Very Violent and Dangerous Haunted Dolls

[nivek]

Spooky Cases of Very Violent and Dangerous Haunted Dolls​

One thing that many people can agree on is that dolls can be pretty damn creepy. With their uncanny, spooky little faces and dead eyes, it is perhaps no wonder that dolls have long inspired unease and spooky tales. For just hunks of porcelain, ceramics, or plastic, they have managed to disturb us on an almost primal level for centuries. Even more unsettling than dolls in general are the numerous tales of haunted dolls, and even scarier than this are those cases that involve these dolls seemingly carrying out verbal and physical violence towards those around them. Here is a selection of some of the most sinister, evil, and downright violent haunted dolls there are.

In 2014, British paranormal investigator Jayne Harris came into possession of a doll named Peggy after being contacted by someone who absolutely needed to get rid of it. The owner of the doll at the time was apparently in quite a distressed state, claiming that ever since she had bought it at a fair she had been assailed with footsteps at night, shadows in the hallway, and lights flickering without explanation. She also claimed that flies buzzed around Peggy, and that just looking at the doll or being close to it brought on bouts of dizziness, nausea, debilitating headaches, and chest pains, and she said she had almost fainted in its presence on several occasions. She believed the doll was psychically attacking her, as well as haunting her dreams, and Harris described the woman’s pleas to take the evil doll off her hands as “an urgent cry for help.” Harris, who just happens to collect haunted items and runs an organization called Haunted Dolls, accepted. Harris says of the woman’s plight:

She'd wake feeling hot and shaken. No matter where she moved the doll to in her home, the nightmares persisted. She apparently sought the help of a local priest but two visits later, there was no change. She suffered from fever and hallucinations. When she recovered, she saw no other option but to get rid of the doll as she was convinced it was at the center of all that had been happening.

Ever since acquiring Peggy, Harris has noticed many of the same sinister phenomena. In addition to anomalous sounds around the doll, it does indeed draw flies, and it also sometimes causes lightbulbs to explode and allegedly has a very dangerous effect on people. According to Harris, the doll causes a variety of negative physical symptoms, including chest pains, dizziness, panic attacks, profuse sweating, and even heart attacks or strokes. The doll can also apparently appear in dreams, and Harris has said that even looking at a photo of Peggy can cause physical symptoms.

She has said of all of this:

One lady, Katrin Reedik, suffered a heart attack and another, Olivia Taylor, had a stroke while alone with the doll overnight. She was only 27. People claimed that by just looking at her photo, they would become dizzy, nauseous, light-headed and in some extreme cases have chest pains and panic attacks. With Peggy, it's not only while people are looking at her or watching her, it seems to be afterwards too. We have been told she can affect people's dreams. She recently visited a lady in her dreams, warning her about one of her cats. The next morning, the lady found her cat very ill and he sadly died that day.

In addition, people have claimed that showing the doll on their screen causes their computer to freeze, that dogs watching her on TV will go nuts, and Harris has apparently used mediums to try and deduce what sort of spirit is inhabiting the doll, and they have been able to deduce that the entity is “restless, frustrated, and previously persecuted, possibly with ties to the Holocaust.” Although Harris initially approaches these things with a skeptical attitude, she is convinced that Peggy is not only the real deal, but possibly the most haunted, vindictive, and dangerous haunted doll she has ever seen. She says:

In order to do the work I do well, I have to approach each case as a skeptic initially and look for 'normal' explanations for things. If it were one or two occasions that things were happening on, I could do that, but with Peggy I just know there's something more. Just the other night we held a session with her and I made lots of notes as the pendulum was going crazy. The next morning, I couldn't find my notepad anywhere, and when I did find it, I couldn't even reach it. My husband had to use a ladder to get it. Many people who saw the picture felt that she did not want me to tell people the information I had gained.

