by Aaron Mahnke
At the same time, though, humans suffer from a disadvantage. We alone have evolved to become walking, talking builders of complex social structures. Only humans go to war, or devote themselves to religious faith, or build elaborate governments to contain our madness and free spirits. Humans are special.
It’s this specialness, though, that leaves us isolated and alone. There’s nothing else like us on the planet. No other creature can send rockets into space or genetically modify the plants they eat. This world may be overflowing with life, but humans are singular in our place upon it.
Which is why, I think, we tell so many stories of beings that are almost human, but not quite. Significant objects, mysterious beings, even otherworldly animals…it seems that the more they resemble us, the more frightening they become. The most terrifying stories, it seems, are the ones that suggest that we’re not as alone as we assumed.
It’s known as anthropomorphism. We give human characteristics to things that are far from human. One of the best places to see this practice in action is in the presence of children. The toys they cherish—the ones that follow them from room to room, or rest in their laps on long car rides, or get pulled under the covers with them at bedtime—take on a personality of their own.
Oftentimes it’s just a game. Other times it’s a coping mechanism for loss or fear. But sometimes, on very rare occasions, these objects seem to set the rules themselves. They pick their own personality. They guide the child’s decisions. As if someone—or something—were controlling them.
PLAYTHINGS
In 1982, a backhoe operator was preparing a building site for development in Titusville, Florida. While working on one of the ponds, he noticed what he thought were rocks visible in the mud. But something didn’t sit right with him, and so he climbed out to take a closer look.
What he had thought to be stones actually turned out to be bones. Specifically, human bones. The county medical examiner was brought in, but it became clear almost immediately that the bones belonged to someone who had died a very long time ago. When Florida State University became involved, its researchers uncovered, so to speak, the truth.
The bones belonged to a three-year-old girl who had died more than seven thousand years before Florida became a state. It was clear that she had been buried by her parents, though. They had wrapped her in cloth made from local plant fibers and then placed her in a shallow grave. And she wasn’t alone. With her in the ground, placed near her arms in case she wanted them, were toys.
It seems that children have had toys—objects that they loved and played with—for thousands of years. Perhaps tens of thousands. But for a very long time toys were still rare. In a world where everyone had to contribute to the well-being of the community, even the children were expected to grow up fast and do their part.
When they did have toys, they were often basic in shape, such as marbles or tops. They would also play with objects meant to represent the things most important to their village or clan: toy animals, soldiers, and religious icons are objects commonly found by archaeologists in ancient graves of children.
Interestingly, the ancient Greeks expected children to give up their toys when they came of age. On the night before their wedding young women would actually take their toys to the local temple, where they would offer them as a sacrifice to the gods.
In European societies, the notion of childhood began to shift after the advent of the Enlightenment in the mid-1600s. Societies became more affluent, and children weren’t expected to work as early or as often as they had previously. In addition, their toys became more complex and useful. Jigsaw puzzles were born in 1767 as a way of teaching geography, and board games from the same period were meant to entertain. Toys had evolved.
But throughout all of history, it seems—across cultural boundaries and spanning thousands of years of art and technology—there has been one constant in the world of toys. From the tombs of the pharaohs in Egypt to the shelves of Target down the street, one toy has maintained a universal and timeless appeal: the doll.
Dolls are little representations of us, after all. They personify the people we love and provide comfort to the lonely in a way that no other toy can. And because of that, people get attached. Children refuse to put them down, and even in adulthood, dolls have a tendency to be kept around.
Sometimes, though, the roles are reversed. As unhealthy as it sounds, there have been more than a few stories of dolls—not children—who refuse to let go. They seem to take control, set the tone, and dominate the lives of the people who own them.
And sometimes the consequences have been frightening.
THE GIFT
Thomas and Minnie Otto were a well-off and well-traveled couple who had a deep love of the arts. They were natives of Key West, Florida, and in 1898 they built a brand-new home there on Eaton Street. Two years after moving in, the couple welcomed their third child to the family, a son they named Robert Eugene, whom they called Gene.
The family quickly settled into the leisurely lifestyle of the Keys. They had more than enough money, and they spent it on convenience, which included a staff of caretakers around the house. Cooks and maids were always at the ready, including a woman from Jamaica who worked as little Gene’s nurse.
History doesn’t remember her name. If you were a woman in 1904, that was pretty common, unfortunately. If your skin color wasn’t pale and your name wasn’t European, those chances dropped even more. So we don’t know her name. But we do know that she loved Gene. She spent hours with him every day. She traveled with the Ottos on their journeys around the country, caring for him like a turn-of-the-century version of an uptown Manhattan nanny. She was close to him.
That’s probably why she gave him the doll. It was big—about the size of a four-year-old boy, in fact. It was filled with straw, hand-sewn, and dressed in a white sailor’s uniform. And Gene loved it. He took it everywhere with him, on travels abroad and on day trips into town with his mother. It was said that Gene even sometimes wore a similar outfit, and the two seemed like siblings.
