa for decades. There are even rumors that some of the 1,000 statues were actually dead humans covered with wax. When I first heard this, it sounded laughably far-fetched. But, if you’ve listened to our fourth episode, about the dead train robber Elmer McCurdy and his second life as a theme park attraction, you’ll know that stranger things have indeed happened.

But nevertheless, the Guards at Haw Par Villa claim they have heard screams coming from the Ten Courts of Hell at night. Other visitors, seeing broken statues, have believed that they contained dark spirits which have now escaped to spread evil through the world. 

I admit I was struck by the overwhelming number of statues in the park. All those frozen expressions, the empty eyes. I caught myself thinking that I wouldn’t want to be here at night. The idea that some spirit possesses them isn’t difficult to imagine. That feeling stuck with me long after this trip to Singapore ended; and it re-emerged on the other side of the globe at a most unexpected place. Las Vegas.

Downtown Vegas is the home of Zak Bagan’s Haunted Museum; it’s a real treat for anyone who loves the spooky and paranormal. If you’re listening to this podcast, you’d probably love it. Its winding corridors contain countless notorious artifacts from incidents of haunting and possession, as well as more ordinary items with macabre histories, like the Volkswagen Van in which Dr. Jack Kevorkian assisted terminally-ill patients to commit suicide.

In recent years, Zak Bagan unveiled a new, headline grabbing attraction – Peggy the Doll. Originally from England, Peggy is said to be one of the most haunted dolls in the world – there are even stories that the act of watching a clips of her on YouTube have caused people health problems. Naturally, I had to pay Peggy a visit for myself. I had to sign a release form to do so – whether Peggy is truly possessed or not, you have to give the Museum credit for knowing how to build anticipation.

For most of my life, I didn’t see what could be so scary about dolls. Dolls were the soft replica of a baby or child that your sister or daughter may have carried around and cared for. Me? I was a bit more of a Star Wars action figure kinda guy. But I have to admit, when I looked into the eyes of Peggy, the memory of Haw Par Villa in Singapore, and the legends of possessed statues, suddenly came back vividly. Suddenly, I believed dolls could be scary.

How does it happen? How does something created for a sweet and innocent purpose, something that provides comfort and safety to so many, come to get such an evil reputation? In a world with so many dolls, how does one single doll become infamous?

This seemed like an irresistible dark path to head down. So let’s talk about some haunted dolls. 

***

Hi, my name’s MF Thomas; I’m an author and a lifelong fan of strange stories from the dark corners of the world. Growing up, I was enthralled by any hint of exciting, forbidden knowledge that waited behind the names and dates we learned in school. And these days, as I travel the world, there’s nothing I enjoy more than to get off the traditional tourist map and find a place or story that has been overlooked, dismissed or ignored.

This is the My Dark Path podcast. In every episode, we explore the fringes of history, science and the paranormal.  We explore unique topics that intrigue and excite; and every once in a while, send a shiver down your spine. So, if you geek out over these topics…. you’re among friends here at My Dark Path. 

To see content related to every episode, visit MyDarkPath.com.  When you’re there, register for the My Dark Path newsletter and you’ll be entered for frequent drawing for a unique book or other curiosity.  And thank you for listening.  I’m grateful that you’ve chosen to spend time here, with me, walking the Dark Paths of the world, together.  Let’s get started with episode 10, Haunted Dolls.

PART ONE

If we’re talking about haunted dolls, the first one you probably thought of is the one that’s become a movie star. Annabelle the doll first appeared in the hit horror film The Conjuring and has since starred in three movies of her own. The image of her on the screen is unforgettable – sunken, ocean blue eyes, that look alarmingly human - except for that crack in the porcelain of the right one. Red painted lips that open into a menacing, toothy smile. Golden blonde hair that hangs in delicate braids tied with red ribbon.

Somehow that frozen smile manages to wake our worst nightmares – stirring up memories of that doll from Grandmother’s cabinet that we always feared might be watching us, waiting for an opportunity to jump through the glass. It’s not hard to understand why porcelain dolls in particular are so haunting. It’s the uncanny resemblance. These dolls look too human, too familiar. Like a child frozen in a mold. 

