HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(drumroll)
MARCUS PARKS
Yep, sounds good. Through The Fire is my favorite drum solo. It's very simple.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But I like a simple drum solo. That's why I like In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, that one is also good.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(drumroll)
MARCUS PARKS
Frankenstein is good too.
ED LARSON
Yeah. That one's at least a little fast on that one.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(drumroll)
MARCUS PARKS
(drumroll) Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. I like it. I like a simple drum beat.
MARCUS PARKS
I know that drum solo by heart.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
It's like a Neil Young guitar solo.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I still love In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, so do I.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I listen to all 16 minutes of it regularly.
MARCUS PARKS
Regularly?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah. It shows up in my top-
ED LARSON
It's like 18 minutes I thought.
MARCUS PARKS
17.5.
ED LARSON
17.5?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't know, I'm just sitting here.
ED LARSON
I tried to lose my virginity to that song.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow. 30 seconds in.
ED LARSON
I was not allowed.
MARCUS PARKS
17.5 minutes of attempts. Welcome to Last Podcast on the Left, ladies and gentlemen. I'm Marcus Parks.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh, this is how we're beginning?
MARCUS PARKS
I lost my virginity to a Sarah McLaughlin song.
ED LARSON
Whoa!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, In the Arms of the Angels.
MARCUS PARKS
With me is Henry Zebrowski.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I lost my virginity to my father. Oh my god! Oh fuck, I can't believe we're beginning like this.
ED LARSON
Yeah. He was singing (singing) oh you dirty little fella, does your mother know you're out?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(singing) There's a hole in your britches and your dick is hanging out! I'm still haunted.
MARCUS PARKS
And of course Ed Larson, who eventually lost his virginity to...
ED LARSON
The Top Gun soundtrack.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh, Take My Breath Away.
ED LARSON
Yeah, I was told no to In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida and then we changed CDs to the Top Gun soundtrack and then I got to see boobs.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's when you should have said absolutely not, it's In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida or you go home.
ED LARSON
I tried, I made a case.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But now let's play a different song. It's important for us to get into the mindset today because this shit, I mean this, this stuff fucking actually creeps me out.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Really?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There's something about this topic specifically. I think it's because I've been in rooms with a couple of these things and it's fucking freaky. And so let's get in the mood. (creepy giggling) This is revenge for Barbie not getting the Greta Gerwig nomination.
ED LARSON
(creepy voice) I like you, Henry.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What? Actually do you like me? That's cool.
ED LARSON
(creepy voice) I wanna see you with no clothes on.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, you wanna see me naked? All right.
ED LARSON
(creepy voice) Yeah, take your clothes off.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh fuck, this is a sting from the haunted doll criminal SVU unit. That's what all this is! This is To Catch A Predator! They're using the haunted doll as bait!
ED LARSON
(creepy voice) You look horrible naked.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well you know what, little girl? You're right about one thing.
MARCUS PARKS
We're talking haunted dolls today, ladies and gentlemen.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah!
ED LARSON
Yeah!
MARCUS PARKS
It's haunted doll time. This is a haunted doll redux.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, dude. And the thing about haunted dolls, we're gonna get into it, is that maybe we're not haunted by the dolls, the dolls might be haunted by us.
ED LARSON
There you go, there you go.
MARCUS PARKS
So on today's episode, we're gonna be discussing dolls that are inhabited by some sort of spirit or energy, whether it be a dead child, which is the most common, a demon-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
A demon.
MARCUS PARKS
Or a general curse imbued within the doll's very fibers. Perhaps not coincidentally, haunted dolls almost always look haunted and are very rarely the sort of regular plastic doll you'd buy at say Walmart. Instead these dolls are usually well crafted and are often decades if not centuries old.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I find it's a bit of a chicken and the egg about whether or not they look haunted. Because yes, all of these dolls are creepy when you look at them, for us quote unquote "objectively", they are creepy. But are they just creepy because we know that they are haunted and there's weird activity around them or has it always been that way? Or is the fact that we go into some of these events, right, when you go to approach some of these haunted objects and we're supposed to treat them as if they're highly dangerous. Does that then make them creepy? Because of literally our thought energy.
MARCUS PARKS
I think dolls are creepy more often than not.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Of course.
ED LARSON
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think are dolls are always creepy. That's me.
ED LARSON
I fucking hate craft fairs.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You see, I love dolls. My mom used to make dolls, right, that was like one of her fave-
MARCUS PARKS
That doesn't surprise me in any way whatsoever.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
She loves dolls. She used to make all of them. She got into like all of the creepy ones. She liked the old timey ones. Like Jackie had a doll that she just called Baby that was this like flat, it looked like a butt plug in shape.
ED LARSON
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But it was one of those. And again, a creepy factor. I always hate when dolls do this, that it was like you flip the dress up, right? You look at it, instead of looking at its pussy, you see it's sleeping face. You pull the dress down, you see it's awake face.
MARCUS PARKS
Weird.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And all dolls that are awake and then asleep because then the eyes mean there can be no witnesses when you lay it on its back, that creeps me out.
ED LARSON
So it had legs growing out of its head? How does this work?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was like a shapeless blob. Remember like the 'I love you' from Mr. Show?
MARCUS PARKS
Oh yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The spokesthing.
MARCUS PARKS
Pit Pat.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Pit Pat.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's Pit Pat but it's got a baby awake face on the top, flip up its dress, and instead of having a bottom half, it's just another sleeping head.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Oh okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Sort of a blob. Like you remember 'Harold and the Magic Crayon'?
ED LARSON
No.
MARCUS PARKS
It was a baby with a magic crayon and it was purple. It was a children's book, I loved it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah it is, it's very cool.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it was a little blob-type thing.
ED LARSON
Man, my Aunt Patty used to have this fucking doll, it was like Time Out Sally or something like that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
ED LARSON
And it had no face. And it's whole thing was you put it in the corner, facing the corner like it's in time out and shit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. Yeah it's like Blair Witch. Yeah.
ED LARSON
I hated the fucking doll. Every time I stayed with her, I'm like get rid of this doll. What are we doing here? And then I remember one time she put it in my bed. I came home drunk and it was in my bed. I was like you cunt!
MARCUS PARKS
Now according to the book 'Dolls of the Dead', you're not supposed to call a haunted doll possessed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No.