Gene called the doll Robert, using his own first name, and their relationship got off to a storybook start. The doll had its own chair near the dining room table, and Gene would sneak little pieces of food to it as the family ate. During bath times, the doll would be placed on a dry towel near the tub while Gene played in the water with toy boats and corks and all the usual things that little kids love to bring into the bathtub. And at the end of the night, Gene would bring Robert to bed with him, and the two of them would be tucked in together.
Everything about this is normal. My own children do similar things, naming their dolls and bringing them along for car rides. But for Gene, that’s where the normality stopped, because not long after settling into a routine with his new toy, things got weird. According to most reports, it all started with the talking.
Gene’s parents would often hear their son’s voice coming from his bedroom as he played. Even though he was in there alone, it would always sound like he was deep in conversation with someone else. First they would hear his voice, sweet and tiny, and then another voice would reply, different and rougher than his own. Oftentimes the second voice would sound insistent, while Gene’s would sound almost unnerved and flustered. Of course, Gene’s parents assumed it was a game and that he was simply playing make-believe. But over time, they began to second-guess that presumption.
During a few of these apparent conversations, Gene’s mother would quietly approach the boy’s room and then, without warning, burst into the room. Inside she would find her son cowering in a corner of the room, arms wrapped around his knees, while Robert the doll sat on the bed or on a chair. She couldn’t be sure, but it seemed to her like the doll was glaring at the boy.
Things escalated from there. The Ottos awoke on a number of occasions to the sound of Gene screaming in his bedroom. They would rush to his room only to find him sitting up in bed, furniture in the room overturned and belongings strewn about. According to Gen
e, Robert was to blame. Robert, the doll, would be glaring at him from the foot of the bed.
“Robert did it” became a common phrase around the Otto house after that. They didn’t believe their son, of course, but the boy blamed the doll for most of the unusual activity. When his parents found toys that appeared to have been mutilated and broken, Gene said that Robert had done it.
Sometimes the Ottos could hear giggling from somewhere in the house. On occasion this happened at night, when Gene was supposed to be in bed. Dishes and silverware were often found thrown about the dining room. Clothing would be found on the floor, appearing to have been shredded by some unknown person. Sometimes servants would enter unused guest rooms, only to find that the bedding had been disturbed and pushed to the floor.
The staff would even find themselves locked out of the house when making their nightly rounds. If Gene was clearly not at fault, sometimes the servants themselves were blamed for the disturbances. As a result, turnover at the house was high, with a constant rotation of servants coming and going.
The one constant through all of this was Robert, the strange doll in the white suit. And some reports say that he did more than create a mess. He may have killed.
A BOX OF TROUBLE
Hearing giggles from distant parts of the house was one thing. Sure, it would unnerve most of us. I know it would freak me out. But the Ottos soldiered on, putting up with the repeated excuses. They were strict parents, maybe even a little overbearing by today’s standards, and were always quick to punish Gene for the mischief. It was one thing to make a mess. But staff were hard to train, and having them frightened away all the time wasn’t congruent with their life of convenience. And so they punished Gene.
To the boy’s credit, he appeared to have been a true believer in his own stories. He would put up a short fight, blame the events on the doll, and then take the consequences like a responsible child.
But there were other reports about the doll, and these were things that could in no way be blamed on the boy. Visitors to the house reported that the doll would blink. Some of them claimed to have heard the laughter themselves, and at times when the Otto family wasn’t home.
Neighbors said they would sometimes see the doll at the upstairs windows, moving from one to another, glancing out through the curtains toward the street. Servants would find Robert in a completely different part of the house from where he had been left moments before. Sometimes the sounds of little feet could be heard moving from room to room.
All of this became too much, and extended family stepped in to find a solution. One of Gene’s great-aunts visited the family and pleaded her case. The doll was cursed, she said. Some evil spirit lived inside it, and if they wanted to be free of the chaos and random episodes of disturbance, they needed to get rid of it once and for all.
On her recommendation, Robert was taken away from Gene and placed inside a box. The box was then moved up to the attic of the large house, out of sight and—at least in theory—unable to cast his shadow of fear over the house anymore.
The next night, the aunt was found dead in her bedroom. She was an older woman, and so the official story—that she had died of a stroke—was passed around and believed by many. But the Ottos didn’t buy it. Out of fear for their own safety, Robert was brought out of storage and returned to their son’s side.
And that’s how things remained. As all kids do, though, Gene grew up. He trained as a painter, traveled throughout Europe, and eventually married an accomplished pianist. But after his parents passed away, Gene and his wife moved back to Florida and took up residence in his old childhood home on Eaton Street.
Gene spent his days painting, and his wife, Anne, settled into domestic life. And somehow, in the middle of it all, was Robert. Rumors in town spoke of how the doll still had a place at the dining room table, that there was a chair beside their bed for him to sit on during the night, and that Gene had a habit of taking the doll with him as he moved about the house.
