Welcome to the Nightwalks…

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A rumour circulated in 1954 in Gorbals, Glasgow that a vampire haunted the old Southern Necropolis. It took a group of feisty kids and a newspaper story to defeat it. However, there are still whispers of its existence in the city…

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In the 1950s and 1960s, comic books were seen as a medium only for children, no matter what the content. There were a fair few comics concerning horrific monsters including vampires, so perhaps this was where the idea behind the rumour originated.

The Gorbals Vampire was apparently seven feet tall with red eyes that glowed in the dark, pale skin, and it had sharpened, iron teeth. It also seemed to have an appetite for children. The rumour held that this vampire had abducted, killed, and feasted on two small boys by draining them of their blood.

In spite of the adults, police force, and teachers trying to calm the hysteria, the children collectively decided to deal with the vampire themselves.

After school on September the 23rd 1954,  some two-to-four hundred kids, from 4 to 14 years old, armed themselves with crosses and kitchen knives, sticks, stones, stakes, and dogs, and rushed upon the Southern Necropolis (or “The Gravy” in colloquial terms) to do a spot of vampire-hunting. Even some adults joined in! They continued to search even as night fell, checking behind trees and Victorian headstones. They even carried on as a soupy fog rolled in, causing them to rush towards one silhouette after another, convinced it was the vampire.

The hunt would have been no mean feat. The Southern Necropolis, built in 1840, contained more than 250,000 resting inhabitants. The Dixon Blazes steelworks was at the rear of the cemetery, coughing out smoke, lighting the sky up orange, likely blocking out the moonlight, emitting a sulphuric stench. Flames from the works’ towers cast odd shadows over the graves, making the headstones seem to leap, making it so figures appeared to be walking along at the back, limned in red light…

On top of that, a bonfire was spotted close to the cemetery and the kids started screaming that the vampire was burning its victims.

Locals called the police, and Constable Alex Deeprose was dispatched to the Necropolis. He said, “When I appeared, I felt like the Pied Piper of Hamelin. All shapes and sizes of children streamed after me, all talking at once, and telling me of the ‘vampire with iron teeth’. This I could handle, but when grown-ups approached me and asked earnestly ‘Is there anything in this vampire story?’ it made me think.”

One child begged a journalist at the scene, “Hiv ye come tae shoot him, Mister? Kill him sae we can sleep tonight!”.

More police arrived followed by Edward Cusick, the headteacher of St Bonaventure’s Primary School, who gathered the kids together to reassure them that the vampire wasn’t real.

It started to rain and the children returned home. Gravediggers, cemetery officials and police couldn’t keep them away. Some of them went back to hunting the vampire in the Necropolis the next night, scaling the walls after the gates were locked, and the night after that. By the third night, their interest was starting to wane. By that time, stories were being printed about it in the national press.

The intrigue about the vampire spread through the wider population, prompting a discussion about the effects of American horror comics on youngsters. The kids’ vigilantism was raised by Alice Cullen, the Labour MP, during a debate on the 1955 Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act. This Act banned the sale of “incidents of a repulsive or horrible nature” to minors. The Act was likely influenced by the Teachers’ Union, a few Christian groups, and the Communist Party (who wanted to stop American influences reaching the United Kingdom).

There were no missing or murdered children reported around the time of the Gorbals Vampire hunt.

At the time of the rumours, there was a horror comic about a vampire with iron teeth in the December 1953 issue of Dark Mysteries.  Other American horror comics at the time were Tales From The Crypt and The Vault of Horror.

However, many of the children living in Gorbals were in poverty and didn’t even have access to comic books or a TV. Most of the kids didn’t even know what a vampire was!

There was a passage in the Book of Daniel in the Bible, which would likely have been taught in schools: “Behold a fourth beast, dreadful and terrible, and strong exceedingly; and it had great iron teeth.”

The children may also have been inspired by the folkloric figure “Jenny wi’ The Iron (or Airn) Teeth,” a variation of Jenny Greenteeth, a monster invented by adults to scare children into avoiding bodies of water where they would be likely to drown. Jenny wi’ The Iron Teeth supposedly haunted Glasgow Green in the early 1800s. This particular Jenny was interested in eating children who refused to go to sleep, according to the rhyme:

“Jenny wi’ the Airn Teeth,

come an tak’ the bairn.