One of the ironies of Annabelle’s iconic appearance is that it’s a Hollywood creation – if you ever go to see the, quote, “real”, Annabelle, it doesn’t look anything like she does in the movies. But isn’t that the case with so many celebrities?

The real Annabelle is an ordinary Raggedy Ann doll – soft, floppy limbs, hair made out of bright red yarn, a triangle nose and button eyes. She looks jolly and sweet, not menacing at all. 

Maybe that’s why the story that gets told about the real Annabelle feels even more bone chilling. When you picture something so ordinary, something just about everyone has run across in their childhood, and imagine it harboring a secret darkness – it shakes you. I think there’s an unspoken trust between a child and the plaything, it’s supposed to be warm and loving. It’s supposed to be innocent. 

Now, when we talk about the so-called “true story” behind Annabelle, we have to venture into the world of Ed and Lorraine Warren, the husband-and-wife team of self-proclaimed “demonologists” whose stories are the basis of all those Conjuring and Annabelle films. The Warrens referred to themselves as psychic researchers and paranormal investigators, and they collected the relics of the hauntings they investigated – often cursed jewels, human skulls, or other types of objects – and kept them locked away in their basement, which they referred to as the Occult Museum.

They claimed to have conducted over 10,000 supernatural investigations during their careers. Now, that would mean completing a new demon investigation every single day, seven days a week, for over 27 years; which would either make them the most efficient ghost hunters in human history; or guilty of some slight exaggeration.

We’re not here to throw cold water on anybody’s fun here at My Dark Path, but we also don’t believe in just passing along unverified claims, whether it’s from our government covering up the Japanese Fu-Go balloon attack on our soil as we discussed in a previous episode, or from a man who claimed he performed secret exorcisms on behalf of the Vatican, like Ed Warren. We think it’s more revealing to consider why these beliefs take hold.

Some people have called the Warrens scam artists. Others are captivated by the elaborate stories they weaved and the scientific jargon they used to dress it up, and believe that there must be something there. The reason I poke at that claim about 10,000 investigations is that it’s one of the few pieces of hard data they’ve ever offered about their work, and it’s a dubious statistic to say the least. So, as we recount the popular version of the Annabelle legend, believe what you want; but remember, we only have this from the mouths of Ed and Lorraine Warren. None of the people involved have ever come forward.  Either way, I’ve become fascinated by the Warrens – who they were and how they came to become some of the most famous demonlogists in the world.  You can certainly expect a future episode about them.

But, back to Annabelle.  The story goes that it was 1970 when a nursing student Donna celebrated her 28th birthday. Her mother gave her a special, sentimental gift – something to remind her of her mother’s love: A Raggedy Ann doll. The doll was ridiculously oversized, about the size of a toddler, but Donna was grateful for the meaningful present. She placed Raggedy Ann front and center on her bed. 

But it wasn’t long before strange things started happening in Donna’s apartment, which she shared with her friend Angie, a fellow nursing student. First, they noticed that the doll would change positions. Donna would place it on its back when she left the room, and find it on its side when she came back. Sometimes the legs or arms would suddenly be crossed when neither woman had crossed them.

Like anyone, they believed at first it must be the trick of the eye. The changes were so small, hardly even noticeable. Maybe Donna had slammed the bedroom door shut too hard, causing the doll to fall on its side. Maybe a breeze from an open window blew one leg over the other. There were so many easy explanations, and after all, these two overworked nursing students had enough on their minds. 

But things only got stranger; in ways that got harder and harder to explain. Raggedy Ann was starting to switch rooms. Donna would leave the doll on her bed and come home to find it on the couch, sitting up straight with its arms crossed. Almost stern-looking. Or she would leave it on the couch and come home to find it in her room with the door shut behind it. On more than one occasion, she returned home to find the doll standing upright, leaning against a dining room chair, staring cryptically ahead. 

Around this time, the story goes, messages started appearing out of nowhere. Pieces of parchment paper would show up on the bedroom floor, with phrases like “Help Me,” and “Help Us” scribbled across them in a child’s messy handwriting. This put a chill down Donna’s spine. There was no parchment paper in the house. Where did it come from? 

