Haunted dolls are the stuff of nightmares – so why are people paying hundreds of pounds for them?
Is my doll just creepy or does she possess the spirit of a dead person?
Billie’s green eyes are framed by fluttering lashes, while brown ringlets hang down her porcelain face. She’s cradling a baby in her arms, as she stares right at me through my laptop screen.
She has a tragic tale, I’m told. Fiercely intelligent, she owned a florist in a small town, but behind closed doors, was married to a violent, abusive man.
Billie longed to be a mother, so when she discovered she was pregnant, she vowed to keep it from her husband and leave him to raise the baby alone.
Tragically though, he found the positive test in the bin and brutally murdered his wife by stabbing her in the back as she sat on her sofa.
Today, Billie resides in the body of a doll and is listed on Etsy for £377.36. ‘She’ll treat you like a loving family member,’ reads the description below her picture. ‘If someone is abusing you, she’ll ruin their life and make them regret the day they ever hurt you…’
Type ‘haunted dolls’ into the internet and pages and pages of Etsy results pop up. Each has a tale as dramatic as Billie’s and is searching for a new home. There’s online communities of people who adopt these dolls, too. Facebook groups such as ‘haunted dolls and oddities’, and doll subreddits in ‘paranormal’ forums.
I love a weird internet rabbit hole – so I’m intrigued, especially as I have a doll that I found at an antiques fair in 2015, which used to sit on a shelf in my spareroom. Whenever my friend slept over, she’d plead: ‘get that thing out of this room!’.
I guess my has a certain ‘energy’, so decide to dip a toe into the haunted doll community to see if she is just creepy – or actually possesses the spirit of a dead person.
How does a dead person find its way into a doll?
According to their owners, these dolls become vessels for the spirits of people who’ve died. Sometimes that person had unresolved problems or passed away in tragic or unexpected circumstances – like Billie who found a resting place in the form of a doll, who’s a mother cradling a tiny baby.
Another doll called Annabelle belongs to psychic medium Deborah Davies, and has a soul that’s very attached to it. ‘It’s an older lady,’ explains Deborah. ‘Annabelle reminds her of her child that died.’
‘Haunted dolls are possessed by earth-bound souls. Sometimes you may have a spirit that just loved their doll so they visit it regularly, these are ‘benign hauntings’ – meaning it isn’t going to proceed through the serious stages to become an active poltergeist.’
There’s a dark side, though, she adds. ‘Worst case scenario, they are taken over by demons.’
Regardless, Deborah says she wouldn’t recommend buying a haunted doll unless you’re an experienced medium. ‘They can literally turn your life upside down without you even realising it’s the doll that’s responsible,’ she tells me.
The women who adopt haunted dolls
Lisa is 37 years old and from Michigan in the USA. She’s a spirit keeper (aka owns dolls) and has many of them. However, It’s Stiletto who wants to be in this feature, she explains over a Zoom call.
Stiletto has long blonde hair and is dressed in black PVC. In her previous life, she was a party girl who rode a motorbike. ‘She’s a badass, up-front and tells the truth – no sugar coating,’ says Lisa, who also informs me that Stiletto says hello. ‘Her real name is Patricia, but she hates that.’
Lisa communicates with Stiletto by reading her energy, she’s told Lisa about specific experiences from her former human life. ‘She stuck up for others,’ says Lisa. ‘She once had a fight with a man who was being inappropriate to a bartender. She’s that kind of person.’
Stiletto has even helped Lisa quit smoking – ‘she kept urging me to as she died from lung cancer.’
The first haunted doll Lisa ever came across belonged to her sister and triggered her journey to becoming a medium, after she taught herself the skills needed to communicate with it. ‘I came to know that her name was Pearl and she’d been watching over me and my sister as a guide,’ Lisa explains.
Time to join the spirit keeper community
It’s fair to say that some dolls look creepier than others. From deathly white skin to angelic-looking chubby babies with wispy curls, their pictures on the community sites often come with a plea for help. ‘I need this spirit gone, it’s evil,’ or ‘can someone read this doll’s energy?’