Tak’ him to your den

where the bowgie bides,

but first put baith your big teeth

in his wee, plump sides.”

(Poem by Alexander Anderson)

Naughty children were also threatened with a visit from another folkloric figure, the Iron Man (not Tony Stark, but a being likely originating from the influence of the iron industry on the area).

In the cramped tenements of Gorbals, the Southern Necropolis was the only green space that children could meet up and play in. The atmosphere of the place lent itself to the swapping of ghost stories, which the kids did.

Gorbals, a place south of the river Clyde, began as a village in medieval times, but then Glasgow spread and surrounded it with the arrival of heavy industry. In 1340, there was a Leper’s House at St Ninian’s Croft hospital in Gorbals, and it’s said that when lepers crossed the bridge from there into Glasgow, they would ring handbells (or “gory-bells”) to warn the uninfected that they were coming.

By the end of the 1800s, Gorbals was suffering from overcrowding and poor sanitation. Many were drawn in by the promise of work with companies that provided worker housing. In 1900, there was an outbreak of Bubonic Plague.

As heavy industry declined and unemployment grew, there was an increase in crime and drunkeness. However, people still migrated into the area and filled up the tenements: people from the Scottish Highlands, Irish Catholics, Italians, and Jews. By the 1930s, around 90,000 people lived in Gorbals.

The infant mortality rate here was high, so it was little wonder that children would subconsciously conjure a being to explain child deaths which also had an association with metalworks. Iron had provided food – through jobs such as shipbuilding, the munitions factories in World War Two, and the iron foundry – but it had also taken away, leading to poverty, noise, light and chemical pollution, and dangerous jobs. In the children’s minds, iron was a thing with the power to destroy.

The Gorbals Vampire hunt was only one of several such hunts in history involving Glasgow children. In the 1870s, children hunted hobgoblins in Cowcaddens. In the 1900s, Glasgow children hunted banshees, ghosts, maniacs, and Spring-heeled Jack, the Victorian fire-breathing entity that apparently plagued London. In 1964, hundreds of children in Liverpool conducted a search for leprechauns.

In 2016, Johnny McKnight put on a play about the vampire in Gorbals, and residents of the area volunteered to act in it. At the same time, a competition was run in local schools for children to create a horror comic and design a mural paying homage to the vampire. Local teenage artist Ella Bryson and Art Pistol street artists Ejek painted the mural in an archway on St Luke’s Place near the Citizens’ Theatre.

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Writing Update

I have recently had a few stories released. My dark humour flash fiction piece “You Are What You Eat” appeared in Slash magazine:

https://www.theslashmedia.com/you-are-what-you-eat/

My poem “Landscape One” won the Chai magazine’s Prithvi anthology contest (which may be available to read later in the year):

https://www.instagram.com/p/DWWkLQpCM87/?igsh=MTR4Yzhrb2hyaHQ3eQ==

I have a flash horror fiction, “Deathwalk,” in GossamerWight‘s Uncanny Regimes anthology, available to read for free online:

https://www.gossamerwight.com/store/p/uncanny-regimes-pdf

And my post-apocalyptic tale “Assuming the Mantle” is in ELA magazine:

https://nightwalks.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/4eef7-ela-3-theendoftheworld.pdf

As for Once Upon A Crocodile e-zine, it is closed to submissions until the start of 2028 due to a backlog, but planned issues are still going ahead. You can read issue 19 here, and issue 20 is in the works. The edits are done, and I’m now doing the illustrations. It should be out by early August at the latest.

I’m also still rewriting parts of the second Nighthunter book. The beginning needed a do-over and some more scenes need adding in.

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Sources

https://folklorescotland.com/the-gorbals-vampire/

Weird Britain (TV documentary series)

https://www.glasgowworld.com/retro/gorbals-vampire-explained-was-the-glasgow-folklore-monster-real-3891719

https://spookyscotland.net/gorbals-vampire/

https://www.davidcastleton.net/gorbals-vampire-glasgow-southern-necropolis/

https://oldweirdscotland.com/the-gorbals-vampire/

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On a stormy night in 1957, newspaper journalist Mr A. Wilmot from Peterborough had his car break down close to Hannath Hall in the fens of Cambridgeshire. Unfortunately the couple in the building were suffering from a ghostly infestation…

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Mr and Mrs Derek Page were living in Hannath Hall (in Tydd St Giles, near Wisbech) at the time with their two three and five-year-old children Keir and Eve-Anne, along with Rose Halls, Mrs Page’s mother.(Derek Page later went on to become the Labour MP for King’s Lynn.)