Another haunted doll that allegedly is very angry and causes chest pains is one owned by paranormal investigator Miki York. The 119-year-old vintage doll is called Janet, and similarly to the case of Peggy, York claims that he first got her from a family in Texas that was being harassed by various paranormal phenomena orbiting the doll and wanted to get rid of it as soon as possible. He says of getting the doll and what happened next:

When I first got Janet in 2016 I was so excited. I knew there must be something serious about her because the family didn’t want any money for her and even paid to get it sent over to the UK. They really wanted rid of her. She had no name when I first got her. I discovered that her name was Janet through a spirit box session. I asked for her name and the spirit that is attached to the doll told me that her name was Janet. She’s mean. She has sworn at me before when I communicated with her through the spirit box. I don’t know too much about her, other than that there is a print of her back that says 1903 and I think that the spirit attached is a child that can’t see out because she hasn’t got eyes. Janet also has teeth, which are really spooky.

After Janet arrived, she would blink, throw herself off of the shelf, and cause intense headaches and chest pains when people were in her presence. It apparently got so bad that he locked her away for a while, but then he decided to take her back out to put her on display. York has said of Janet:

I decided to bring Janet out just to see what would happen and since she has been on display in my office, I regularly walk in to find her on the floor and there is no way that she could have fallen off. I am trying to communicate with Janet through a spirit box to find out why she is constantly jumping off the shelf. Since having her a lot has happened. There has been a moment when Janet has been captured blinking on camera, even though she doesn’t actually have any eyes. I have also had friends around Janet who have had to walk away because they’ve started feeling chest pains and feeling sick. When I am working with Janet, I even feel sick. She is not well-liked and people hate her. She is definitely not welcomed by my family.

He nevertheless continues to hold onto Janet for research purposes, rather than doing the sensible thing and burning her to ash with a flamethrower. It is interesting that Janet cursed at her owner, because verbal threats seem to be common among the more evil of the haunted dolls. In 2015 there was the terrifying case of Ashley Nicole-Fine, 24, from Leeds, Alabama, who purchased two dolls to add to her extensive dolls collection. The difference with these is that that she has claimed they are possessed by the vengeful spirits of women who were murdered by their boyfriends. These unfortunate murders then twisted their minds even in death sot that they have come to hate all men. This has proven to be a problem for Ashley’s own boyfriend, Phillip Baston, 25, as apparently the dolls don’t like him either. According to Phillip, he has been attacked in his sleep by the creepy dolls on several occasions, waking up with scratches and bruises on his body. He then ordered Debbie to have them removed from the bedroom, which she did. One of the dolls is named Violet, and is supposedly haunted by the spirit of a woman who died in the 1500s. It is apparently very mobile, often disappearing from its resting place to turn up in different locations around the house, and is known to start the music box attached to her as well. The dolls in question have since been locked into their own special room, possibly plotting amongst themselves, waiting for their chance to attack their next victim.

Another example is a doll called Grace, owned by another brave paranormal investigator by the name of Danny Moss, of Wales. The doll routinely apparently bangs on the blessed glass case she is kept in and says “release,” which he has captured on an "S Box," a device which scans white noise while blocking out any radio interference to pick up voices from the beyond. Even more terrifying is that the doll, which he believes is possessed by a 16th century witch, has also been recorded telling Moss that she wants to burn his eyes out. He has said of this and the other paranormal phenomena revolving around Grace:

Hearing it say it wanted to burn my eyes was terrifying at the time and to have members of the public along with us who witnessed it was just crazy. What is also significant is that a few years ago we also captured a voice saying something along the lines of reap your eyes and a number of people have had the sensation of their eyes burning but we never thought too much of it until this incident. Over the last few months we have recorded some good evidence including knocking sounds and the same voice several times which has been captured and heard in real time. We've had knocking sounds and a voice saying release me which was captured on the box and the camera shows nobody else was in the room. It is interesting as it is always three knocks wherever we take the doll and always the same voice. People may be sceptical and say our Grace doll findings are fake but we have caught them in real time and I'll admit even I was never a big believer but this item is just amazing. I've never seen anything like it.

