PRPG:

A Few Creepy Items That Just Might Be Haunted

October 31, 2024

By Brian Boone

Halloween is a time to embrace the scary and the spooky, the ghostly and the ghastly. For example: these stories about purportedly haunted objects. Are they treats, or are they tricks? You decide.

The Haunted Doll

In 1904, young Gene Otto of Key West, Florida, was given a straw doll as big as he was, a birthday gift from his grandfather who got the toy in Germany. Gene named it Robert (his real first name), and the doll was supposedly just as alive, too. The family reportedly was awakened in the night more than once by Gene’s blood-curdling screams, and they’d find him in the middle of his trashed bedroom, claiming Robert the doll upturned the furniture and toys. When the family would go away on vacation, they’d the doll behind — but servants could hear tiny footsteps and laughter in the hallways. After Gene’s death (in the family home, with Robert at his side) in 1974, Robert was sent to the attic. For decades, the doll apparently kept making his way back to a window to stare at passersby. (He, or rather, it, is now in a museum, kept in a locked box.)

The Haunted Wedding Dress

It starts with the sad tale of forbidden love — in 1849, ironworks heiress Anna Baker fell in love with one of her father’s workers, and her father made sure a marriage couldn’t happen, kicking his daughter’s fiancé out of Altoona, Pennsylvania. Anna never married, and she never got to wear her elaborate wedding dress. The family home, the Baker Mansion, became a museum and where Anna’s dress would be on display permanently. Kept upright under class in Anna’s old bedroom, the dress has been seen swaying back and forth or violently quaking, imbued with its owner’s sadness and rage over being torn away from her one true love. 

The Haunted Mirror

Bela Lugosi is a Hollywood legend for portraying spooky, creepy monsters, like Dracula, in the mid-20th century. Off-screen, he maintained a deep interest in the occult, and he claimed to have psychic powers — he’d stare at a mirror until he claimed spirits would talk to him through those items. After Lugosi’s death in 1956, movie producer Frank Saletri bought the house, with the mirror still in it, and still reportedly full of the trapped spirits that Lugosi had once summoned. Saletri was mysteriously murdered in the house in 1982, and his niece inherited the mirror. After she installed it in her house, she felt and saw ghostly figures and felt phantom bites on her neck, so she donated the mirror to a Las Vegas museum.

The Haunted Elmo

In 2008, Sesame Street’s popular Muppet, Elmo, inspired the technologically advanced Elmo Knows Your Name doll, programmable to recite, in Elmo’s voice, the name of the child who owned it. James Bowman, a Florida toddler, was lucky enough to get one, but unlucky enough to get one that was defective… or haunted. This Elmo Knows Your Name knew James’ name, because it repeatedly chanted, without stopping, “kill James.” James’ spooked mother sent the doll back to manufacturer Fisher Price, which said it would figure out what the problem was. It never revealed — privately or publicly — why Elmo wanted to “kill James.”

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