After the reporter, A. Wilmot, heard about what had been happening in the building, he contacted the Society for Psychical Research, who then contacted the Cambridge University Society for Psychical Research. An investigation was organised by Tony Cornell (one of the most prolific ghost hunters in that area who wrote Investigating the Paranormal in 2002, and was later the vice president and treasurer of the SPR). Cornell was at first suspicious that the haunting might be a publicity stunt.

Dr Alan Gauld, a psychology lecturer at Nottingham University, also joined in with the investigation. Teams from the University Society visited the Hall twelve times, holding vigils, and Cornell and Gauld visited the building twenty times over a number of years. They slept on the floor of the haunted bedroom and heard strange groans and footsteps, rapping, bumps, knocking, and dragging sounds.

One memorable visit was on February the 6th, 1958 (the night of the Munich Air Disaster), when they arrived at the Hall to find a lot of eerie sounds and stories of more unusual activity.

Gauld and Cornell claimed they had seen actual poltergeist activity upstairs. They saw a chair fly past them and at one point they became trapped in a room when a shiny, new-looking, brass toasting fork of unknown origin was wedged in the door hinges (or perhaps the lock, some sources differ). There were many inexplicable rapping sounds which they used to communicate with an entity in 1959, holding a seance in the haunted bedroom with an amateur medium. They supposedly contacted a woman named Eliza Cullen or Culler, who was murdered in the house in 1906 (though this wasn’t confirmed as historical fact). The entity claimed to have buried her dead infant in the garden and was looking for the baby.

Hannath Hall was originally built in the 17th century on a reedy peninsula amongst the bogs of the undrained fens, though it used to be called Sparrow’s Nest until Joseph Hannath bought it in 1812.

The kitchen and southern end of the house were built first, then the house was rebuilt and enlarged a hundred years later, adding the north wing. This meant it grew from the size of a cottage to one more suitable for a landowner.

The ground floor of Hannath Hall had three living-rooms, a kitchen, and a disused washroom. The first floor had a gallery onto which various rooms opened out, five bedrooms, a study, and a bathroom. 

One story explaining the haunting was that, in the 19th century, the former owner (Joseph Hannath)’s wife passed away. They had been married for forty years. The grieving and disturbed husband kept her body upstairs in her bedroom in the Hall (the one over the kitchen) for six to eight weeks, having meals sent up to her (breakfast, lunch, dinner, and supper) every day until authorities had to intervene and the woman’s body was given a proper burial under a chestnut tree in the Hall’s garden. Other sources state that Joseph bricked up his wife’s body in a space between the outer wall and the breast of the bedroom chimney, and that it wasn’t given a burial. He apparently carried bricks and mortar up the creaky oak stairs to do the deed himself.

A maid was driven to committing suicide by these events, and some folk have said they saw the ghost of a woman in white stalking through the corridors, or appearing in the windows of the house when looking at it from the outside. Nobody was able to sleep in the room where the body was kept after that.

Joseph Hannath was also deeply attached to his horse, Bess (so the tale goes). There were stepping-stones from the Hall to the stables so that Bess could walk without getting her hooves muddy. Her manger was always stuffed with hay. When Bess died, Joseph had her buried in the garden where he could see the grave from his window, and every morning an armful of hay would be put on the grave.

Another part of the legend states that Joseph Hannath sold more than half his thousand acres of land for around £30,000 but that not one coin ever went into a bank. There was a rumour that his missing gold was hidden somewhere in the Hall.

Mr Hugh Williams bought the Hall and farm in 1895. He said that dogs wouldn’t stay in the building, they would “clap their tails between their legs, howl their hearts out and bolt”. Mrs Williams refused to live in it – Hugh had to construct a bungalow for her two fields away. When Hugh was a boy, a maidservant dashed out of the place at midnight, screaming, and never returned. He said that people would hear sounds like a body being dragged across the floor, footsteps along the corridor at night and up the stairs, along with bedroom doors being flung open with quite a bit of force.