I post a picture of mine, inviting comments. I get just one response from a woman in the UK who says she’s ‘doll whisperer’. Not all dolls are the same, she informs me, you need to listen to what they’re telling you… and then she’s gone. No one wants to talk, it seems.
That is until Lisa (and Stiletto, of course) welcome me in. She’s not just someone who adopts dolls, she also re-homes them. I follow her name to her Instagram and find a cornucopia of dolls she’s put up for adoption, including Billie.
Although there isn’t a matching process, Lisa believes a spirit chooses their keeper. ‘I ask if they’re ok with who they’re adopted by and 99% of the time they’re happy,’ she explains. ‘Otherwise it will be cancelled.’
Doll talk
Lisa has friends from the community all over the world and introduces me to 21-year-old Miranda who lives with her grandparents in Texas. With more than 50 dolls, she admits she can’t remember all of their names.
Sometimes Miranda takes them out with her, although most of the time she hangs out with her dolls at home. She communicates with them using apps on her phone (she says ‘ghost hunting tools’ is the best) and light-up balls usually meant for pets, which she says the spirits illuminate by touch.
As we’re talking, a sound comes from another room. ‘I’ve heard my spirits whistle, two of them have knocked themselves over because they wanted attention,’ Miranda tells me, matter of factly.
‘For one of them, that was a sign of her telling me that she liked me – basically she got a little spicy, so it was more like ‘girl shut up of course I like you’ kind of thing. I’ve heard a knock on my bathroom door from that same spirit telling me to hurry up,’ she laughs.
Although I download the app Miranda suggests, I’m too much of a newbie and scared by Deborah’s words to use it. Instead, I send a photo of my doll to Lisa, to see if she can communicate with her through it.
At first, she struggles. There’s a lot of ‘energy’ and she can’t decipher who it belongs to. She sees the name ‘Olivia’ and ‘blonde hair’ (my sister’s blonde and called Olivia) and a dog that could be a retriever (that could definitely be my dog). I don’t know why, but this makes me cry and I decide I trust Lisa more than I did before.
I send a new photo – outside to see if it rids it of all this mixed-up energy. This time, Lisa sees the name Florence, a young woman sewing and a baby in a blanket. She hears a year: 1856. There’s also a man, who falls ill and leaves her alone with the baby. The woman is sad. She might have had a miscarriage. But crucially, she was strangled to death by a man.
The history of haunted dolls
Maybe unsurprisingly, haunted dolls are not a recent phenomenon. Robert the doll, for example, is about 120 years old and has lived in a display case in the Fort East Martello Museum in Florida since 1994. He’s rumoured to have caused car accidents, broken bones, job loss and divorce. Robert belonged to a boy called Otto who had a relationship with him right through to his death. He took him everywhere with him and referred to him like he was alive.
Like most things, the apparent rise in popularity of haunted dolls is down to the internet – with eBay bringing up more than 1,500 page results, you don’t need to be an expert or someone who regularly rummages at antique markets to land yourself a spirit.
It’s why Lisa tells me you have to be aware of fakes and scammers – and also the reason prices can range into the thousands. ‘Haunted dolls are so expensive because people are curious about the macabre side of life – and truly haunted dolls are rare,’ adds Deborah.
It’s also perhaps why the experts warns first-timers to tread carefully. Lisa, won’t sell bad spirits, but she’ll help people get rid of them. ‘Someone once dropped their entire collection off in the middle of the night,’ she remembers, adding that she believes one doll she was given – a pink creepy clown – was possessed by a rapist.
‘I don’t deal with these spirits, I don’t want them around,’ she says.
Since I joined the haunted doll community, I’ve began to call mine Florence – and I totally get this allure of this group. When Miranda tells me ‘my dolls are family and the spirits help me feel less alone in this world’, her words resonated with me.
I don’t know if I’ll end up finding anything else out about Florence, but I have moved her into a new home in the living room.
I like seeing her in the evening as I watch telly on the sofa. We’re together, and I’ll be there if or, indeed, when she decides to communicate with me.