MARCUS PARKS
Instead the book suggests that one uses the term 'spirit attachment' when talking about a haunted doll.
ED LARSON
PC culture strikes again, man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, man. Woke ass shit.
ED LARSON
Yeah, this fucking-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We can't even say the word. We can't say P-word anymore?
ED LARSON
Fucking Annabelle is a goddamn murderer and I'm supposed to care about her feelings?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You gotta be careful, you don't want to offend them. Because next thing you know, we're gonna get one star reviews from all these haunted dolls.
MARCUS PARKS
Well by the book's reckoning, most spirits who haunt dolls aren't dark but they're instead people who have chosen to remain on the earthly plane after death for whatever reason. So this may go some way towards explaining why these spirits usually choose well constructed dolls that are made from wood or porcelain as opposed to cheap plastic dolls.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well I actually had a really great conversation as a sort of like a consultant, because I had a lot of questions. And so I went to the two people that I know that know more about haunted objects than anybody else, that is Greg and Dana Newkirk. And they have a new documentary called The Unbinding which is all about haunted objects and one specific thing called The Crone that is extremely, it's honestly very creepy.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But they view this very, it's different in a way. Because they have a whole concept about the idea that dolls are haunted by us, that we look at a thing and our trauma essentially is what attaches to this object. And then the object sort of projects through our mental powers. Because they have a consciousness centered view of the paranormal, basically saying that nothing is objectively haunted, it's only when we show up that they become haunted. Because it's something about consciousness, it's something about... And especially things that look like us.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like it's easy for us to put our trauma through their eyeballs and then they kind of project it back out into a bunch of fucked up shit. Same thing with menarches. It's why when little girls have their periods for the first time and there's like a massive change in their brain when things starts flying around.
ED LARSON
Yeah. That's logical. That's logical. It makes sense. It's why the Tonka truck never becomes haunted or something like that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We don't know.
MARCUS PARKS
Maybe. Maybe if something really bad happened to you in a Tonka truck.
ED LARSON
If you gave it eyes. Maybe like one of the like the Cars guys, I could see one of them-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
ED LARSON
Like Mater, Tow Mater but he's haunted and shit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because they're like a silent witness to all of your crimes.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But as we shall see, whether it be wood or porcelain, one of the most famous of the modern haunted dolls at least appears to be plastic and its power is supposedly so great that it can reach through a TV or computer screen to curse anybody who views it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Damn it, Peggy!
MARCUS PARKS
We'll get to her later though. Now long time listeners know that we've done an episode on haunted dolls before. But if I remember correctly-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(creepy giggling)
MARCUS PARKS
I believe that the episode in question was mostly us going through eBay listings of dolls that people claim are haunted.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
One listing, if I'm correct, claimed that the doll for sale was king of the warlocks.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's very difficult to claim but you can just say it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You don't need proof.
MARCUS PARKS
No. And indeed 12 years later, eBay still has a thriving haunted doll marketplace which we'll cover later.
ED LARSON
Great.
MARCUS PARKS
But because we didn't give haunted dolls their full due, we're gonna cover a slew of haunted dolls today.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yay.
MARCUS PARKS
Starting with what inspired today's episode.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
My boy!
MARCUS PARKS
Robert the haunted doll.
ED LARSON
Bobby!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Bobby!
MARCUS PARKS
And you guys are fucking up right at the beginning.
ED LARSON
What happened? What'd I do?
MARCUS PARKS
You're fucking up immediately.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What?
MARCUS PARKS
You can't call him Bobby, you call him Robert or you call him nothing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Robert, I'm sorry.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes. Good. Ed?
ED LARSON
Sorry, Robert.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There are a lot of rules. Robert the haunted doll is the soup Nazi of haunted objects.
ED LARSON
He is very popular.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He is very popular, there's a lot of work in there. But if you want to get that Muscatawny, you're gonna have to play by the rules.
ED LARSON
Have you guys ever seen Robert?
MARCUS PARKS
Not in person.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No.
ED LARSON
I've had friends see Robert before because it's a Florida doll.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
He's from Key West.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Key West, yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah. And they all say he's fucking terrifying.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh it's very scary.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Well Robert the doll was the subject of an entire book by an author of the paranormal named David Sloan, who first met Robert the doll in 1996. Sloan, by the way, makes it a point to say in his book that he was investigating the paranormal before it got popular.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, it was like a total scene back then. But it's totally different now because back in then Bigfoot would like hang out. Like you could fucking talk about like Loch Ness would just like be there or fucking whatever, you didn't have to pay for a meet and greet.
ED LARSON
Pre Ghostbusters.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh Yeah. Well more like pre paranormal, like pre ghost bro.
ED LARSON
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Pre ghost bro because also remember Dan Aykroyd started Ghostbusters because he was one of us.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He was a total obsessive with this content. But it was not popular.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Have you ever read the original screenplay to Ghostbusters or heard about the original ideas?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's 150 fucking pages.
ED LARSON
I just know it was supposed to be Belushi.
MARCUS PARKS
No. Well yeah, it was supposed to be Belushi.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
But the original concept, like the original script of Ghostbusters is insane.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's awesome.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, it's awesome but it's fucking crazy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm gonna make that movie. They had wands. Which is honestly, that was probably a good creative choice, the proton pack is honestly more fun, it's more iconic.
ED LARSON
Futuristic.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well author David Sloan became obsessed with Robert the doll after visiting a man named Darryl Meyer who owned the house where Robert the doll had lived for a number of years, mostly in the attic. Now Meyer was skeptical that a doll could cause any sort of paranormal activity but when David Sloan asked to see the attic where Robert had spent so many decades, a nearby rotary phone flew off the receiver.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And that was one of those things that happened regularly around Robert the haunted doll.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah. Well rotary phones, they shook, the phone could have fell off.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's bad wiring.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. It flew though.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It shouldn't just be shaking.
MARCUS PARKS
But the homeowner shrugged it off as if this was something that just happened all the time. But even though he didn't believe in the paranormal, the homeowner still let David Sloan, a total stranger, rummage around in his attic. Sloan found that the room still held several pieces of child-sized furniture all built for Robert the doll.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And that was real. And that was before Robert the haunted doll became like publicized or whatever, they did create a whole area where this doll could just live.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Now admittedly, Robert the doll very much looks like a cursed object. Its face is pockmarked and nearly featureless and it somewhat resembles the prosthetic faces that were given to disfigured soldiers during WWI. It also has the definition of a doll's eyes, lifeless eyes, black eyes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Black eyes! It's so much fun to do.