One of the Williams children (now Mrs Audrey Godman) was convinced that as a girl she saw the ghost of Hannath galloping through her bedroom on a big, white horse. John Williams remembers experiencing some strange dreams in his childhood. Aged eight to twelve, he experienced doors opening when they should have been closed and the bed lifting itself, though as an adult he dismissed the hauntings as rubbish. His mother used to tell him stories about Hannath not being able to accept his horse as being dead and keeping its body in a kind of vault, where food had to be brought to it by workmen. According to Mrs Olive Williams, the food was always gone later (but the workmen likely took the food home for their own animals).

Two of Hugh’s nieces slept over at the Hall, aged twelve or thirteen, and claimed they had seen hands dripping blood hanging over them.

However, Hugh and Olive Williams did not believe the place was haunted and didn’t experience anything uncanny themselves.

Hugh Williams and his wife left the Hall in 1950 and rented the Hall to the Pages. According to Hugh, Mr Page’s mother-in-law stayed for one night. She heard bumping and dragging in the corridor outside and something smashed through her bedroom door like it had been hit with an axe, then she left the next day (unsurprisingly).

Then Mr Page’s own mother stayed for a night at the Hall, and she also was quick to leave in the morning. Mrs Catherine Page was terrified by knocking on her bedroom wall at midnight, raps, thumps, groans, and footsteps. (Some sources say her name was Audrey Page.)

Rose Halls said she’d often heard regular tapping from the upstairs rooms while she was in the living-room downstairs. Once, she was startled awake in her bedroom (at the south end of the gallery, on the first floor) by a crashing noise, as if someone was breaking down a heavy door downstairs. Another time she was shocked by a massive jolting of her bed. In a statement dated 24th of April 1959, she said that recently she’d heard a heavy thud again during the night. She said that whenever any of these things happened, the door to the haunted bedroom at the other end of the gallery had been opened, somehow.

Mr Page was usually only at home on weekends, so he never heard anything. However, he told the investigators his mother had had to cut short a stay at the Hall because of some frightening dreams she’d suffered.

More in-depth details of the investigations can be found in some old newspaper articles here: https://poltergeistarchive.co.uk/tydd-cambridgeshire-1950s/

One later tenant of the Hall claimed that if psychical researchers visited the place, ghosts would emerge from the walls and scratch any children present.

The phenomena receded, but on April the 22nd 1959 (and later that same year) Mrs Page saw the ghost of a fair-haired, roughly six-year-old boy in the doorway between the living-room and the box-room.

Alan Gauld and Tony Cornell published an account of Hannath Hall in Poltergeists (1979) and in SPR journals. Tony Cornell recalled his experiences during a Ghost Club meeting in 1997.

Derek Page became Lord Whaddon later on. Mrs Catherine Page died in 1979, though Derek remarried. He then died in 2005.

At that time, many SPR members were of the opinion that poltergeists didn’t exist and that poltergeist activity had to have a natural explanation. The researcher Guy Lambert was promoting the geophysical theory: that subterranean water and small earthquakes were the things causing poltergeist phenomena.

After Gauld and Cornell shared their findings, the SPR grew a little less sceptical of poltergeist phenomena. To this day, the haunting hasn’t been scientifically explained or debunked.

Ten members of the London Imperial College H.G. Wells Society stayed in the abandoned Hall for two nights in 1967. They came with more modern recording equipment but didn’t find anything supernatural. The only unexplained noise was a sound “like someone kicking a bucket.”

In 2009, a woman named Alice was living in the Hall. She told a Fortean Times forum that her stepbrother had been sleeping in the haunted bedroom for about ten years and had not experienced anything out of the ordinary.

In 2019, someone else on the Haunted Isles blog shared a story of when they were living in the building as a child. Their brother was sleeping in the old maid’s room and frequently had conversations with “a lady called Mary”. The person also said people often had an uncanny feeling at the top of the stairs, as if there was someone behind them ready to give them a push…

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Sources:

https://poltergeistarchive.co.uk/tydd-cambridgeshire-1950s/

https://europaranormal.com/the-hannath-hall-poltergeist/

https://hauntedisles.blogspot.com/2018/08/hannath-hall.html?m=1

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This week we’re diving into humanoid objects, their bizarre powers, and why humans are so fascinated with them.

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Dolls might be the most ancient toy in existence but they were also used in religious rituals. The earliest ones were made from clay, wood, stone, bone, leather, ivory, or wax.