Interestingly, Moss also claims that the doll has caused people to feel a burning sensation in their eyes or to experience blurry vision. What is behind the doll’s sinister fixation with eyes? Who knows? Another haunted doll that apparently lashes out at people’s eyes is one that appeared on Bargain Hunt, a British television program in which two pairs of contestants are challenged to buy antiques from shops or a fair and then sell them in an auction for a profit. On this episode, host Charlie Ross had the chance to see and appraise a doll brought to him by a Marie Wesson, who had brought the doll from its home in the Nottingham Haunted Museum. The doll, named George, apparently dates back to the 1930s in Texas, and is creepy as all hell, apparently having a dead man's glass eyes and real human hair. It also has the habit of causing people to have violent headaches and for their eyes to burn intensely.

On the program Wesson explains of the doll to Ross:

He came to us from Texas and, back in the day, they would make things like George in memory of passed loved ones. The difference with George is the passed loved one... George now has his glass eyes and hair. The family member who passed over. He came to us because the family was experiencing a lot of paranormal things with him. They would get headaches and their eyes would start hurting, so they took him to a few mediums and apparently George wants his eyes and hair back, he can't rest without them.

George the doll is just about as creepy and freakish as you can get, terrifying even, and the host Ross is clearly unsettled and freaked out at this point, saying that he can “feel a bit of a headache coming on.” Moving on, we come to another truly disturbing case from Liverpool, England. In September of 2021, Jonathan Lewis was pounding through a boarded-up wall cavity at his new home with a hammer, and when a hole opened up he peered into the gloom to see a doll sitting there staring back at him with its dead eyes. He explains of what happened:

I've just bought the house and I got the keys on Friday. I kind of knew there was this void underneath the stairs that had been plaster boarded up. There was a wire coming out where the previous owners had the fridge but I didn't know where the wire was plugged in so I knocked through a bit of the plasterboard to see what was there. I knocked through a hole about the size of a fist, shone a light in and there was a doll just sitting there.

This would perhaps be spooky enough as it was already, but truly propelling it into the terrifying was a handwritten note scrawled onto a piece of paper sitting next to the doll, which reads:

Thank you for freeing me! My name is Emily. My original owners lived in this house in 1961. I didn't like them so they had to go. All they did was sing and be merry. It was sickening. Stabbing was my choice of death for them so I hope you have knives. Hope you sleep well.

Although Lewis suspects this is all a practical joke, his friends have urged him to move out and told him that haunted dolls are no joke. Is this really an evil haunted doll threatening violence or a sick joke? Whatever the case may be, it is likely not something anyone would want to find staring out from the darkness of a hole in the wall. From Australia we have a story of an allegedly haunted doll that has apparently cursed a whole area. In North Queensland, along the Hinchinbrook Channel in the small coastal town of Lucinda, there is apparently a doll sitting in a swing among the mangroves by the waterside, complete with a dress, tights, shoes, hat, and even a tidy plait down the back of her head. No one knows how it got there, but locals insist that anyone who gets too close to the doll will have bad luck fishing or experience accidents, with some unsubstantiated reports saying that there have been some serious incidents that have harmed people.

One local has said of it:

Everyone seems to know about the doll but nobody really wants to talk about it. Residents are intrigued but also weary of the doll’s origins. Everyone I’ve talked to has said they have no idea how the doll got there or who may have placed it on the swing, which hangs off a low-lying tree. Every question I ask people seems to lead to more questions - it’s become a real local mystery. I’ve heard stories of people who have gotten too close to the doll having bad luck while out boating or fishing. This might be pure circumstance or just a modern wives’ tale - but it’s something I’m definitely not willing to toy with.