MARCUS PARKS
1200 men went into the water-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
316 men came out.
ED LARSON
(singing) Show me the way to go home!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Eddie, you actually did some good Google searching right before. But it is important to remember we did learn this, when you type in 'Robert the sailor doll' you need to include 'haunted'.
MARCUS PARKS
Haunted, yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because if not, it brings up a whole twink universe that I didn't know was there. There was a lot of happy trails in that search.
ED LARSON
Yeah, I mean he's in Key West.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yup, definitely. Robert the sailor doll out of Key West? I've met that guy.
ED LARSON
Yeah, lots of roommates, never a girlfriend.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Close talker. Yeah. His belt buckle touched my belt buckle when he hugged me.
MARCUS PARKS
Robert is also surprisingly large, it's child-sized. It's 3 ft tall but only weighs about 6 lbs.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
A unit.
MARCUS PARKS
Covering his felt and wire body is a yellowed four piece sailor suit that replaced his original costume of a pink and green harlequin outfit that was replete with pompoms.
ED LARSON
So he was a cheerleader.
MARCUS PARKS
No, harlequin. No, not pom poms.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Little tiny pom poms.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Little wibble wobbles, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Wibble wobbles, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
I know what you're talking about.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I actually find the sailor costume to be creepier than a harlequin costume.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh easily, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because harlequins I'm not fazed by.
MARCUS PARKS
Well it's hack at this point.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But yeah, a tiny haunted sailor is terrifying.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah because I know a lot of big adult haunted sailors.
MARCUS PARKS
We lived through Fleet Week many a time in New York City.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, they got a story to tell and they got a boat that doesn't go anywhere.
MARCUS PARKS
Well as far as where Robert came from, we know he was crafted in Germany near the turn of the century by the Steiff Company. And it's believed that Robert was an expensive window display piece that was sent to Key West by family that was still living in Germany.
ED LARSON
When did it get to Key West?
MARCUS PARKS
1900
ED LARSON
So it could have known Ernest Hemingway.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was in the same neighborhood. He probably spilled a couple of beers on it.
MARCUS PARKS
But soon after Robert arrived dressed in his original clown outfit-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What if Robert the sailor doll was his inspiration for the guy with no penis in that fucking book?
ED LARSON
Could be. Robert the doll has no penis.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cause Robert ain't got no penis, no.
ED LARSON
Have we checked Robert's penis?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, it's got no penis. They said none. They would have said.
MARCUS PARKS
There was a whole chapter on it in the book.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes, there is. It describes every inch of Robert the haunted doll.
ED LARSON
None of it? There's none, there ain't no penis.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Quit checking, quit asking.
MARCUS PARKS
No spaghetti, no weenie.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We're going to call the haunted doll SVU unit, sir, if you ask one more question about Robert's genitalia.
MARCUS PARKS
But soon after Robert arrived dressed in his original clown outfit, those clothes were replaced with its current sailor suit. That suit had once belonged to Robert the doll's first owner, the long suffering Gene Otto.
ED LARSON
I'm just blown away, I gasped.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ah!
MARCUS PARKS
Now at the turn of the century, it was quite normal for boys to play with dolls, so Gene and Robert soon became inseparable. But the nature of Gene's obsession is speculated to have less to do with a child's normal attachment to a beloved toy and more to do with good old voodoo.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Even just the obsession, because that's what they said is that this obsession continued throughout Gene Otto's life.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, which we'll get into.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But there's something attached to this. He saw something in this doll and that's kind of what they talk about. Because it's about our relationship with the object.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's what does it mean to us? There are certain objects that, when I was talking to the Newkirks, they talk about trauma, like I brought it up before. But the idea that like you're in a room where something traumatic has happened to you, your focus was on objects while you're in that room while something traumatic is happening to you. And it's like you shoot juju at it, right.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You make it filled with this kind of energy. Where something like this is like if you're really lonely, because that's another one of those like deep dark, well especially when you're a little boy-
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And you don't know what to do. Because your emotions are stronger when you're a little kid.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You're a little bit more, maybe, you're not more in tune but you're definitely more vulnerable and sensitive. And the idea of you becoming obsessed with this other thing and it's sort of like implanting your personality on it.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh I was extraordinarily attached to my little monster doll.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
You had a little monster doll?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, My Little Monster, yeah.
ED LARSON
Oh I remember those, yeah!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I remember that.
MARCUS PARKS
There's the big fat one with the long nose and all that. No, I was attached at the hip to that thing. I loved it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
I loved my Baby Tugs Care Bear.
MARCUS PARKS
Nice.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Aw.
ED LARSON
Yeah, he was a good guy. Now do you think, Key West, throwing out some theories here. Lots of Haitians in Key West. Especially back in the day.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
ED LARSON
Straw Market, mom could have yelled at someone at the Straw Market.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I curse you!
ED LARSON
Cursed the doll.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Here's the thing, concerning that, Gene Otto's grandfather was a doctor named Joseph who had a servant from the Bahamas named William.
ED LARSON
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
So it's still West Indies. And William was married to a fellow Bahamian named Emmeline. Dr. Joseph Otto went blind in his later years and William cared for him until Joseph died from internal injuries after suffering a fall.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was really nice honestly, their relationship.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But once Dr. Otto was dead, Thomas Otto, Gene Otto's father, hired William to work as a clerk at his drugstore. Soon after, Thomas Otto began an affair with William's wife Emmeline.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
As is evidenced by journal entries written by Gene Otto's mother, Minnie. And also further proven by the fact that Minnie Otto specifically requested not to be buried in the Otto family plot after her death.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
She actually had her name to be changed to the Mini Cooper.
MARCUS PARKS
Here of course is where the curse comes into play. See Emmeline gave birth to a child during her affair with Thomas, it was Thomas's child. And this is evidenced by a lawsuit that she filed against the Otto family. Tragically the child died and it's said that Emmeline used voodoo to trap her dead child's soul inside Robert the doll.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(metal guitar riff)
ED LARSON
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, dude.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's what happens.