The ancient Egyptians had flat, paddle-shaped dolls carved out of wood as early as the 21st century BC. Dolls with articulated limbs and removable clothing were in existence in roughly 200 BC. Greek clay dolls were articulated at the hips and shoulders and stories from 100 AD provide evidence that little girls were playing with them. They were sometimes worked with strings or wires.

There were wooden, clay, and ivory dolls in ancient Rome and these dolls have been found in the graves of Roman children. There were rag dolls in Rome in at least 300BC. In both Rome and Greece, boys would dedicate their toys to the gods when they reached puberty, and girls dedicated their toys to the goddesses once they got married. If they died before marriage, the girls’ dolls were buried with them.

But why did human beings have this urge to create small figures out of inanimate materials and why were they so attached to them? And why are dolls so creepy despite this attachment?

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Magic

In some cultures, dolls that had been used in rituals were then given to children as playthings. In other cultures, the dolls used in rites were taboo – too infused with magical powers for children to touch.

The idea of sticking pins in voodoo dolls to affect a person through sympathetic magic is a well-known one and is often stereotypically associated with the Vodou religion of Haiti, even though that religion doesn’t use them. The voodoo doll belief is likely influenced by the European poppet or kitchen witch. The use of effigies to magically affect someone has been noticed in African and Native American cultures as well.

The Hopi Native American tribe made dolls out of cottonwood representing each Kachina or ceremonial masked spirit.

In Inca mythology, Sara Mama was the grain goddess. She was associated with maize that grew strangely or in bunches. This maize was sometimes dressed as a doll of Sara Mama.

Similarly, Native Americans used corn husk dolls, made from the dried leaves of a corn cob. These dolls had no faces.

In Japan, Hina dolls were used to deflect misfortune or absorb spiritual harm, protecting the families that owned them. However, hina dolls could be corrupted and supposedly turn malicious, thereby becoming objects to dread and avoid!

The urge to create miniature versions of gods or goddesses, or even of other humans, seems to come from the basic human desire for control.

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Voice and Movement

Doll-making also seems to be an outlet for self-expression and giving voice to the forbidden.

The artist, Hans Bellmer created surreal dolls with interchangeable limbs in the 1930s and 1940s in Germany, protesting the Nazi party’s idea of the perfect Aryan body.

The East Village artist, Greer Lankton was famous in the 1980s for creating theatrical window displays of drug-addicted, anorexic, or mutant dolls.

In Iran during the Qujar era, people criticised the politics and social conditions of Ahmad-Shah’s reign using puppets in order to escape punishment for speaking out. According to Islam, women are not allowed to dance in public, but dolls and puppets are often free in a way that human beings aren’t, in spite of their attached strings. Layli (a hinged, dancing doll) is popular among the Lur people of Iran.

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Loving Longevity and Easing Isolation

The people of Guatemala used “worry people” – tiny dolls half the length of a finger, dressed in various materials – to ease their anxieties. They would tell their worries to these tiny figures and put them under their pillows before going to sleep, with the belief that, in the morning, the worry people would have taken the worries away.

Dolls were used in ancient Egyptian funeral rites. These dolls would be buried with the deceased and often represented servants or family members.

In the Victorian era, “memorial dolls” were made out of wax representing children who had passed away. They were quite lifelike, often dressed in the child’s clothing and adorned with locks of the child’s hair. They would be displayed in the home to provide a source of comfort to the child’s parents and relatives.

Until the middle of the 19th century, most dolls were made in the image of adults. Child-like or baby dolls didn’t make an appearance until about 1850. By the late 19th century, dolls of babies and children had flooded the market. The dolls had painted eyes, mouths, and hair, and they had a voice box sewn into them that cried “Mama” when the body was tilted. During 1923, 80% of dolls sold to children in the U.S. were “Mama dolls” (named after the sound they made).

Here was the best approximation of a child, something vulnerable that you could hold onto and cherish for ever because it couldn’t die. Something with no opinions of its own that couldn’t contradict or abandon you. (Perhaps this is why much of humanity is currently reliant on talking to AI chatbots.)

Starting in the 20th century, most porcelain and plastic dolls were made for the adult collectors’ market.