Donna and Angie decided there must be an intruder in their home. Someone sneaking around, messing with them, trying to get a rise out of them. So, to test their theory, they started taking measurements. They marked exactly where the front rug was located, so they could see if it moved. They marked doors that were open and closed, the contents of the refrigerator, how many pencils they had in a drawer. But after days of this rigorous documentation, they found that the only thing that ever moved was the doll. 

One day Donna left the doll on the living room couch and came home to find it on her bed. She approached it, feeling uneasy, and upon inspection, found that it was dripping red liquid from its eyes and chest. Was it bleeding? There was nothing to explain the liquid – no ketchup left out, no Halloween makeup. 

Now genuinely frightened of the doll, Donna and Angie decided to contact a medium. This medium conducted a séance – where she opened communication with the ghostly spirit of a little girl. The spirit said its name was Annabelle Higgins. She was maybe seven or eight, and she claimed to have died on the property that the apartment was built on. She told the medium that she liked Donna and Angie – that she wanted only to be loved by them. She wanted a place where she could be cared for.

This melted Donna’s and Angie’s hearts. They invited her to stay inside their Raggedy Ann, for as long as she wanted to. They would be happy to take her in. There was just one problem – the spirit, Annabelle, had been lying to them. She was looking for a human host and, perhaps like a vampire, just needed to be invited in.

A few weeks later, Angie’s boyfriend Lou was taking a nap while the women were out of the house. He had a nightmare in which he was being attacked by Annabelle. She was holding him down. Strangling him. 

He awoke in a sweat. Annabelle was sitting beside him, watching. He felt something wet on his chest and looked down to find bloody claw marks on his skin. Then, these seemingly deep scars healed completely in a matter of days, leaving no mark behind.

Donna and Angie realized they needed to get rid of the doll. They called upon an Episcopal Priest, Father Hegan, who they hoped could get rid of the spirit. Father Hegan was wary of handling the situation alone. And as he passed his request up the ranks of the Church, and someone in the chain of command contacted Lorraine and Ed Warren. 

The couple came for Annabelle right away. 

They had a priest perform an exorcism on the apartment. Then they buckled the doll into the backseat of their car to drive home. They claim that Ed decided to steer clear of the highway, afraid that the doll might resist being taken away. And sure enough, they claim that the brakes on their car began to fail, nearly causing a serious accident, until Ed splashed the doll with holy water.

Today Annabelle sits in a glass cabinet in the Occult Museum. A sign on the door reads “Warning: Positively Do Not Open.” It’s an unnerving exhibit once you’ve heard the story, and stories persist of people who suffered all sorts of calamities for taunting or disrespecting the Raggedy Ann.

Now, what you won’t see is any of the parchment paper she supposedly wrote messages on. You won’t see any documentation of the Catholic Church enlisting the Warrens for assistance. You won’t see any evidence at all that Donna, Angie, Father Hegan, or any of the other people identified, ever existed. 

Seven years before the Warrens claimed to have captured this doll, there was an episode of the legendary television series “The Twilight Zone” called “Living Doll”. In the episode, a doll, known as “Talky Tina”, seems to slowly drive the father of a family mad by saying things it shouldn’t, by seeming to move around on its own, until he finally trips over her and falls to his death. The mother of the family, who finds the doll by her husband’s dead body, is named Annabelle.

Is this a coincidence? It could be. But the more interesting coincidence, I think, is how much the story the Warrens tell resembles the story of another haunted doll that came before. Let’s head down the coast to Florida, and meet Robert.

***

PART TWO: 

The strange case of Robert Eugene Otto. He always preferred to be called “Gene”. He was a successful painter and writer for much of his life, and something of an eccentric member of the community of artists that sprung up around Key West in the early twentieth century.

Unlike some of the other artists, he was a native of the area, the scion of a prominent Floridian family. By most accounts he was a precocious, creative child, but persistently unhappy. While his parents were, by most accounts, loving, there are stories of tension – that the family of Robert’s father didn’t approve of his choice of a wife. Whether it was domestic tension, or a lack of peers who shared his imaginative temperament, or an early form of depression or other mental illness, we really don’t know, but the records we have are consistent that young Gene was known to be lonely.

Gene’s grandfather, while traveling through Germany, thought that he found a solution to this problem. The Streiff Company was in the business of making realistic, high quality dolls. One of them, he thought, looked uncannily like his grandson.

