Child’s Play

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Story 1: The Devil in the Doll.

While stories of haunted dolls can be traced back many generations,

it was not until until the arrival of Hollywood characters such as Chucky and Annabelle that the concept of possessed puppets truly cemented itself within the wider public consciousness.

In this episode, we examine three allegedly true stories of toys which seem to have a life of their own and try to determine exactly what was behind the devil in the doll.

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Robert Eugene Otto was born on the 25th of October 1900 into one of the wealthiest families in the Floridian city of Key West.

From a young age, he preferred his second name over his first and was known to everyone in his household simply as Jean.

By the age of three,

his parents had duly commenced the search for a nursemaid to supplement their staff and attend to their son's needs.

After several interviews, a Bahamian lady was finally employed, who quickly went on to form a close bond with her young charge.

But the nurse was soon to discover why there was such a speedy turnover of staff within the family, when she was handed her notice for the most trivial of matters.

It was never established if the hand-stitched doll she handed to Jean prior to her departure was created to ease the boy's heartache or to perhaps simply irritate his parents.

Regardless, Gene immediately fell in love with his new companion, a three-foot-tall puppet dressed in a sailor's uniform, who he named Robert.

In no time at all he was spending hours with his new best friend, and as the servants went about their business, they would regularly catch the sound of two young boys conversing with one another.

coming from behind the closed door of his bedroom.

Quite naturally, it was assumed that Gene was providing the voice for Robert, affecting a slightly gruffer tone to differentiate it from himself.

But soon, rumours began to circulate amongst some of the servants that they believed they had in fact heard two distinctly different voices, coming from the young boy's room.

Then, one day, Gene's panicked screams brought his parents running upstairs.

As they hurried across the landing towards his bedroom, they also heard what they thought was devilish laughter, which continued as they then struggled to open his door.

Finally, with the help of a servant, they managed to force entry.

Inside, the Ottos found their son cowering on his bed, his furniture and toys lying overturned and broken all around him.

When they tried to find out from Gene what had taken place, all he could reply was that Robert had done it, whimpering and pointing across to the doll, which was now sat on the window ledge, staring back into the room.

As time passed, Gene and his possessions were plagued by further supernatural occurrences.

These included some of his other dolls being discovered hidden around the house, mysteriously torn and mutilated.

There were also incidents where servants working in a particular room subsequently found themselves locked inside, when no other person was present in the house with them.

Several items of family silverware were also discovered bent or warped out of shape.

More than one of the servants openly stated that they believed the nursemaid had used voodoo or some other form of black magic to curse the doll she had given to the boy before she left.

Eventually, when his parents passed away, Gene would go on to inherit the Otto family home.

With his love for his childhood friend undiminished, he happily gifted Robert his own bedroom, where the doll was placed in a chair by the window to sit and stare down at passers-by.

In time, Gene fell in love and married a local woman called Anne.

But His insistence that Robert should sit with them at the dinner table and sit on a chair in their bedroom at night, would go on to put great pressure on the marriage.

Finally, at the behest of his new wife, Otto agreed to lock the doll in the attic and have no further contact with it.

Unsurprisingly, this only seemed to make things worse.

Parents from the neighbourhood began to attend the address, complaining that the doll was pointing and gesturing from the attic window, terrifying their children who were playing on the road outside.

Anne Otto was plagued by the sound of footsteps coming through the ceiling above their room, only to find nobody up there besides the doll when she and her husband went to investigate.

Eventually, she suffered a full mental breakdown and was committed to a local asylum.

Jean went on to pass away in 1974.

at which point both the deeds of the Otto household and its hand-stitched occupant passed to new hands.

When the 10-year-old daughter of the new owners became plagued by visions of Robert the Doll trying to kill her, the aging puppet was quickly removed from the address and donated to the nearby East Martello Museum.

Robert remains there to this day, safely contained in a glass case.

But stories of his supernatural shenanigans persist.

It is said that it's almost impossible to take a photograph of him, with cameras and electronic devices regularly malfunctioning when visitors attempt to do so.