In the modern era, this phenomenon of subconsciously trying to freeze-frame our children has gone one step further with the invention of Reborn dolls. These are vinyl, silicone, or a mixture of both. They are customised, painted, and have realistic hair sewn into their scalps by Reborn artists so that they are visually indistinguishable from real babies and children. Some even have heartbeat sounds and breathing simulators as well as weighted bodies. These intricate creations are sold to collectors (and parents suffering from the emotional aftermath of losing a baby or a child), often for thousands of pounds.

Reborn dolls are sometimes also given to elderly people suffering from dementia, to ease loneliness, give them something to care for that is external to themselves, and perhaps to help them remember looking after their own flesh and blood children in the past.

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Education

Dolls have also been used for instructional purposes, and still are (e.g. for learning CPR). Lifelike dolls are used by health professionals, medical schools and social workers to educate doctors and nurses about health procedures or investigating cases of child sexual abuse. Artists sometimes use articulated, posable wooden mannequins to help them draw the human body.

Dolls have been collected for historical importance, and they have been used – perhaps not consciously nowadays – as a way to indoctrinate children into gender stereotypes. Plastic action figures and superhero figures are predominantly marketed towards boys, indirectly giving them an image of strength, risk-taking behaviour, and stoicism to try to live up to. Girls are usually given fashion dolls and dolls of babies, which subconsciously insinuates that they ought to be caring for others and looking visually appealing.

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Pediophobia and the Uncanny Valley

The fear of dolls and similar objects is known as pediophobia (literal translation: “fear of children”) or glenophobia. The psychologist Ernst Jentsch said that uncomfortable feelings arise when there is uncertainty as to whether an object is alive or not.

The Japanese roboticist, Masahiro Mori, expounded this theory and came up with the “uncanny valley” hypothesis – if something is obviously non-human, its human-like characteristics stand out and are endearing… but if that thing reaches a certain threshold of human appearance, its non-human characteristics stand out, making it disturbing. Talk to any AI chatbot and see the weird maelstrom of irrelevant emotions passing over its eyes and mouth without quite landing, like a kaleidoscope of imitative feeling, and you’ll experience the uncanny valley effect.

The fear of dolls may have started around the time that dolls began to look just that little bit too realistic, perhaps when porcelain dolls with glass eyes were invented. There is something oddly corpse-like about those glass eyes as they stare into the hollows of your soul… and something that feels wrong about skin that’s so… cold… and shatters easily.

In modern times, the fear of dolls is influenced by pop culture, for example horror movies including Chucky, Annabelle, and M3gan. Stories passed from generation to generation could also have portrayed dolls as vehicles for evil powers or evil entities. (Dolls can be seen as vessels for spirits when they are used in rites or for protection.)

A linked fear is automatonophobia or the fear of non-human figures which imitate human behaviour.

Humans tend to anthropomorphise objects, even animals, as a way to make sense of and relate to the world. The common psychological quirk known as pareidolia leads us to see faces and figures in patterns such as clouds, wallpaper, tiles, and knots in wood. We are born with the instinct to find a face, our eyes automatically triangulating between anything that looks like two eyes and a mouth.

However, we aren’t born with the uncanny valley propensity. Research has shown that children under age 9 don’t experience the uncanny valley effect.

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Haunted Dolls

…And then there are stories concerning dolls that could be seen as legitimately, well, concerning.

Annabelle

In the 1970s, a nursing student named Donna was gifted Annabelle, a Raggedy-Ann doll with red hair and a flat triangle for a nose. Her mother gave her the doll as a birthday present. Soon afterwards, Donna and Angie (her roommate) noticed the doll seemed to change positions and move from room to room of its own accord when they weren’t looking. They also kept finding cryptic messages scrawled on bits of parchment paper, even though neither of them owned any parchment. In the end, their mutual friend Lou was attacked by an unseen entity that left claw-marks on his chest. They contacted Ed and Lorraine Warren (two well-known paranormal investigators) who concluded that there was a demonic being controlling the doll with a view to gaining possession of a human body. The Warrens removed Annabelle the doll and placed her in a glass case in their museum of the occult. Annabelle is still in her glass prison to this day.