The doll was hand-sewn, carefully stuffed with straw, and lovingly dressed in a sailor suit that matched one of Gene’s favorite outfits. And it was forty inches tall, nearly the size of young Gene himself. Gene’s grandfather purchased the doll and had it shipped to Florida from Germany, to be a birthday present to young Gene. This was in 1904. One detail that would have been an unpleasant surprise to me - apparently the doll’s face was originally painted in the style of a harlequin, or clown. But maybe that’s just how I feel about clowns – I know I’m not alone. Gene didn’t seem to mind, and the painted makeup wore off fairly quickly.

In fact, Gene was delighted in every way by his new companion in the sailor suit. He started to call him Robert, his own given name. People joked that the two of them could practically be called twins.

Robert the Doll was Gene’s constant companion. Gene played with him day and night, indoors and outdoors. When the family ate dinner, Robert joined, and some accounts say that, on most nights, they set a place at the table for him. When the family went on holiday, Robert came along, too. And every night, Gene and Robert would go to bed in Gene’s turret room in the Otto family mansion. It is here that the first strange incidents occurred.

Gene would stay up late playing with Robert; like any child would with a favorite toy. And he would have long and animated conversations with Robert. That’s not so unusual. But in the case of Robert, there was another voice, and it talked back. When they first heard the voice, Gene’s parents naturally assumed that the boy was just playacting, making up a voice for his imaginary friend. The more they heard this voice, though, it sounded unlike anything they had ever heard their little boy say. It was almost as if someone else, and not Gene, was speaking.

One night, the family says, there was a clamor of noise from Gene’s room. The parents rushed to investigate, and found that Gene’s room had been ransacked. Furniture was broken. Toys strewn everywhere. Again, this wouldn’t be a surprise in many children’s bedrooms, but Gene wasn’t known to be messy or destructive. He cried out “Robert did it!” and pointed to the doll where he sat at the foot of Gene’s bed. And this wouldn’t be the last time such things happened.

More things were broken, more messes were made. And every time, Gene would blame Robert. One story says that the family pet (a cat or a dog, we don’t know) was constantly harassed. Another story told of the smashing of valuable china. Whatever the truth of these stories, we do know that multiple incidents involving Robert occurred. And we do know that Gene blamed them on the doll.

And then there was the screaming. Every so often, Gene would wake up screaming in the middle of the night. He had never experienced night terrors before Robert. One night, Gene’s father came to check on him, only to discover that Gene was cowering beneath the covers, and pointing at Robert, who was sitting at the foot of the bed. Over time, Gene’s parents, family friends, and the household servants, came to fear Robert; even if it was just an ordinary doll, the emotions he seemed to bring out in Gene were very real, and very troubling. 

The stories started to spread beyond the walls of the house. Neighbors talked about a strange child who would watch them through the upper story windows. Schoolchildren who walked past the Otto Mansion claimed that Robert would watch them, run back and forth between the windows, and even mock them while they walked to school. It was no longer a question of whether this was just Gene’s imagination; other people were starting to believe there was something frightening about Robert the Doll.

Eventually, Gene grew up and went away to study art in Paris. He didn’t take Robert with him. The doll was put away in the attic. But that wasn’t the end of it. It’s reported that Gene’s parents, would occasionally hear sounds coming from the attic. Sometimes, the noise was like running footsteps. But sometimes they say they heard a voice, giggling.

Gene married a woman named Annette Parker, who adored him. They moved into the family mansion. As she had only known her husband away from this house, she was shocked to see the intensity of his attachment to the doll. Gene insisted that Robert be taken out of the attic and moved into his childhood room. During the days, Gene would paint with Robert nearby.

Annette certainly disliked the doll, but we don’t know precisely why, she never committed her feelings to record. But there are stories. One story claims that Gene, who was otherwise a gentle soul, insisted that Robert be seated at the dinner table, and would verbally berate Annette if she objected. Another story says Annette would overhear Gene having arguments with Robert, in a low voice but loud enough that she could hear them from another room.

If Gene left the home for any prolonged period of time, Annette allegedly felt unsafe with Robert. She would put him in a chest in the attic. Some wild stories come out of this – that Annette lost her mind, that Robert escaped the chest and she was frightened to death, that she wound up in an asylum. These three stories are definitely false, Annette remained in the house, and became a widow when Gene passed away. Heartbroken like so many other widows. 

