Post by Graveyardbride on Mar 15, 2015 19:30:51 GMT -5
The ‘Haunted Doll’ Fad
The doll in the photo above is currently listed on eBay with a starting bid of $99.00. Following is the seller’s description:
I found this doll in my attic after going up there to look for squirrels that were making scratching noises. I couldn’t find any evidence of squirrels when I went up there, but found this. Once I took it down and put the dusty doll in a box in the garage the scratching went away. Notice the blur by the dress in the picture. Her leg [sic] were broken off when I found her. Cleaning and fixing her might make her happy. The doll itself is a collectable sleeper doll 21" an early Effanbee Ann Shirley with working eyes.
Some childhood symbols straddle the line between adorable and terrifying. Like clowns. Or Furbys. But some dolls fit the category, with spooky eyes that seem to move and the porcelain pallor. They’re not all Chucky, but some of them just don’t seem quite right.
Anne McLaughlin grew up with a cabinet full of dolls – a pretty dancer doll, a set of wooden nesting dolls. But one, she says, stood out. “One of the dolls in the cabinet was absolutely terrifying,” she says. “Very tall, thin doll, and her face was not a doll face. It was a grown woman, so she didn’t have big eyes she didn’t have a smile. She had tiny little eyes. She always looked like she stepped out of one of those New Orleans ghost stories.”
The lady doll was also a music box and spun slowly to music when wound. The doll gave Anne the creeps. So one night, when she was about 10, McLaughlin thought, “‘I’m going to take her out of the cabinet just to prove that I’m not scared of this doll,’ even though I was very scared of the doll.” So she wound her up, left her on the bedside table and walked away. Suddenly there was a crash. “And right when I turned around, she had just walked to the side of the bedside table and fallen to the floor with a big crash, McLaughlin can’t even finish her sentence. I went and slept with my parents.”
The next morning, she crept back into her room and placed the doll back inside the cabinet. “I was really sure to put her in the cabinet facing away from me ... so that she couldn’t watch me,” she remembers.
Many have their own haunted-doll memories, which isn’t surprising, considering that haunted dolls are big business on sites like eBay and Etsy. Jak Hutchcraft, who wrote about the phenomenon for Vice.com, says he stumbled upon the trade one night when he was surfing around the “Everything Else” section of eBay. “There was an advert for something which was a sadistic, perverted haunted doll,” Hutchcraft says. “It was this little, menacing-looking sort of troll.” Intrigued, he noted the bids kept going up, with 10 people in the running. The doll that looked like a possessed little troll sold for more than $1,400.
Hutchcraft did some research to find out why anyone would want a haunted doll – let alone pay for one. “Some people want to connect solely with the spirit,” he explains. “Some people buy them just for the doll because they’re doll collectors and the spirited aspect of it is just a secondary thing. I thought it was baffling, really, because I can look past the ghost as long as it’s a cute doll.”
Hutchcraft met with a woman who is a major player in the world of haunted dolls and found, to his surprise, that he kind of liked her. He started out as a skeptic, but ultimately came to appreciate this seemingly bizarre subculture.
But when it comes to owning a haunted doll? “I thought about it,” he says. “But the thing is, the more it went on, the more it took over my life for about a year really ... and then I started to think, ‘Will my brain trick me into thinking it is haunted? Or something will happen when I get it. And to be honest, I didn’t have the money to fork out – and I was a little bit scared!”
Many years after McLaughlin’s scary doll “walked” off the table, she got the courage to take the doll out of the cabinet again. She found, upon closer examination, that the music box was off balance – probably the reason the doll fell to the floor. But I gotta admit, I liked the story better when the doll was possessed.
Source: Rachel Martin, NPR, March 15, 2015, and eBay.