MARCUS PARKS
It's a lot of... There's gonna be a lot of spite talked about today.
ED LARSON
Okay, cool.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But that makes a lot of sense. Spite is one of the really powerful emotions that we have. I mean that's why we're here.
MARCUS PARKS
It's why we're sitting here today.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
No, this whole network has been fueled by spite from the beginning.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. And it's nice but it does create problems.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You have to be careful because if you're seeking revenge, it ends up coming back on you.
ED LARSON
And also like if you put that in someone's head, they're gonna, like you said earlier, help it manifest.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Well this, author David Sloan speculates, is why Gene developed a lifelong attachment to the doll, because Gene intuitively sensed that the soul of his dead half brother was encased within.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I mean it's a big jump but it is interesting.
MARCUS PARKS
It's a very large jump.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But the idea that you maybe even as a kid have heard these things, like I like to kind of something along these lines. (beeping) And I'm gonna continue on even though my mic just cut out. I know it's definitely not because that I maligned Robert the haunted doll.
MARCUS PARKS
No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Right?
ED LARSON
No!
MARCUS PARKS
No, not at all.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because I didn't. And I want to say I'm sorry again, Robert the haunted doll.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because that genuinely creeped me the fuck out.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. I mean it's not due to the fact that this Scarlett already has one input that shat out and we just went through a studio move and these things just don't really last for a long time.
ED LARSON
Yeah. And you spit constantly into the microphone. It's covered in water.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I just want to say again, I'm sorry, Robert. And I love you. But I think there's a practical edge to this.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Where you could maybe as a kid, you'd be surprised what kids hear, right?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, of course.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So he could have heard the story, right. He could have watched his parents going through this conflict. He knows maybe about his father's infidelity. Maybe they've even said this like through the rumors or other people have told him. And then in a way, it's still him haunting the doll because he's thinking about his dead half brother. Maybe he thinks about that and he plants that in Robert.
ED LARSON
He gave it a vessel.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
I mean it might even be that he walked in on Emmeline doing some sort of ritual with the doll. I mean whether or not the curse, quote unquote "curse" is real or not. I mean if a kid sees, he walks in and like the woman that's married to like his dad's employee is doing a voodoo ritual on the doll-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
It's gonna put something into that doll.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And the power of curses is the belief in them.
MARCUS PARKS
That's right. Now interestingly, Gene was the one who actually named the doll and the reasoning behind the choice gives it a bit more of a paranormal oomph. Gene's full name was Robert Gene Otto and he originally went by the name Robert. But as soon as he received the doll, he demanded to be called Gene instead so his doll could take his first name.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's the first step towards anthropomorphising that doll.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, this doll is me, I am the doll.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. It's very Persona. Have you ever seen that movie?
MARCUS PARKS
Nope.
ED LARSON
Persona's great.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ingmar Bergman. It's great.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's a lot of like crossfades of two different very scary looking white women's faces.
ED LARSON
You'd love it.
MARCUS PARKS
Face/Off.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Face.
ED LARSON
It's nothing like Face/Off.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Face/Off, I actually-
MARCUS PARKS
Oh you're saying an Ingmar Bergman movie is nothing like Face/Off?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You could see the inspiration.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Now it's rumored that the story of Robert the doll inspired the Child's Play movies which gave birth to the foul mouthed munchkin named Chucky that we've all come to know and love over the years.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's my boy! My fucking boy!
ED LARSON
Love you, Chucky. Love you, Brad Dourif.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, of course. There is however no direct evidence for this. I mean haunted dolls, it's just kind of a thing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's haunted dolls.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, it's haunted dolls.
ED LARSON
He's a serial killer.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But throughout his childhood, anytime mischief in the Otto household was attributed to Gene, the little boy invariably said quote:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
"Robert did it."
MARCUS PARKS
Additionally, Gene's parents said that they could sometimes hear two distinctive voices coming from wherever Gene and Robert were playing together.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Technically they probably would have said the same thing about me.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah, exactly. I played pretend all the time.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But it's different when you're going like oh Robert, you're so funny, it's so nice to be around you. And you're like yeah, kill your fucking parents. Kill your mother. Just kill your fucking mother.
ED LARSON
You ever play sharpen the knife, there?
MARCUS PARKS
The most disturbing recurring event was when Gene's parents heard screaming coming from Gene's room in the middle of the night. They'd rush over only to find the little boy struggling to pin Robert the doll to the floor for some unknown reason.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's not good.
MARCUS PARKS
No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's trying to join the Navy.
MARCUS PARKS
Eventually though Gene grew up, left Robert the doll behind, and moved to Paris. There he studied art and met his wife, a concert pianist named Anne. But before long the couple returned to Key West, where Anne was shocked to find that her husband's childhood doll had its own room in the attic filled with child-sized doll furniture.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is where it really continues the empowering of the doll to be haunted to other people.
ED LARSON
The mom missed her boy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No because the word came from Gene. This thing throughout his whole, going to be an adult, go learn, he went to the sexiest city in the world. He went to Paris, he got boned up, he became an artist. But the whole time he's like make sure Robert's comfortable. You know what I mean?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And so the mom set it all up in the attic. And like can you imagine that? Like let's say you really were what's his name from Ace Ventura. Laces out. Ray Finklestein.
ED LARSON
Oh yeah, Ray Finkle.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ray Finkle. Like you love Dan Marino.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So let's say Julie showed up on your first date and she hasn't come to your place yet but then saw you have a full shrine to Dan Marino where he's like hanging out.
ED LARSON
Could happen.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There's like a mannequin there and then you got like a fucking fleshlight on his butt.
ED LARSON
If I had more money, it could have happened.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But she'd have to understand oh now I'm also dating Dan Marino.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Anne became even more alarmed when her husband's childhood fixation on his doll reignited upon their permanent return to Key West.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(giggling) Robert!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
I find it to be cute.
MARCUS PARKS
Do you think it's cute?
ED LARSON
I think it's endearing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's terrifying.
ED LARSON
If I would have found my... I miss my Baby Tugs.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
If I would find Baby Tugs, I'd put Baby Tugs out and everyone would have to deal with Baby Tugs being around. But he's gone, I left him in Showbiz Pizza and he's gone. I miss you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's me, Baby Tugs. If it just shows back up tonight-
ED LARSON
Oh my god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm gonna be really upset.