Gene died in 1974. Annette in 1976. Not long after, a woman named Myrtle Reuter acquired the Otto Mansion. Robert was still there. She kept him in Gene’s old room; and while Ms. Reuter had no prior connection the family, or the doll, the stories continued. It seems as though the neighborhood wouldn’t let the legend die. Locals would whisper that the doll was watching them from the windows. Others, who didn’t know that Robert was a doll, claimed that a child dressed in a sailor suit was being held prisoner, locked in the upper room. In at least one case, a plumber was working in the turret room, where Robert sat, and swears he heard a giggle behind his back. When he turned, the doll had moved.

The stories persisted long enough to get the attention of the media. Malcom Ross of Selares Hill, Key West, investigated the doll in the 1980s while looking into local folklore. He visited Robert in the company of friends, but his curiosity soon turned to deep discomfort. He says that, upon entering “Robert’s” room, he felt an icy chill of discomfort. He said, Quote:

“It was like a metal bar running down my back. …When we walked through the door, the look on his face was like a little boy being punished. It was as if he was asking himself, ‘Who are these people in my room, and what are they going to do to me?’”

As his friends pointed out the child-sized furniture in the room, Malcom claims that Robert seemed to be following the conversation. When one of the friends said, “What an old fool Gene must have been!” the expression on the doll’s face seemed to change. The doll wasn’t happy. Robert recounted, quote: “There was some kind of intelligence here. The doll was listening to us.”

In 1994, Myrtle Reuter donated Robert to the East Martello Museum. The notes from intake say, quote “she believed the doll was haunted and moved around her house.” Myrtle died just a few months later, but Robert’s story was still going strong. In the months before Robert was officially put on display, the word got out that he was in the museum’s possession. Locals and tourists clamored to see the doll, creating what the small museum staff called, an “odd sort of energy”. When he was finally, officially unveiled to the public, he became a hugely popular attraction, and a subject of further superstition. Even locked in a display case, he still seems able to cause mischief.

Electronic devices have a tendency to malfunction around Robert. Cameras, it’s said, rarely work properly. Weirder still? A great many people claim to have suffered from profoundly bad luck after paying Robert a visit. They shouldn’t have mocked the story of Robert and Gene, they say; or they shouldn’t have taken a picture. If you visit him today, the museum politely suggests that you ask Robert for his “permission” before taking a photo. People write letters to Robert; some of them decorate his case and the surrounding walls. In some of them, the letter writers apologize profusely, begging Robert to forgive them and to lift his “curse.”

What’s the truth of Robert the Doll? We have to take into account that a lot of what we know about Robert comes in the form of urban legend and folktale.  This is only exacerbated by Robert’s popularity - he’s been featured in multiple podcasts and television shows, has his own line of merchandise, and has even inspired a string of horror movies loosely based upon his story. 

That means we have to untangle misconception and outright fabrication from the historical record. At “My Dark Path”, it’s what we refer to as “fun”. But even when we do that, what’s left is still intriguing, and unsettling. It’s undeniable that Gene was unusually attached to Robert. And there are multiple, direct witnesses to bizarre incidents, like the overheard conversations, the screaming at night, the giggling and sounds of movement when Robert was supposedly packed away. We know that Annette loved her husband Gene, and hated his doll. We know that his subsequent caretaker, Myrtle Reuter, believed that Robert was “haunted and moved around.” And then we have the thousands of people who believe that Robert has somehow affected their lives. Why?

Because Florida is so near the West Indies, there are theories that try to connect Robert to the practice of Voodoo, speculating that either Gene took an interest in the occult, or that there was a West Indian servant in the house who was actually the one who gave Gene the doll. But we have no evidence such a servant ever existed, and though Gene was known to be an unusual child, it doesn’t seem likely that he would suddenly develop expertise in Voodoo rituals.

The popular psychological theory is that Robert represents a case of what’s known as emotional transference. In psychology, it’s suggested that a person who suffers a trauma can unconsciously transfer that trauma to another person, or even an inanimate object. In paranormal studies, this process can take on supernatural force. Stories of   poltergeists, of possessions, they often disguise painful secrets hidden under the surface of a seemingly-happy family, or a seemingly-functional person. Maybe Gene was just a distressed, highly-imaginative child who didn’t fit in, and Robert provided an outlet for impulses and ideas that Gene’s family would have found unacceptable. Psychologists would have a field day with the fact that Robert was Gene’s own birth name. 