There have also been reports that some tourists have seen the doll's facial expressions change, with his hands sometimes twitching down by his sides inside his display case.

It would seem that whatever strange powers the doll possesses remain undiminished following the death of its beloved owner.

The tales of Robert the Doll's mysterious movements in his new public home are eerily similar to those of another doll which resides nearly 4,000 miles away on the opposite side of North America.

Resting in a near-identical container in the depths of the Quenelle City Museum is the enamelware doll of a small girl named Mandy sitting with a baby lamb upon her lap.

The full history of this doll is much less well known than that of of her American counterpart, as the woman who donated the toy to the museum in 1991 insisted on remaining anonymous.

From the first evening that Mandy arrived in her new home, haunting events began which would totally unnerve the staff members who had been tasked with preparing her for public exhibition.

When it arrived, the toy's clothing was filthy.

For a short time, it was placed into a clear plastic bag in order to shield it from the elements whilst the garments were taken away to be cleaned.

Almost immediately, staff working in the vicinity of the bag began to detect a faint rustling sound.

Some workers even reported having seen the plastic twitching and moving, apparently by itself.

But when the bag was opened, Only the doll was present inside, with no power source or mechanism which might cause it to move of its own accord.

It had been hoped that once Mandy's laundered clothing was restored and she had been placed in her display case, that such incidents might cease.

But it turned out that quite the opposite would be true.

Visitors passing by the new exhibit reported hearing faint tapping sounds.

as though the toy was drumming its tiny fingers against the glass.

On one occasion, Mandy's toy lamb was found placed on the floor outside her case, despite nobody having been anywhere near it at the time.

Then, several months after her arrival, staff opening up the museum one morning found that all the exhibits had mysteriously been opened overnight.

A number of these pieces had been petulantly hurled across the room, as if by a child suffering a tantrum.

Mandy's display case, however, remained sealed and untouched.

It was at this point that one of the workers suggested inviting a medium to come and assess the toy.

Unnerved by the happenings, the museum's curator was quick to agree to this idea.

A local seer was duly approached who conducted a psychic reading of the doll and apparently deciphered that it had previously belonged to a little girl.

Unfortunately, when her owner had died at a very young age, the child's spirit had been transferred into the doll she was holding at the time she passed on.

Like any small child left to their own devices, the girl's psyche would possess and animate the enamelware toy, in search of excitement and attention.

But when the curator contacted the woman who had donated Mandy to the museum, he was unprepared for the entirely different tale.

she related.

The donor explained that she lived alone, and one one night had been pottering around her house when she had heard the sound of a baby crying downstairs.

Cautiously descending the stairs into her cellar, she had found a doll she did not recognise lying on the floor in the middle of the room.

Despite all of her efforts to dispose of the unwanted toy, even including throwing it in the bins on the day they were due to be collected, She would always hear further haunting crying before going on to discover that the doll had somehow made its way back into her cellar.

Eventually at her wits end, she had offered Mandy to the museum in the hope that regular human contact would satisfy the toy's hunger for attention, an idea which now seemed to have paid off.

Much like Robert the doll, Mandy appears to have an issue with being photographed, with many attempts to take her picture failing due to unexpected malfunctions of the devices being used.

Mandy remains at the museum to this day.

Her new owners are adamant that the doll is not bad or evil in nature, merely childish, and prone to the occasional temper tantrum.

Naturally, haunted dolls do not reside solely within dusty museum display cases.

And on the other side of the globe, in the state of Queensland, Australia, one such haunted curio remains a fully functioning member of the family that owns it.

Much like Mandy, the exact origins of this Australian example of the haunted doll phenomenon will never now be known.

It was first discovered by two brothers during the early 1970s, when they were exploring an abandoned house in the suburbs of Wagga Wagga.

As they had made their way through the shattered husk of the premises, the younger of the two had suddenly cried out in terror.

There,

staring back up at them through a gap in the floorboards was a human face.

Cautiously, the pair had edged closer, only to discover a crudely carved wooden doll, dressed in boys' clothing.