ED LARSON
I'd only love it if it was 6 ft tall.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey, now I'm Man Tugs. How you doing, daddy? It's me, Full Grown Man Tugs.
MARCUS PARKS
Some fucking dude knocking on your door in the middle of the night.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey! Wake up! It's Tugs here! It's Tugs! Come for my share of your wife.
MARCUS PARKS
Now at first Gene would just dress Robert in different outfits. He had the sailor suit, he had something he called his pixie suit. And since he was somewhat of an eccentric artist, it seems like this was just kind of played off as a quirk.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, like Michael Jackson's secret room next to his bedroom that was filled with all the plushy toys.
MARCUS PARKS
Super quirky.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, super quirky. Funny guy.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the alarm that would go off when people got too close.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, funny guy.
MARCUS PARKS
Quirk. But before long, Robert and Gene became once again inseparable and the hours Gene would spend painting in his studio were always spent in the company of Robert the doll.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What do you think, Robert? Oh yes, it does need more blood. Thanks, Robert.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, he'd prop up Robert near one of the windows. From that point, Gene regressed even further. He curated the entire attic to create a miniature world just for Robert. And when Gene was accused of abusing his wife, he'd say the same thing he'd say as a child when confronted with bad behavior.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wobert did it.
MARCUS PARKS
Wobert did it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wobert did it!
ED LARSON
Well Robert is his name.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's me, Man Tugs! Man Tugs goes in there and he answers the light. Man Tugs will go in there and he'll handle the landlord. It's me, Man Tugs!
ED LARSON
You're getting an outfit.
MARCUS PARKS
Now by the end of his life, Gene was spending most of his time in the attic talking to Robert. And after his death, his wife said that Robert the doll was actually the only friend that Gene ever truly had.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And he really shouldn't have been for how many times Robert the doll hit me. I really wish he would have said something.
ED LARSON
So he said Robert did it but he is Robert.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes, he is Robert.
ED LARSON
So he is kind of admitted to it.
MARCUS PARKS
It's sort of, have you ever seen that Anthony Hopkins movie Magic?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Dude, so good!
ED LARSON
No.
MARCUS PARKS
So did you end up watching it?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, I've seen it, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
It's so fucking good. It's one of those like forgotten classics where Anthony Hopkins is a magician, he wants to be a magician but he ends up doing this ventriloquist act and the lines between the doll and the man become blurred.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Blurred! And it's Anthony Hopkins, he's fucking great in it.
ED LARSON
Yeah, he's unbelievable.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. He got nominated for a Golden Globe for it. And it's just one of those movies just gone. But I found it on a Prime the other night.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's on Shudder.
MARCUS PARKS
Fucking love it.
ED LARSON
Hell yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Interestingly though, the special treatment of Robert the doll continued after Gene died in 1974. Gene lived to be 74 years old. Imagine that, a 74 year old man in an attic, jabbering at a doll.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's a lot.
ED LARSON
I'm just surprised he can get in the attic.
MARCUS PARKS
I mean yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was his exercise.
MARCUS PARKS
Well when the house was rented out after Gene's death, there was a clause in the lease stating that Robert had to remain in the attic and that no one could use or even enter the space. Two men however rented the house and broke the rules.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Never break the rules! Never break the rules!
MARCUS PARKS
No. Especially not when it comes to Robert the doll.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Or any cursed fucking object.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Definitely not with Robert the doll.
MARCUS PARKS
Just err on the side of caution.
ED LARSON
Yeah. Break the law.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sometimes what's legal is not right.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. After hearing noise from the attic on several occasions, bumps and knocks and such, these two men climbed up to investigate. They only found the creepy 3ft doll sitting in one of its custom made chairs.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We're burning this whole fucking house to the goddamn ground. If I go-
ED LARSON
That's what I'm talking about. Why doesn't anyone stomp this thing to death and burn it?
MARCUS PARKS
We'll get to that later.
ED LARSON
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because again, what do I know? We'll also learn from the unbinding and just remember this at all times, this is a big old lesson, if someone says hey, this thing is cursed or hey, don't in this place or hey, don't take an object from this sacred area and bring it home with you. You never ever do it because you're gonna get punished for it. Never touch it.
ED LARSON
You're also a visitor and it's just good respect.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
ED LARSON
That's why we didn't bring lava rocks home from Hawaii.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because that also fucking will curse you forever.
ED LARSON
I found some cool ones. I took pictures. I got them.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep.
ED LARSON
I can look at it whenever I want.
MARCUS PARKS
There you go. Well these two guys left the doll alone as per the terms of their lease. But when they heard the noises again, they went back up to the attic to find that Robert had somehow moved to a different side of the room since the last time they'd been there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(giggling)
MARCUS PARKS
Another time, which I think was the last time they went up to the attic, the two men said they heard giggling behind them. They both turned to look for the source of the noise. But when they looked back at Robert, the doll had somehow moved across the room.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Now I'm over here! Whoa!
ED LARSON
Could have been raccoons.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I mean that's just scary.
ED LARSON
Raccoons giggle.
MARCUS PARKS
They do?
ED LARSON
Yeah. (giggling)
MARCUS PARKS
That's adorable.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You're full of shit.
ED LARSON
You haven't seen Killer Raccoons 2?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah. Good plug. good plug for Travis Irvine.
ED LARSON
Dark Christmas in the Dark.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, that is nice. I do however prefer opossums to raccoons.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yes. Absolutely.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We all do.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well in another instance of Robert allegedly abusing a tenant, one guy claimed that the doll managed to lock him in the attic for over a week. It was just a guy who accidentally locked himself in the attic and blamed Robert the doll.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh, I don't know what to do now. Oh man.
MARCUS PARKS
This guy blamed everything... He got yellow fever later, he also said that was the doll too.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It had to have been.
ED LARSON
I missed the toilet when I shit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh Robert the doll did it. Oh no. I got my foot caught in a bucket. Man, Robert, why you making me clumsy?
ED LARSON
My mom hates me. Robert did it.
MARCUS PARKS
The next family to move in happened to have a 10 year old daughter who actually made friends with Robert, at least at first. One day she woke up to find Robert sitting on her face as if he was trying to smother her. And decades later, she still maintained that the doll was in fact trying to kill her.