That would be how we would put it using the rigorously scientific approach: Gene was a troubled child, who blamed his outbursts on his imaginary friend, a doll who looked very much like him. In a strange way, you can almost understand his parents preferring to believe this fiction, because then Gene could still be their beloved child, not a hurt soul suffering from anxiety, depression, and anger who needed help. By the time the neighbors started to reinforce the myth with their own rumors, it almost stops mattering whether Gene actually brought Robert to life or not. The myth of Robert the Doll, an innocent toy meant to comfort, transformed into some sort of monster, is real enough.

If you’d like to find out for yourself, you can still visit Robert at his current home in the East Martello Museum, not far from the old Otto Mansion, which is now a bed and breakfast known as “The Artist’s House.” You could make a vacation of it; Key West is lovely at the right time of year. There’s a fantastic pirate museum. Lots of interesting food. Lovely views.

And then there’s Robert. Just be sure to ask his permission before you take his picture, first…

***

PART THREE: PEDIOPHOBIA (Kevin)

The scholar Eva Marie Simms describes a doll as “a dead body, an inanimate child, an unresponsive rigid corpse that occupies the space between alive and dead.”  Dolls look like us, but they are empty. Whatever you think a human soul, the doll doesn’t have one when it’s packed up in its box. But somehow we can fill it with…something. If you think about it, those Toy Story movies are pretty disturbing when they suggest that toys are sentient, living things, beings that think, plan, can feel pain, and have free agency – that come to life when we’re not looking. It’s charming when it’s Woody and Buzz. Less so when it’s Robert or Annabelle.

The fear of dolls is so common that there’s a term for it: Pediophobia. The writers of horror stories and the makers of scary movies have found this phobia to be fertile soil indeed. It’s insidiously easy for us to believe that a doll is more than just wood, porcelain or plastic. That it’s capable of doing something, maybe even of doing us harm. It only get worse when you add ventriloquism to the mix – when a doll speaks, who is really talking? 

In his essay “The Uncanny,” Sigmund Freud, the father of psychology, singles out the haunting and creepy nature of dolls as an example of the uncanny – things from everyday life that ultimately make us uneasy, anxious, and afraid. In the field of robotics, they’ve derived a term from this – the Uncanny Valley. If something looks somewhat lifelike, a person is charmed by all the ways it reminds us of ourselves. A clock that looks like a smiling face. The way we can imagine the feelings and motives of a cute animal. But if you get too close to imitating human life; we stop focusing on what’s similar and start focusing on what’s different. The lifelessness of the eyes, the unnatural way the mouth moves. And we become unsettled and disturbed. When this happens, your simulation of life has fallen into the Uncanny Valley. There are a lot of dolls down there, dolls that look so innocent, so realistic. Almost too real for our comfort. 

Take the experience of Charlene Weber. In 1974 she moved to the picturesque little town of Bodega Bay in Northern California. This town was the setting for Alfred Hitchcock’s terrifying film The Birds. Maybe Charlene should have taken that was a warning. 

She bought an old house in Bodega Bay. The previous owners warned her that the place was supposedly haunted; but she thought they were simply adding a bit of local color to a home that was over a hundred years old, and she thought no more of it.  

She opened Charlene's Yesterdays' Museum, a gallery of antique furniture, and vintage dolls.  She built a huge collection of them: dolls that were small, large, life-sized, groups and individuals. A doll for every taste. Eventually Charlene had more than 2,000 dolls in her museum, she loved sharing them with visitors. And the more her collection became widely known, the more people from miles around would donate dolls to her remarkable menagerie.

But among all those thousands of dolls, one of them became notorious.

It was a life-sized effigy of an eight-year-old girl. It was modeled on a real child, we don’t know her name; but it seems that she died young and her parents, deeply grieved by their loss, had a death mask made of her face. They hired an artist to use that death mask to create an exact likeness of her face on a life-sized doll. And that’s not all. Actual hair, eyelashes and eyebrows were removed from their child’s body and placed on the doll. It was more than just a memento, it was literally a piece of the lost child, kept away from the grave.