Reasoning that the toy had been abandoned when the house was vacated, The boys decided to take it home with them.

They christened their new friend, Letter,

a shortened version of the full name Letter Me Outer Here.

Letter would later disappear from sight for some time until the older brother, Kerry Walton, discovered the doll again when he was cleaning out the attic of his home in Warwick.

It was at this point, when he brought Letter down to clean it up, that the doll's apparent supernatural powers began to manifest.

The family dogs became agitated when in the same room as Letter, to the point where they had to be removed to prevent them from becoming aggressive.

On a number of occasions, the family would leave the doll in a certain pose or position when they went to bed, only to find that it had mysteriously changed when they awoke the following morning.

Kerry also found a series of small scuff marks on the floor around the house.

and was shocked when he discovered corresponding marks on the soles of Letter's shoes.

Determined to get to the bottom of the doll's origins, Kerry placed it in a sack and took it to a toy expert, who stated that they believed the doll was European in origin.

They theorised it had been handcarved, possibly by gypsies, and that the thick black hair woven into the top of its head may well be human.

Dumbfounded, Walton returned home with Letter,

only to recoil in horror when he parked on his drive and found the doll now out of its sack, lying across the rear seat of his car.

Finally, when his children awoke screaming in bed one night, stating that they had dreamed that Letter wanted to kill them and could move of its own accord, Walton called for a spiritualist.

The medium who agreed to hold the doll stated that they believed it was possessed by the spirit of a young boy who had drowned many years ago.

Reasoning that the toy was lonely as opposed to malevolent, Kerry decided to sell his story to the local media.

Since that point, the supernatural occurrences within the Walton home have ceased, only manifesting themselves when visitors come to see and hold the haunted doll.

During one interview, When a journalist began to ask about the spirit of the drowned boy, a nearby clock flew off the wall and smashed upon the floor.

Several other interviewers have also become disconcerted and upset as they have allegedly felt the doll moving around as if trying to make itself comfortable when they have been holding it in their lap.

So, are we to believe that the human soul can transfer into an inanimate object, thus prolonging its time amongst the living?

There is certainly a key number of similarities in each of the cases we have examined, which seems to suggest that such supernatural possession may be a reality.

And yet, psychologists have a very different theory about the phenomenon, which dates back centuries, all through the evolution of children's toys.

The oldest surviving dolls still in existence from the 17th and 18th centuries possess angelic, exaggerated human features, designed in such a way to bring joy to the child playing with them.

But over the years, more and more effort has been put into making the dolls look realistic, producing an end result that is very similar to a real child, but still not quite perfect.

As a consequence, such dolls are unnerving because of their subtle differences to a genuine human child.

People will accept the presence of a doll as it resembles a human being, but will also subconsciously remain hyper-vigilant and guarded if they know it is not a real thing, building an almost instinctive distrust of it.

As a knock-on effect, the mind can over-interpret and misunderstand situations which occur when the doll is nearby, mistakenly attributing accidents or coincidences to its presence.

In essence, What has been manufactured is not intended to be frightening, but as it sits there staring back at you with glassy eyes and and a big smile, it is inherently unnerving.

With the popularity of the conjuring film series, more and more stories of creepy dolls have now come to light.

It is clear that some of these lack merit, but others, such as the ones we have examined, remain intriguing.

So, when looking to purchase lifelike companions for your children, it may be worth ensuring that you know its full history before you bring it into your home.

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Story 2 The Black-Eyed Children

Over the past 20 years, the number of online testimonies describing encounters with phantom children have increased exponentially.

Who are these nocturnal visitors, and what exactly is it that they want from those whom they unexpectedly approach?

In this episode, we examine the phenomenon of the black-eyed children.

The snow had been falling steadily for several days and had totally blanketed the sleepy corner of Vermont where the elderly couple lived.

The moon shone in a clear black sky, its borrowed light spilling onto the fields below, amplified by the reflective nature of the flawless, crisp white snow.

It somehow gave the impression that dawn was close at hand, but that was not the case.