ED LARSON
Cancel him.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep. It's called a fucking haunted doll 69.
MARCUS PARKS
It's a 10 year old girl.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well you better call the police.
ED LARSON
He's getting canceled.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The haunted doll SVU unit has to be brought in.
ED LARSON
Robert, you're canceled.
MARCUS PARKS
Hoping to put an end to the nonsense, the girl's father locked Robert away in a trunk where it lay undisturbed for years. But Robert seemed to have gotten the last laugh. Soon after hiding Robert away, the father died from carbon monoxide poisoning in his car.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is weird.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is weird. They put him away.
ED LARSON
Locked himself in his own trunk.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. But they do say that is the way to handle it. If you do have a haunted object and you don't really know what the hell to do with it, you put it in a glass case, like you wrap it up, you make sure that nobody... And you put it in a box and you put it away. Because it really seems that out of sight, out of mind works for something like this.
ED LARSON
It's Key West, put it on a raft. Send it out.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Send it out. Send it to Cuba to Fidel Castro.
ED LARSON
Yeah. That could have been a great way to kill him!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's what the CIA should have done.
MARCUS PARKS
Well from there, Robert's legend only grew. Some said that Robert's head would move as if it could follow conversations. And even though his face has no points of articulation, it sometimes seems to change expression. Some even claim that when they're in Robert's presence, they feel a sensation like a hot metal bar pressing on their chest.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The Newkirks talked about is that when you walk into this room to see Robert the doll, obviously there's certain rules like you have to regard it, you have to-
MARCUS PARKS
We'll get to the rules later.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But it's interesting because I felt the same way when I went into the Winchester house because it's a place that literally tens if not hundreds of thousands of people have walked in feeling fear and apprehension about this thing. And there's something about the, they said it's a suffocating atmosphere when you walk in and you see like so much fear is built up in his room. Sadness from the doll, they said they felt an extreme sadness from the thing. And I felt the same thing at Winchester house, where there was a room in the center of the house that like again, it's all touristy shit. Same thing with Robert the haunted doll, it's a kind of surrounded by a lot of touristy stuff. But when I went to that Winchester house, you're like oh blah, blah, blah, kind of walk through, oh it's cool, all the different rooms and stuff. When you get into the vault where she put her husband's... Like Lady Winchester had put a lock of her husband's hair, the deed to the house in this giant walking safe. It is 10-15 degrees colder in that room. And it does feel like it bums you out. You walked into this like it felt like the heart of pure sadness. And there's something about it, there's something about that feeling of it's been all built up too.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's just like psychic energy is built up in the room around this thing.
MARCUS PARKS
See I felt in that room, I felt like a sense of like wonder.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
See it creeped me out. I felt like the hairs at the back of my neck raise up. And I got a lot of hairs.
ED LARSON
Yeah. They're gonna hurt somebody.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, it went boing!
ED LARSON
See Key West though is like an end of the earth like society, like not like end of the world as in time but as in like at the edge of-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's right at the end of the country.
ED LARSON
People go to hide there.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
They want to never be seen again, they want to go forget about everything. It's honesty one of the reasons why it was a good safe haven for gay people for so long.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Sure.
ED LARSON
And stuff like that. And so there's a lot of crime that came through there, a lot of immigrants coming through Key West.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Very similar to Alaska.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's another place where people go to disappear.
ED LARSON
Yeah. So I feel like just that town has that energy.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Even if it is a happy drunk place, it has that fucking energy of like we're hiding from something.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Now eventually Robert was donated to the Fort East Martello Museum in Key West. But the staff was so frightened by the doll that they kept him locked away and covered in a sheet, viewable only by appointment. At the same time though, the house in which Robert had spent so many years remained a hotspot for paranormal activity even after Robert was gone. Besides the aforementioned flying phone, one can experience such classic poltergeist activity as knocking sounds, doors that fly open on their own, and the distinct feeling of being watched. But most telling of all, ghost tourists report that the figure of Robert can sometimes be seen sitting in the same window where Gene Otto placed him so many years before during his fruitless hours of creating paintings that were overshadowed by his obsession with a doll.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Humans have been working spiritually with objects since the beginning of time, like since the beginning of modern thought. We talked about this as kind of like in the ancient Roman times in certain areas, where they would believe, they would build an effigy to something like whether it be a god, a demigod, a spirit. And then they believed that that object was the god. And if you wanted to destroy a local small religion, you go steal their god and destroy it. And literally their god is dead and they are left. But it's weird. So this stuff actually, there's something to how our consciousness works and diffusing it through, amplifying it through an object that is outside of us, something allows it to. And for some reason it can create a prism of paranormal activity very easily. The Newkirks are trying to prove that they can do it on their own and haunt an object by thinking about like creating a story, like a tulpa.
MARCUS PARKS
Wow. Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The same thing. We're creating a thought form, an aggregor that can pop off the thing. Because now like you filled it with pictures from your own mind and your own emotional connections. And then you kind of like, I don't know, for some reason it works as a conduit.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. The Ancient Egyptians used to take clay pots, they would make a special kind of clay pot, they would paint the name of the person that they wanted to curse on the clay pot using red paint and then they'd take it outside and they'd smash it. And that was supposed to kill them.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Dude, that is old as time.
ED LARSON
Highly productive. Honestly I feel like Tootsie, my dog, has been dead for years.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You never know. You don't know.
MARCUS PARKS
It is said however that Robert is not the only spirit haunting the house. Sometimes guests feel a ghostly female presence, which some believe is Jean's mother Minnie, and a woman in a wedding dress has been seen walking down the stairs like so many ghosts are wont to do. Stairs are paranormal hot, so many ghosts walk downstairs.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Transitional areas.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Liminal spaces.
ED LARSON
My mom swears that she was pushed down a flight of stairs by a ghost.
MARCUS PARKS
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah, yeah. That's a much bigger story than right now.
MARCUS PARKS
Most recently though in 2003, 80 people gathered at the Robert house for Gene's birthday and all of them reported seeing a flurry of orbs flying through the house before they scattered either to the sky or the ground. Now Robert the doll was finally put on permanent display in 1996 at, as I said, the Fort East Martello Museum. And from reports, electrical malfunctions are the most recurrent phenomenon when it comes to Robert. But it's cameras in particular that fuck up around Robert.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We've had no problems with the cameras yet, just my microphone stopped working for some reason.