There were whispers that his wife, Anne, hated the doll. That she was unnerved by the presence of the doll so close to their marriage bed and stopped allowing Gene to bring it into the room. For a while he complied, and Robert was locked back in the attic. But according to reports, that didn’t help.
Robert would sometimes be found sitting in a rocking chair downstairs, even though he was supposed to have been locked up. The couple would hear footsteps in the attic at night and the soft, distant sound of laughter. Local legend claims that all of this drove Gene’s wife insane, eventually ending her life.
MATTERS OF POSSESSION
The study of folklore often encounters the same patterns throughout the world and across the centuries. One of the common themes that we can see is the dehumanization of people of minority status. The witch trials stand as a somber example of this, where the accused—often women, often poor, and often social outcasts already—were stripped of their humanity and treated like animals and monsters.
Robert the doll, though, stands on the opposite side. Rather than being one more tale of someone having their humanity stolen from them, Robert—a cloth-and-straw doll without a soul—appears to have had humanity bestowed upon him.
Why? It’s hard to say. Perhaps it’s because Gene Otto’s parents needed an excuse for their son’s atypical behavior. Maybe it was a culture of superstition brought into the house by servants with a different ethnic background. Somehow a living, breathing Robert was an easier story to swallow than the alternative.
We’ll never know for sure whether Gene Otto invented it all. He passed away in 1974—with Robert at his side, some say.
For a while, the house remained uninhabited, unless you count Robert as a resident. But eventually a new family moved in and made the house on Eaton Street their own. They restored a lot of the original charm of the house, and in the process they found the doll. Maybe they were compelled to, or maybe they had heard about it from locals, but whatever their reason, the new family packed up the doll and moved it to the attic.
The family later donated Robert to a local museum, but it wasn’t charity that motivated them; it was fear. You see, not long after moving in, they began to experience odd things. Things that Gene Otto would have known all too well: soft giggling, light footsteps in the attic, and random, unexplainable messes.
The family’s ten-year-old daughter reported that the doll would appear in different parts of the house on its own, and that on a handful of occasions it even tried to attack her—a claim that she makes even now, as an adult.
But the final straw came later, when the girl’s parents were awakened in the middle of the night. In the darkness of their room they could hear laughter and the sounds of movement. Alarmed, one of them flicked on a bedside lamp, only to feel their hearts stop.
There, at the foot of their bed, was Robert the doll, a kitchen knife in his hand.
IN 1970, DONNA was twenty-eight and going to school to become a nurse. She lived in an apartment with her roommate and friend, Angie, and the pair did all the normal things that two college-age women would do: played host to friends, went out, and studied.
For her birthday that year, Donna’s mother gave her something she’d found at the local thrift store. It was an oversized Raggedy Ann doll, perhaps two feet tall. It was certainly an odd gift for a mother to give to her adult daughter, but I’ve heard of worse. Regardless, Donna seemed to appreciate the thought.
Her roommate, Angie, had different feelings, though. Shortly after the doll moved in, Angie began to notice odd behavior. On several occasions, Angie stated, she would leave the room, only to return and find that the doll had shifted position. Sometimes its legs would be crossed, sometimes its arms. Sometimes both.
These instances increased in frequency over time. Soon both women were finding that the doll—which they had named Annabelle—had actually moved around the apartment. Donna would place the doll on the couch before going to work, and when Angie came home later, Annabelle would be on Donna’s bed
, with the bedroom door shut.
Let’s be clear: this is the point where I would have purchased a bottle of lighter fluid and a metal trash can. I can’t think of a birthday gift I wouldn’t burn if it started doing things like this. But the women seemed to have put up with it. Maybe it was the sentiment; the doll was a gift, after all. Whatever their motivation, they kept it around, something they would later regret.
COMMUNICATIONS
That’s when the messages started to appear. Donna and Angie would enter a room and find Annabelle sitting on the couch or a bed, and a scrap of old parchment would be nearby. Two things were odd about this: first, the women owned no parchment, so it was unclear where it had come from to begin with. And second, these scraps of paper had words written on them.
Not just words; these were notes. Usually written in red, in a faltering, almost childlike handwriting, these messages included the phrases “Help me” and “Help us.”
The women brought in a spiritual medium, someone to help them communicate with what they assumed was a spirit inside the doll. Let’s give Donna the benefit of the doubt. She was training to be a nurse, so she clearly felt a sense of duty to help people in need. Maybe, just maybe, these notes—these cries for help—somehow tugged at her heartstrings.
The medium told them a story that seemed to make sense. Annabelle was possessed by the spirit of a young girl who had died long before their apartment building had been built, and she was buried there beneath their feet. This spirit, according to the medium, liked the women, and she wanted to stay with them. Donna and Angie agreed.
Again, suspend your disbelief. Yes, most of us would have taken a blowtorch to the doll long before, but we were never in Donna’s shoes. We can play armchair exorcist all we want, but we can’t change their decisions.
