Episode 15: Unboxed

This is the story of the one.

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My great-grandmother was a painter.

She picked it up late in life, but she produced dozens and dozens of oil paintings once she hit her stride.

They're mostly still life studies and landscapes.

They're not Dutch masters by any stretch of the imagination, but to our family, they're precious.

They connect us to her.

Because of this, those paintings have become a centerpiece of her extended family.

Generation after generation now makes room on their walls for as many of these framed treasures as they can acquire.

People have a way of becoming attached to things.

Maybe it's the long journey that these objects accompany us on through our lives, or perhaps it's due to the feelings they can invoke when we see them them or touch them.

Or maybe, deep down, we understand that even though our lives might be fleeting and temporary, these things, these objects we grow to love and revere, seem to live on after we're gone.

This habit of attributing personality and emotion to our possessions is something known as anthropomorphism.

We give human characteristics to things that are far from human.

Some people name their cars and talk to them like an old friend.

Others will say that their house has a lot of nervous energy.

They don't, but at the same time, they do.

You know?

The best place 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 lay in their laps on long car rides, or get pulled under the covers with them at bedtime.

Those objects 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 children's decisions.

as if someone or something

were controlling them.

I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore.

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, a human skull.

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, they uncovered, so to speak, the truth.

The The bones belonged to a three-year-old girl who had died more than 7,000 years before Florida had become 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.

But she wasn't alone.

With her in the ground, placed near her arms in case she wanted them, were her toys.

It seems that children have had toys, objects that they loved and played with, for thousands of years, perhaps tens of thousands.

But 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 atops.

They would also play with objects meant to represent the things most important to their village or clan.

Toy animals, soldiers, religious icons, all are commonly found objects by archaeologists in the graves of ancient children.

Interestingly, the ancient Greeks expected children to give up their toys when they came of age.

Young women would actually take their toys to the local temple on the night before their wedding, where they would offer them as a sacrifice to the gods.

These rules began to shift after the advent of the Enlightenment in the mid-1600s.

Society became more affluent, and children weren't expected to work 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.

Dolls.

They're 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.

to set the tone, and dominate the lives of the people who own them.

And sometimes, the consequences have been frightening.

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 completed building 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.

They called him Jean, and the family quickly settled into their leisurely lifestyle in 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 Jean'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 any 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.

And 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 Jean 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 Jean 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 Jean played in the water with toy boats and corks and all the usual things that little kids love to do.

And at the end of the night, Jean 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.

And 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, he would always sound like he was in deep 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 Jean's would almost sound 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, Jean's mother would quietly approach the boy's room, and then, without warning, she would burst into the room.

Inside, it was said she found her son cowering in a corner of the room, arms wrapped around his knees, while Robert the doll sat on the bed or 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 on the bed, furniture in the room overturned and his belongings strewn about.

According to Gene, Robert was to blame.

Robert, the doll 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 or broken, Jean said that Robert had done it.

Sometimes the autos could hear giggling from somewhere else in the house.

Sometimes this happened at night, and each time when Jean was supposed to be in bed.

Dishes and silverware were often found thrown about on the dining room floor.

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 off to the carpet.

The staff would even find themselves locked out of the house when making their nightly rounds.

If Jean 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.

One constant through it all, though, was Robert, the unusual doll in the white suit.

And according to some reports, he did more than make a mess.

He may have killed.

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 was 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 stories.

He would put up a small 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 youngest auto 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 auto family wasn't even at home.

Neighbors said they would sometimes see the doll in 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 small, little feet could be heard moving from room to room.

All of this became too much, and extended families stepped in to find a solution.

One of Jean's great aunts visited the family to plead her case.

The doll was cursed, she said.

Some evil spirit lived inside it, and if they wanted to be rid of the chaos and random episodes of disturbance, they needed to get rid of the doll once and for all.

On her recommendation, Robert was taken away from Jean and placed inside a box.

The box was then moved 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 all.

But the autos themselves 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 eventually grew up.

He trained as a painter, traveled throughout Europe, and eventually married an accomplished pianist.

But after his parents passed away, the couple 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, according to the reports, was Robert.

Rumors in town spoke of how the doll had a place at the dining room table.

and 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.

Unnerved by the presence of the doll so close to their marriage bed, it was said that she stopped allowing Gene to bring it into their room.

And for a while, he complied.

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 upstairs in the attic.

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 Jean's wife insane, eventually ending her life.

The study of folklore often encounters the same patterns throughout the world and across the centuries.

One common theme that we 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 of the spectrum.

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 unusual behavior.

Maybe it was a culture of superstition brought into the house by servants with ethnically different backgrounds.

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.

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 for whatever reason, the new family packed up the doll and moved it to the attic.

Eventually, though, the family 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 10-year-old daughter reported that the doll would appear in the house on its own, and on a handful of occasions, it even tried to attack her, a claim that she holds to even now as an adult.

But the final straw happened later, when the girl's parents were awoken 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 the bedside lamp, only to feel their hearts stop.

There,

at the foot of the bed, was Robert the doll, a kitchen knife in his hand.

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This episode of Lore was researched, written, and produced by me, Aaron Mankey.

Lore is much more than a podcast.

There's a book series in bookstores around the country and online, and the second season of the Amazon Prime television show was recently released.

Check them both out if you want more lore in your life.

I also make two other podcasts, Aaron Mankey's Cabinet of Curiosities and Unobscured, and I think you'd enjoy both.

Each one explores other areas of our dark history, ranging from bite-sized episodes to season-long dives into a single topic.

You can learn about both of those shows and everything else going on all over in one central place: theworldoflore.com/slash now.

And you can also follow the show on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Just search for lore podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button.

When you do, say hi.

I like it when people say hi.

And as always,

thanks for listening.