Robert

Robert is a three-foot-tall straw doll dressed in a sailor suit, residing in Key West, Florida for over 100 years. In the early 1900s, a little boy named Robert “Jean” Eugene Otto got the doll as a present from his grandfather. “Jean” named the doll after himself and was very attached to it. Soon the household was experiencing strange occurrences such as objects being moved on their own and eerie giggles. When something happened, the boy said it was the doll that caused the mischief. Neighbours said they had seen Robert the doll moving from window to window when the family wasn’t at home. After Robert died, the doll was donated to the Fort East Martello museum, where he is still on display. He is surrounded by hundreds of apology letters because those who visit him and show disrespect towards him pay for it with bad luck later. Robert became the basis for the doll “Chucky” in the horror movie Child’s Play.

Okiko / Okiku

In Japan in 1918, three-year-old Kikuko Suzuki was diagnosed with a terminal illness. Her seventeen-year-old brother Eikichi travelled to Sapporo city in search of a present to help cheer her spirits. He bought a traditional Japanese doll as a souvenir from a maritime exhibit. It was dressed in a kimono with a hairstyle known as “okappa” (a shoulder-length cut with bangs sweeping across the forehead). The doll was about forty centimetres tall, with black porcelain eyes.

Young Kikuko became emotionally attached to the doll as soon as she saw it and named it Okiku. She died of her illness a year later, and spent the final months of her life clinging to the doll. The Suzukis put the doll on the altar of their family shrine.

Shortly after Kikuko died, the Suzuki family noticed something odd. The doll’s hair had begun to grow, the ends becoming uneven. It was almost imperceptible at first, but within weeks the doll’s hair reached its knees!

Every time they cut its hair, it grew back. The Suzuki family came to believe that their daughter’s soul was now inside Okiku, and they began a monthly ritual where they cut the doll’s hair.

The Suzukis had to leave their home during World War II, and they were afraid of the doll and Kikuko’s ashes falling into the wrong hands. They decided to bring the urn and the doll to the Mannenji Buddhist temple in the Hokkaido region, and the monks took over responsibility for caring for Okiku and keeping her hair cut.

The monks witnessed how the doll’s hair carried on growing even under controlled environmental conditions, and they published photographs of the doll sporting different length haircuts. Scientific analysis has found that the doll’s hair originally came from the head of a young human female.

Numerous reports say that – upon close observation – Okiku’s hair shows natural growth with visible roots and realistic texture. Some visitors and monks have even seen subtle changes such as moisture in the doll’s eyes, subtle movements in its lips, and even in recent years the perception that the doll’s mouth is half-open and teeth can be spotted inside. Some have seen subtle movements in the doll’s hair or even changes in its facial expression depending on their emotions and the time of day.

Mandy

This porcelain doll in Canada causes disturbances and weird sounds in the Quesnel Museum in British Columbia, where she is on display.

She arrived at the museum in 1991, after her previous owner found her among her grandmother’s belongings. The woman gifted her granddaughter Mandy to give to her newborn daughter. The doll had been incarcerated inside a chest for many years and the woman decided it was too creepy to be near her baby.

Local legend has it that the woman heard the doll crying in her attic before she decided to give it away.

Since arriving at the museum, Mandy got up to all kinds of tricks. After being left alone in the museum lab overnight, the next morning the lab was in disarray as if a small child had had a temper tantrum. Another night a reporter was alone in the museum developing photographs of Mandy in the basement and heard footsteps on the floor above him. His equipment malfunctioned.

There were other incidents of Mandy somehow defeating recording equipment when people tried to film or photograph her.

A woman from Surrey claimed her house was broken into shortly after she saw Mandy, and the only thing stolen from her house was a porcelain doll.

A family came to see Mandy in her case and as they stood in front of it, the young daughter fainted. Her blood pressure was so low she had to be taken to hospital for overnight monitoring.

More information here: https://www.curiousarchive.com/mandy-canadas-most-mischievous-haunted-doll/

Letta Me Out

This is a marionette doll in Australia which was reportedly discovered beneath a house in Wagga Wagga, New South Wales, and seems to move on its own. It is believed to be inhabited by the restless spirit of a young boy. The doll is cared for by a man named Kerry Walton.

In 1972, Kerry was attending his grandmother’s funeral in Wagga Wagga. While staying there he explored a nearby abandoned house which was said to be haunted. Ever since he was a child, he had heard disturbing stories about the building, including that of an old man seen moving about the property dragging a sack of human heads. One night, Kerry grabbed a torch and decided to investigate. As you do.