What is going on here? If all of the dolls we have looked at aren’t bad enough, how about one that is suspected of actually murdering someone? Ghost hunter, haunted doll collector, and author Kevin Cain has plenty of supposedly haunted dolls, but one of these in particular stands out. The doll is called “Voodoo Mama” after the fact that it supposedly came from a Voodoo practitioner in Haiti, and he describes of it:

Voodoo Mama is a small wooden doll with hinged arms and legs and human hair. The maker omitted her eyes, leaving dark open sockets instead. This type of doll is commonly left by mourning Haitians at their loved ones’ graves to act as a conduit, guiding the dead person’s spirit to the afterlife.

According to Cain, Voodoo Mama could have possibly had some connection with a mysterious unsolved death he has investigated and written about in his book My Haunted Collection, The Dark Side. The case revolves around a man he calls “Daniel McKent (name changed to protect the family),” which is infused with possible paranormal activity, and he has said of it and its possible connection to the doll in an interview with author Susan Furlong:

In 2016, Daniel McKent’s body was found outside his home in Vestavia Hills, Alabama. It appeared that he’d died from a single gunshot wound to the head. Neighbors reported that Daniel had recently slipped into depression after the death of a loved one. He’d also accrued substantial debt and then lost his business. Initially suicide was suspected, suggested by the fact that only Daniel’s prints were found on the gun that killed him. However, other evidence at the scene indicated foul play: the rifle used to kill him was located a distance from the body, and an autopsy determined that the bullet entered at the back of the skull. No suspect was named, the skull was entered into evidence, and the case remains under review.
Daniel’s friend and estate executor, Marilyn, had moved into Daniel’s home to inventory his collections to be auctioned. She called our team to investigate paranormal activity she’d experienced in the residence. Unexplainable footsteps and knocking on the walls which would stop as she entered the room, pots and pan clinking in the kitchen, the sound of hammering and construction coming from the basement. This had gone on for some time, but what prompted Marilyn’s call was when Daniel’s spirit manifested and let out an angry scream before vanishing. We used several tools in the investigation. A K2 meter which reads electromagnetic activity and thermal readers for sensing heat. The K2 readings did consistently lead us to the fireplace where after some exploring, we discovered a loose brick which turned out to be a secret compartment for hiding something, maybe cash or something else of value. It was empty when we found it. But our most direct findings were detected by using a spirit box. We picked up on the words: money and murder. Marilyn, his friend, confirmed that it was Daniel’s voice.
Marilyn attributed much of the misfortune that led to Daniel’s death to a voodoo doll. Daniel traveled extensively and collected items from around the world. Marilyn remembered Daniel showing her a doll before his death. He said that it was given to him by a Haitian woman who told him that it was cursed and would bring tragedy to whoever brought it into their home. Daniel thought the curse was “nonsense,” named it Voodoo Mama, and added it to his collection. Soon afterward, his life took a tragic downturn. It felt eerie to see Voodoo Mama in person, so to speak, although the doll itself seemed innocuous. Marilyn asked me to take it off her hands. Because of the curse, she didn’t feel comfortable selling it with the rest of the estate items.

Interestingly, Cain has another evil and violent doll in his collection that he keeps in a special case adorned with arcane symbols meant to contain it. The doll’s name is Lori, and he says of it:

She (Lori) was sent to me by her previous owner, Vivian, who purchased the doll from another on-line collector. Not long after receiving her, Vivian started experiencing paranormal activity. She described sensing a demonic presence in her apartment, seeing dark humanoid creatures lurking about, and experiencing violent nightmares. During one nightmare, she awoke with scratches on her body. Once I received Lori, I also sensed something evil about her, so I doused her in holy water and prayed over her. Then I sealed her in a case. The sealed case is used to keep the doll bound so that no one comes into contact with it, and hopefully it will no longer harm anyone.