When the parents passed away, the doll came to the place where all the unusual dolls from the area came - Charlene’s Yesterdays’ Museum. That’s when things took a turn for the creepy.  

One night, Charlene Weber was awakened by a strange sound coming from the second floor. It was music, the sound of a zither, a stringed instrument which isn’t popular today but which dates back to ancient times. Then she heard a loud crashing noise. She rushed up the stairs to the second floor, the floor where that most unusual doll was kept.

The glass in the case holding the doll had broken to pieces for no apparent reason. And then, Charlene claims, she discovered that the expression on the doll’s face had changed. Suddenly it had an expression of great sadness. There was even a tear on the doll’s cheek, as if she had been crying.

Charlene tried to dismiss it as a bit of late night imagination, cleaned up the glass, put the doll away, and went back to bed. But the next morning, when she came back to the second floor, the doll had moved again. She was standing in the middle of the room. 

As time went on, visitors started to ask Charlene questions, about the tall, bearded gentleman in Victorian clothing who stood near the doll. One visitor said that the gentleman was leaning over a child-sized bed, as if checking on a sick child. But Charlene had no roommates, no employees, certainly no one who liked dressing in Victorian clothing. She never saw the supposed gentlemen herself, but the repeated questions became impossible to ignore.

A psychic who visited the house told her it was the spirit of its original owner, a Captain McCuen, whose child had been born with brain damage, and who was confined to a crib until her death. Charlene began to wonder if this strange doll, the one created from the death mask of another tragically lost child, had awakened the old sense of loss and sadness from another parent who had lost a child in this house.

For years after, Charlene would occasionally hear the same zither music coming from the upstairs room, and knew that if she climbed the stairs to investigate, she would find that doll, only that doll among the thousands in her collection, moved to a different place than when she had left it.

Charlene Weber died in 2009 at the age of 79. Her family inherited her collection, and gave away most of the dolls. There does not seem to be any record of what happened to the life-sized doll of the little girl. It might still be out there, searching for a kind spirit to watch over it; or perhaps, searching for the unknown grave where the remainder of its mortal remains lies interred.

***

We’ve really come a long way on this one – from the Ten Courts of Hell in Singapore to a little boutique museum in Bodega Bay. You might call it a dark path through the Uncanny Valley. Human beings have been making effigies of ourselves for as long as we have a historical record; it’s something we seem innately compelled to do. Maybe it’s a way of wondering about ourselves, and what these bodies are that we occupy during our mortal existance. Maybe we’re investigating the idea of our eternal soul and distinct from our mortal limbs and muscles, skin, bones, and vital organs. 

Countless children over the centuries have found comfort with a doll, have practiced giving love and nurturing attention, or used it as an outlet for difficult emotions. But it seems like there’s something else that sticks with us. After all, something drives us to get out of bed, to live and love and have our human existence. Something that a doll doesn’t have. When we create one of these artificial bodies, that look so real, maybe we can’t help but wonder – could some force bring you to life, make you move like we do? Live like we live?  What would place the breath of life into this inanimate object?  And if a doll can become animate – what governs it?  Does it become peaceful and loving, or perhaps, something wicked?  And, would it, have a choice in how it thinks and lives as we do?

Maybe the best thing is a doll can do is remind us that, our souls, our agency to choose our own path, is a powerful thing.

***

Thank you for listening to My Dark Path. I’m MF Thomas, creator and host, and I produce the show with the indispensable Emily Wolfe; and our audio engineer is Dom Purdie. This story was a real group effort, as everyone on the team was excited to delve into the world of Haunted Dolls. I’m not sure what that says about us. Annabelle was researched by Laura Townsend, our lead researcher Alex Bagosy took charge of the section on Robert, and the section on Charlene’s Yesterdays Museum was prepared for us by Kevin Wetmore, who first proposed this topic for the show. As always, our senior story editor responsible for getting it all assembled is Nicholas Thurkettle.

Please take a moment and give My Dark Path a 5-star rating wherever you’re listening. Again, thanks for walking the dark paths of history, science and the paranormal with me, your host, MF Thomas. Until next time, good night.