It was nearly 2am when the husband was unexpectedly awoken by the sound of persistent knocking, emanating from downstairs at the front of his property.

Having arisen, he moved across to the window and looked outside to see who might be calling at this ungodly hour.

There was no vehicle parked outside, or tracks of any kind imprinted in the virgin snow following the path leading to his front door.

Shrugging his shoulders, he slowly made his way downstairs as his wife got out of bed behind him.

Reaching the hallway, he opened the front door and standing on the front porch, seemingly unperturbed by the freezing temperatures outside, were two children, a boy and a girl.

Both were dressed in old-fashioned clothing with traditional haircuts, and neither neither seemed to want to make eye contact with him.

Speaking in a slow and deliberate manner, the boy simply stated that their parents were coming to collect them, and asked if they could come in and shelter from the freezing cold weather.

Their account was vague, but despite the old man's misgivings, his wife was quick to usher the two youngsters past him and into the front living room.

The pair then settled themselves on the sofa and both immediately became unresponsive, failing to reply to any of the couple's questions.

There was something deeply unsettling about these children, which for some time the elderly man could not quite figure out.

That was until he noticed that their eyes were entirely black, with no discernible pupil or iris.

In an instant, he was overcome by a a crippling feeling of dizziness and unease.

As he collapsed backwards into an armchair, his wife gasped upon seeing blood pouring from his nose.

She ran to the kitchen to grab a towel, and as she tried to staunch the flow of blood, all the lights in the house suddenly flickered and went out.

A sing-song voice then pierced the darkness as the little girl announced that their parents had arrived.

The two small shapes rose from the sofa, making their way to the front door and out of the premises.

Waiting outside was a black, classic American car, with two men in dark suits standing beside it.

They all left together.

The couple remained huddled in the dark, terrified by what had just happened, until the lights mysteriously came back on about half an hour later.

But the wider effects of this sinister visitation would take far longer to become apparent.

Both husband and wife continued to suffer from dizzy spells and nosebleeds in the months following the incident.

In addition, the old man was subsequently diagnosed with skin cancer, and of the couple's four house cats, One would be found lying on the sofa where the children had sat, having died of a hemorrhage.

The other three simply vanished without trace.

The mysterious and deeply unsettling phenomenon of the black-eyed children, who were also described as black-eyed kids or BEKs, was largely unheard of until the mid-1990s.

It was at this time that stories involving these strange entities began to circulate online, prompting more and more internet users to come forward and share their experiences.

But examples of people receiving unwanted visitations from BEKs stretch back far beyond this period.

One of the earliest recorded examples of such an encounter dates back to 1950, when a 16-year-old boy living in rural Virginia returned home to his parents in a panicked state.

Sobbing uncontrollably, young Harold Whitaker had explained to his father that he had been walking home from school when he had noticed a boy of similar age leaning up against a nearby gatepost.

This other boy had stepped out in front of him and said, I want to go to your house.

You will walk me to your house.

Harold told his father that the youth's eyes had been pitch black.

and that he was suddenly overcome with a feeling of absolute fear and apprehension.

He also remembered having the distinct impression that the other boy was somehow reading his thoughts.

The black-eyed adolescent moved to block his path and ordered the terrified teen not to run, again demanding that he show him the way to his house.

Harold related how he had suddenly become light-headed and unable to think clearly.

An uncomfortable suggestion began to form in his mind, urging him to comply, but he suddenly panicked and made a run for it.

The last thing that Harold heard was an animal-like howl echoing behind him.

The story that first brought the concept of BEKs into the public consciousness was posted online in 1996 by a man named Brian Bethel.

A resident of Abilene in Texas, He had written about his experience that year.

According to Brian, he was seated in his car on North 1st Street and had been writing out a check when there was an unexpected knock on the driver's side window.

When Bethel looked up, he was surprised to see two boys standing alongside the vehicle, whom he guessed were aged about 9 and 12.

When he wound the window down to talk to them, He was suddenly struck by their penetrating jet black eyes, which seemed to pierce his very soul when they came to rest upon him.