ED LARSON
But still the wiring in Florida... It's fine, it's all shanties. It's like popsicle sticks hugging popsicle sticks.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's creepy as fuck, dog.
ED LARSON
It's all fucking driftwood.
MARCUS PARKS
See when people try to take photos of Robert, conventional cameras don't work, at least not all the time. In some cases the batteries in digital cameras will drain in Robert's presence but return to full charge once the owner has left the building. Others reported that entire rolls of film would be ruined except the pictures taken of Robert. And one person claimed that when he developed his film, he found only 24 images of Robert in different positions.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's frightening if that's real. That's like one of those where that's really strange.
ED LARSON
(singing) I'm too sexy for my shirt-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(singing) Too sexy for my shirt, so sexy I curse you!
MARCUS PARKS
From what I can tell though, the last time Robert was taken out of his box was in the late 90s when restoration was performed on this century old doll.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But they had asked for permission.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But on the day after he was returned to his case, an employee said he saw small doll- sized footprints in the dust on the floor.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's the shit that's like when dolls do stuff like that, being like ooh you creepy doll. You're creative.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
I would make the footprints.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah of course.
ED LARSON
I would keep the doll and be like-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, it'd be funny as hell.
MARCUS PARKS
Well just as the employee noticed this anomaly, he heard tip tap tapping coming from Robert's locked case.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(giggling)
MARCUS PARKS
And he noticed that Robert's feet were covered in dust.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's a-me!
MARCUS PARKS
He then heard emanating from somewhere in the room a lone, ominous giggle.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(giggling)
MARCUS PARKS
Now Robert is, as we've said, it's supposedly quite the vindictive haunted doll, as there are dozens of so-called dear Robert letters from visitors who have met with misfortune after visiting Robert and slighting him in some way or another.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm sorry, Robert.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes. Because of this there are strict rules when visiting Robert. First one must not make fun of Robert in any way whatsoever. Not his face, not his clothes, nothing.
ED LARSON
I look great!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think you look good.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm glad you're one of our boys in the services.
ED LARSON
Yeah, he's employed.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Second, one must address Robert correctly by his full name.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You did that.
MARCUS PARKS
No Robs, no Bobs, no Bobbys, no Berts. Nothing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You did it, you fucked that up immediately.
MARCUS PARKS
So did you!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No but I was yes and-ing him, I'd say he did it first, it's his fault.
ED LARSON
I never realized Bert-
MARCUS PARKS
Robert.
ED LARSON
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Also I've never met a Bert.
ED LARSON
Yeah you have, he was a criminal.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But never like with the full name Robert. I've only ever met Bert as a Burt.
MARCUS PARKS
I thought our friend Bert from back in Greenpoint, also hung out with Andy all the time. I think he's a Robert. Cause he's the one that told me that Bert was Robert.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I thought he was straight up Burt.
MARCUS PARKS
No shit?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think if it's with a U then it's Burt.
ED LARSON
Bert is a shitty thing to call your child.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah well Bert-
MARCUS PARKS
Bert you choose.
ED LARSON
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Bert has to come out of the pussy a full grown man with a can of Pabst. Like you can't not be a Bert and not be a hardcore beer drinker from 3 on.
ED LARSON
Now Robert's full name, is it Robert Gene? Or is it he's just Robert.
MARCUS PARKS
Robert.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Robert.
MARCUS PARKS
He's Robert the doll.
ED LARSON
Got no last name.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, no last name.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The haunted doll.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But lastly, if you absolutely must take a photo of Robert, you have to ask permission before doing so.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And I would recommend you do that because the Newkirks actually gave me a good tip on that too. I would recommend you do that of any haunted object, you always ask permission.
MARCUS PARKS
But do they ever answer?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, they do it by not cursing you.
MARCUS PARKS
Cool.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You can take the picture.
ED LARSON
But you don't know until later.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Exactly.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
I guess if like a picture frame falls, you take that as a no.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's what I would say.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
See according to some who have broken the rules, they soon after experienced freak accidents, divorces, pet deaths, baggage losses and mysterious chronic health ailments, and the letters they write to Robert are full of apologies and pleas to remove the curse.
ED LARSON
Well there's no direct flights to Key West. Of course your bags are getting lost.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's hard. And again, the weather's kind of iffy.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. What's the nearest airport to Key West?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Miami.
ED LARSON
Miami.
MARCUS PARKS
Miami? Okay.
ED LARSON
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
All right.
ED LARSON
There might be a little something in like Islamorada or something.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. There's gotta be a private airport.
ED LARSON
Yeah. I flew, when I went to Key West, I flew into the Key West by way, it's scary as hell, you think you're going right into the ocean.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
ED LARSON
But yeah, no, I took from Fort Lauderdale right in there. It was nice.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh great. Thanks Delta.
ED LARSON
I love Delta!
MARCUS PARKS
Well in one recent letter to Robert, a person claimed that they came down with a sudden serious rash the day after they failed to ask Robert permission to take a photo. Just after, this person received a message through social media from an unknown account. The message simply said:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wobert did it.
ED LARSON
With a W?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No. It's Robert did it.
MARCUS PARKS
Now the letters are too numerous to go into each and every one. But I do want Henry to read this letter which has a distinctly Floridian vacation flavor.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm gonna say this right.
MARCUS PARKS
This is definitely a vacation to Key West.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And also I'm gonna read this and this is largely, I'm gonna say I might add some sparkle but it is 99.9% what is written. "Me and my wife, we went to go see you. I was warned to not take your picture. I thought it was all mumbo jumbo so I took your picture without asking permission. And the next day I went snorkeling and I was stung three times by Portuguese man o' war. There were about 50 in the water and I was the only one who got stung. Now the next day I had a few drinks and I came to several hours later in the emergency room getting my arm stitched, handcuffed to a hospital bed. Now apparently in my blackout I had wandered away from my hotel room over to another hotel and I happened to break a window with my elbow. Now when the cop showed I ran. And when I was apprehended, now this is real, I was speaking unfortunately in a Caribbean accent. Now I don't remember any of this and this is what I was told by the deputies."