He explored deep into the basement and was shocked to find what appeared to be a child’s dead body with its bright eyes entrained on him. On closer viewing, it was merely a child-sized, distorted, wooden doll. It had large, brown eyes, a sharp nose, and a twisted smile full of tiny, carved teeth. Kerry felt somehow that he must take the doll out of the house with him, so he did, placing it in a sack and locking it in his car boot.

Then Kerry left his grandmother’s house with his brother and returned home to Queensland. It began to grow dark when he and his brother heard faint movement and a scream from the rear of the car. Convinced they had imagined it, Kerry’s brother joked that the doll must be trying to escape the sack, screaming “Letta me out” and so the doll was named.

At home, Kerry put Letta in his living room. Soon his family became uneasy with it. Some of them maintained the doll’s expression would change when no one was looking. They said its eyes would change colour. The doll started moving around inside the house of its own volition – the family found footprints across the floor every morning. The footprints supposedly matched the shoe-soles of Letta.

One night, Kerry’s son woke up screaming after seeing the doll inside his bedroom. He said the doll had been talking and moving its head on its own. From that point, things got weirder. Objects close to the doll would break, picture frames near it would crash to the ground. Light bulbs exploded suddenly. People, even visitors, experienced discomfort whenever they were near the doll – nausea, vomiting, and faintness, often followed by fear then extreme sadness.

One group of women who came to see the doll all began to scream and cry then fainted simultaneously. Cats and dogs would behave strangely and try to attack the doll. Whenever Letta doll was placed inside a moving vehicle, it would start to rain.

In one instance of financial need, Kerry tried to sell Letta doll. However, after he drove to the prospective buyer’s home, he physically couldn’t remove the doll from the car, as if an unseen force was controlling him.

Kerry took Letta doll to the Australian Museum in Sydney for examination by experts. From the nails in its feet, they determined the doll was about 200 years old. They were convinced the doll was made in Eastern Europe. Its style was similar to that of the Traveller community in Romania. The doll’s hair was real human hair and the structure underneath it was built similarly to a human brain.

Kerry then took Letta doll to a psychic. The psychic said the doll was possessed by the ghost of a young boy. Years ago, the doll was made by a gypsy dollmaker in a Romanian village. He made it for his son. The son died from drowning, aged six. The father laid the doll on his son’s grave and either the boy’s soul entered the doll naturally or the father used black magic to make it happen.

Another Traveller boy took the doll from the grave and kept it. One day, he was riding a horse with the doll on his lap and accidentally dropped it. He reached down to pick it up from behind the horse, and the horse kicked him straight in the head, killing him instantaneously.

A rich man was visiting from Australia with his two daughters. The two girls found Letta doll and took it back to Australia with them. Not long after that, their father died in an accident and the two girls somehow lost the ability to speak ever again. However, no one knows how the doll managed to end up in a basement of a house in Wagga Wagga.

The Island of the Dolls (La Ila de Los Mungiercas)

In the canals of Sochi Milko near Mexico City, there is an eerie island festooned with thousands of hanging dolls in various stages of decay. They either dangle from trees or are scattered upon the ground, all put there by one man, the island’s caretaker Don Julian Santana. He found the body of a drowned girl in the canal, then found a doll floating nearby which he hung from a tree to settle her restless spirit… but he spent the next decade collecting and hanging dolls, believing the girl’s ghost was still present. Visitors to the island often find it unsettling with all those glass stares, the faint whispers on the wind, and the possibility of slight movement in all those frozen forms.

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Sources

https://brewminate.com/a-brief-history-of-dolls-from-the-ancient-to-modern-industrial-eras/

https://thedollhistory.com/doll-history/

https://diariopsicologico.com/en/doll-phobia/

https://www.msn.com/en-us/society-culture-and-history/social-issues/why-so-many-people-find-porcelain-dolls-unsettling/ar-AA1S9P0H

https://en.uniproyecta.com/Okiku%3A-The-Disturbing-Story-of-the-Japanese-Doll-Whose-Hair-Grows-Back/

https://youtu.be/3zkckblJMKM?is=OmhXseoWrLf4WBww

https://www.curiousarchive.com/mandy-canadas-most-mischievous-haunted-doll/

https://youtu.be/cyHk0nlfFAA?is=n4bkTjEJoKeqa1eK