Speaking in a monotone and emotionless manner, the eldest of the two informed Bethel that they had no money and needed a lift home.

Utterly disturbed by their demonic appearance, Bethel made his excuses and told the boys he couldn't help them.

They seemed to become visibly angry at this and urged him to let them into his car.

Suddenly, Bethel noticed that his own arm was now reaching for the door handle, very much against his will.

Intimidated by their intense gaze, he instead wound up his window, locked the car doors, and drove off into the night.

As he accelerated away, Bethel looked in his rearview mirror, only to realise that the two boys had completely disappeared, as if they had never been there at all.

Another more recent encounter took place in the English county of Staffordshire in 2004.

On the morning of the 13th of September, a husband and wife were walking their dog across the Cannock Chase Nature Reserve.

They were proceeding along the main path near to an area known as Stile Cop.

when they heard the unmistakable sound of a small child giggling, hidden within the confines of a tree line they were passing.

The couple stopped and peered into the dark undergrowth, looking for the source of the laughter, when it abruptly ceased.

After a time, they turned to resume their walk, but almost jumped out of their skin when they saw that a young girl was now standing a short distance away, blocking their path.

She wore an old-fashioned white dress, but it was her emotionless and unblinking black eyes that held held their attention.

The girl stood stock still,

regarding them with a somewhat unsettling smile on her face.

She did not respond or move at all when they tried to speak to her.

She simply stood there and stared back at them.

It was only when the couple's dog cautiously ventured towards her that she turned and ran back into the trees, laughing to herself.

When describing the haunting encounter to a local newspaper, the husband stated that throughout the incident, the girl had seemed to have her head cocked to one side.

The angle it had been resting at looked uncomfortable and unnatural, almost as if she had been hanged with a rope or cord of some kind.

The husband and wife are just two of many witnesses who have encountered this apparition at Cannock Chase, and the repeated sightings of the black-eyed girl have given rise to a number of theories about who this mysterious child might be.

During the mid-1960s, a series of brutal killings took place along the route of the A34 Road, and they would later become known as the Cannock Chase murders.

The bodies of six-year-old Margaret Reynolds and five-year-old Diana Tift were found half-hidden in a ditch at Mansdee Gully in January 1966.

Both girls had been abducted from different parts of the West Midlands whilst travelling to and from school several months prior.

The following year, another body would be found less than a mile away, that of seven-year-old Christine Darby.

The local constabulary would put hundreds of man-hours into trying to identify the killer.

But it would not be until November of 1968 that the case finally received a breakthrough.

Witnesses to the attempted abduction of a 10-year-old girl from a street in Warsaw provided police with a car registration number, resulting in the arrest of a man named Raymond Leslie Morris.

Morris was well known to the authorities for his obsession with young girls, and he had been one of the suspects interviewed in the disappearance of Christine Darby.

Whilst he was being held in custody for the abduction, his wife admitted admitted to officers that Morris had coerced her into providing him with a false alibi for the day of Darby's disappearance.

He was eventually convicted of her murder and died in prison in 2014, becoming one of England's longest-serving prisoners.

Despite never being convicted of the murders of Reynolds and Tift, It was long believed that Morris had been responsible for their deaths too, and the reports of a ghostly girl haunting Cannock Chase started to appear soon after his incarceration.

Local residents believe that the black-eyed girl is the ghost of one of these victims, her young spirit, unable to move on.

The idea that these haunting individuals may be the spirits of deceased children does seem a convenient one.

and some of the persuasive and repetitive behaviours of these so-called apparitions are similar to those associated with phantom hitchhikers.

hitchhikers.

But the majority of cases involving black-eyed kids are either too isolated or bizarre in nature to trace back to a local ghost story.

Some believe that rather than being confused or misguided spirits, these individuals are in fact possessed by a far more malevolent and divisive entity.

To the ancient Celtic tribes of the United Kingdom, children with black eyes were believed to be otherworldly demons, who walked our plane of existence in search of blood rituals and sacrifices.