One of the more well-known vindictive cursed dolls is the haunted doll simply known as Robert the Doll. The story begins in 1906 in Key West, Florida, where an affluent family, the Ottos, lived on their sprawling estate manned by numerous servants. One of these servants supposedly was a Haitian who was a practitioner of Voodoo and Black Magic, and was allegedly fired when the family found her in a garden performing some dark spell or ritual. Before the servant left, she is said to have given the family’s son, Robert Eugene Otto, a 3-foot high doll made of cloth, wire, and straw, with human-like hair and dressed in a sailor outfit as a parting gift, which is thought to have been imbued with a potent curse to smite the family.

The boy apparently took an instant liking to the doll, going so far as to name it Robert, after which he insisted that this was the doll’s name from then on and that everyone should call him by his middle name, Gene. The boy and the doll were inseparable, and he would often reportedly talk to the doll for hours on end. The spooky part was that servants claimed that they could on occasion hear a ghostly voice that was clearly not the boy’s own responding to him. Gene’s parents dismissed it as the boy just using a disguised voice to converse back and forth with his beloved doll, and didn’t think much of it at the time.

Not long after this, odd things began to happen around the house. Rooms would be found in a state of disarray, with objects smashed and broken upon the floor and furniture toppled over, which young Gene insisted he had had no part in, instead claiming that it had been the doll, Robert. The same went for the rash of objects that would suddenly go missing to be found later far from where they had been placed, dishes falling from tables, lamps toppling to the ground, and clothing found to have been ripped up, shredded, and strewn all about.

Some nights Gene’s parents heard a commotion in their son’s room, only to run there and see that toys and items had been sprawled out everywhere, and which the boy also claimed had been done by the doll Robert. In addition to this, neighbors swore that they had seen Robert the Doll scurrying under its own power from window to window one day when the family had been out. Guests to the house also claimed that sometimes when they were looking at the doll its expression would change or it would even blink. At other times the doll would change positions in the split second it took for someone to look away and look back. Things got more intense when the doll was seen by the family to tilt its head or move on its own, and it was claimed that it would on occasion let out a sound like a giggle.

The frightened family locked the doll in the attic and it was all but forgotten as Gene grew up to pursue a career in art in Paris. When he moved back to the states with his wife, he found his old friend and made a small room for the doll, complete with a tiny chair and furniture for it. From then on the weird phenomena apparently started again, with neighbors seeing the doll move through the windows when no one was there, or to hear disembodied laughter when no one was at home. This went on until Gene died in 1974 and his wife moved away after putting Robert back into the attic. Even after this time, neighbors and utilities workers claimed that they could hear strange laughter and footsteps emanating from the house.
When the house was bought again, the new family’s 10-year-old daughter allegedly found the doll and started keeping it in her room. Not long after this, the girl began to wake her family up in the middle of the night, claiming frantically that the doll had moved on its own. She would later claim that the doll had actually attacked and tried to kill her.

Eventually, Robert the Doll found itself at the East Martello Museum, an art and historical museum located in Key West, where it remains locked in a glass case to this day. Visitors claim that the doll is still up to its old tricks, as it will sometimes move as guests look on or change positions even though the case has not been opened. It is also claimed that if one wants to take a picture of Robert it is imperative that they ask his permission first. It is said that if the doll tilts its head this means permission has been denied. Those who take photos without asking permission, or those who take one anyway after being turned away, are said to be doomed to be befallen with bad luck, and indeed Robert’s display case is surrounded by letters from people outlining their testimonies of the string of misfortune they’ve had since taking such photos, and begging for forgiveness. To this day, Robert the Doll is considered to be one of the most haunted objects in the world.

It is uncertain just how much stock to put into such tales. Are there really insidious forces surrounding these normally inanimate objects or are these just urban legends congregating around and feeding off many people's natural revulsion towards these things? Haunted dolls are one thing, but are there those out there that go beyond this to be truly evil, and capable of inflicting actual harm? Here we have seen these possessed dolls that take things a bit further than things that go bump in the night, and which seem by all accounts to harbor powerful, wicked forces that have the potential to be very dangerous. Whether there is anything to it all or not I leave for you to decide.

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