Across the ocean in many Native American cultures, black-eyed people were thought to be similar to the Wendigo, in that they were the unfortunate victims of an evil entity with hostile intentions.

The Iroquois referred to this spirit as the Otcon, a malevolent being whose goal was to infect key members of a tribe and gradually turn them all against one another, starting with the most vulnerable prey, the children.

As recently as 2017,

the inhabitants of a native Oglala reservation located at Pine Ridge in South Dakota asked for a shaman to visit and bless their encampment after having reported a series of encounters with BEKs.

Over a period of weeks, Strange children with haunting black eyes had approached the borders of their camp and tried to encourage the Sioux youngsters to play with them.

Unsurprisingly, the camp's children refused to do so, finding the eyes of the newcomers soulless and terrifying.

The strangers then focused on the adults of the reservation, asking for food and shelter in dull monotone voices.

When this was also refused, One of the children asked the horrified residents if they had any blood to spare, before they they disappeared back into the trees.

In the weeks afterwards, a number of pets went missing from the community, until the shaman's blessing seemed to end the matter, altogether.

In a significant number of encounters describing BEKs, such as the one in Vermont, Witnesses have described seeing the children meeting up with what are believed to be men in black.

Sometimes these mysterious and intimidating individuals are seen driving the children around in their cars.

In other situations, MIBs have either ushered the black-eyed children away or visited their victims in the aftermath of an encounter.

This has naturally given rise to the theory that the children may be extraterrestrial in origin or human children who have been abducted and assimilated in some way.

The fact that they appear to possess some level of psychic persuasion and the ability to harm people they encounter suggests to some commentators that they are either participants in or escapees from a sinister government test programme.

Given the lack of overt hostility displayed during most encounters and the fact that the phenomenon is quite recent in nature, there is also the possibility that this is little more than an urban legend or creepypasta.

A certain percentage of the testimonies which have been published online is almost certainly little more than creative writing on the part of the author.

On the other hand, it is relatively easy these days to purchase sclera contact lenses that completely cover the exposed areas of the eye.

Many horror films have utilised them to terrifying effect.

There are also numerous forms of medication where a widely expanded pupil is a common side effect.

It is entirely possible that environmental conditions, such as street lighting, may give the impression that someone's eyes are completely black during an encounter.

What is perhaps surprising about the phenomenon of the black-eyed children is the widespread absence of photographic or video evidence.

Their legend has been precipitated in an age of smartphones and more advanced surveillance cameras.

and yet alleged witnesses have not been able to capture a single piece of convincing footage.

A subscriber recently contacted us regarding an encounter he had whilst working security at an abandoned building.

One night, two young individuals approached the security fence surrounding the site, asking him if they could take shelter in the derelict building.

At first, they had kept their eyes cast downwards, but when he had refused their request for safety reasons and proceeded to ask where their parents were, They had looked directly at him, revealing jet black eyes.

The CCTV footage that the subscriber provided clearly shows that he is conversing with someone on the other side of the fence.

He even visibly flinches at the point where he says they looked at him, and yet the CCTV cameras inexplicably fail to record their presence, making it appear as though he is talking to no one.

Although intriguing, The video in itself offers no proof whatsoever.

A common feature of the stories and accounts involving the supernatural makes reference to the eyes of the creatures and entities involved being somehow different to those of a normal person.

The overwhelming number of ghosts, aliens and monsters who have been described throughout the ages possess eyes that are devoid of a pupil or iris and consist of only one colour.

These are usually red or black in appearance, colours most commonly associated with evil and malevolence.

This means that stories involving children with black eyes can traverse different genres, such as ghost stories or alien abductions.

And it is entirely possible that rather than being an isolated phenomenon, the concept of BEKs is simply a common horror trope that commentators are choosing to view in isolation.

Regardless of this, the stories continue to come thick and fast, with these strange intruders displaying even more bizarre and unsettling behaviour.

All we can say is, remember to keep your doors and windows closed and your camera phone handy should an insistent knocking suddenly occur in the early hours of the morning.