MARCUS PARKS
That's exactly what the letter says. When he was apprehended he was speaking in a, he was black out speaking in a Caribbean accent.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Definitely a white guy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, very much so. He's being like I did not know, apparently some time and then I became Chinese.
ED LARSON
You get a little loosey goosey in Key West, there's public drinking.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah man, they're encouraging it.
ED LARSON
And there's sea lice, there's man o' war everywhere.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
ED LARSON
He doesn't know who got stung and who didn't. He was running around the beach, being like did you get stung by the man o' war?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And we're still selling fake dreads.
ED LARSON
This guy is trying not to go to jail and get divorced by writing this letter.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He has to. She's like well you better apologize to Robert the haunted doll and you better get rid of the two vacation braids you got put into your side hairs. Because you're a white man.
MARCUS PARKS
Now as far as what sort of haunted doll Robert is, it could be said that it's either a cursed doll fueled by the vengeance of a spurned lover or a doll haunted by the spirit of a dead child. Strictly cursed dolls however do exist and they can sometimes bring specific misfortune to anyone who comes into contact with them. Case in point is a doll named Joliet.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I will also remember we're blaming the dolls here.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We have to think about the people involved.
MARCUS PARKS
That's right. According to the legend, Joliet is a monkey's paw type of doll that's been passed from expectant mother to expectant mother several times. See while the doll will bless the woman with the birth of two children guaranteed, the first born boy is also guaranteed to die shortly after birth.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Is this a good mother? I don't know. The idea that you're gonna have, so you at least net out one.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Well only if one of them is a boy. Say if you have two girls, they're both gonna be fine. But if you have a girl and then a boy, then the boy's gonna die. But if you have a boy first and then another boy, that first boy is gonna die and the second boy is gonna live.
ED LARSON
Stop giving people the doll!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's the doll's problem.
ED LARSON
The doll's named after a person.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
MARCUS PARKS
But I think it's one of those things like if a woman is having trouble conceiving, like you can receive Joliet the doll and it's like you shall have two children but one of them shall... It's like you're throwing the dice.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey-
ED LARSON
it's fucking Rumpelstiltskin?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey listen, I was actually kinda thinking instead of involving myself in a centuries old curse, I'm gonna get IVF. I'm gonna do something else because it seems that us kind of chancing with this inescapable curse might be bad for all of us.
ED LARSON
Adopt!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I also feel like there's no way that the baby that lives is not gonna have a fucking cursed life too.
MARCUS PARKS
Well once the boy is dead, it's said that the demon that controls Joliet traps the soul of the firstborn boy within the doll's body, making the toy a sort of soul prison for dead babies.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh I didn't know. Now that you put it that way, yes, that actually sounds incredible.
ED LARSON
Like how like informed is the soul of a baby?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Babies don't know they're in jail.
ED LARSON
Yeah, babies don't know. Do babies even have souls?
MARCUS PARKS
I have a theory that a baby doesn't get a soul until like a few months in.
ED LARSON
At least.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't think a baby gets a soul til they're 21 years old.
ED LARSON
Yeah. You can't even talk to them until they're 24.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
No offense everybody but you're an idiot until you're 24.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You can't talk, you make no sense. We have nothing in common.
MARCUS PARKS
Well as far as its origin goes, it's aid that it all started with a jealous, angry woman who was unable to have children herself. Her close friend meanwhile had no problems giving birth whatsoever. Spitting them out. And she had a second child on the way soon after her first.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Irish twins.
MARCUS PARKS
So the childless woman crafted Joliet and cursed every stitch that held the doll together so as to imbue the object with a vengeful rage. And lo and behold, when the close friend's second child was born, this one a son, the jealous woman placed Joliet in the crib with him. Three days later, the newborn was mysteriously dead. And supposedly the grieving mother could still hear crying from her deceased infant's crib even though the only thing still there was Joliet.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow.
ED LARSON
Kill this woman.
MARCUS PARKS
They didn't figure out the curse til like... It had to happen a lot before like oh it's the doll.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's the doll that's doing it.
MARCUS PARKS
Either that or the doll was... I have a theory that the doll was like made from asbestos or something.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Filled with poison.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, just accidentally filled with poison and it just happens to kill babies, yeah.
ED LARSON
That makes a lot of sense.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, it makes more sense than the fucking soul prison.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Soul prison is just hard to quantify, it's hard to see. You can't visit someone in the soul prison.
MARCUS PARKS
But this woman who lost her son still had her first child, a daughter. That daughter grew up and had a child of her own. This child was a boy, her first child. And for some reason Joliet the doll had stayed in the family and was placed in the newborn boy's crib.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Whoa.
MARCUS PARKS
A few days later, that baby's dead too.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep.
MARCUS PARKS
But the second son who also had Joliet as a bedmate survived. The cycle continued with mothers passing down the baby killing doll from generation to generation. Although today, the whereabouts of Joliet are unknown.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Honestly I think it's actually really good for Planned Parenthood to get a hold of Joliet the doll and use a new form of noninvasive abortion.
ED LARSON
Yeah. When Trump's talking about the abortion after nine months, he's talking about Joliet.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's talking about Joliet. And he's met Joliet.
MARCUS PARKS
In another case of a baby's soul being trapped in a doll, we have to go back to tsarist Russia, to the year 1730. According to the legend, one of the tsar's mistresses became pregnant but the child was born hideously deformed. Reacting badly, the tsar had the baby burned alive.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That is a bad reaction.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'd say it's knee jerk. Because you could also, because I believe, I miss it because I don't think we have it as much anymore. Like wear a mask. I think it'd be so cool if you got like jacked up, if you got birthed jacked up, right. There's gotta be more masked people.
MARCUS PARKS
No-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like big steel mask or a phantom mask or like something like the Cobra Commander style mask.
MARCUS PARKS
If that's your choice. But I think everyone should be-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Free!
MARCUS PARKS
Free with their deformity.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Or have more fun with your deformity.
ED LARSON
Yeah. It's more accepted now, even like from the 90s.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
No one cares as much.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Be mysterious. You have the option to be the man in the iron mask but out loud. And that's like we now have a whole show that's about people in masks and they sing and we have to guess who they are. But if you're just like that all the time, that's fucking cool in a way. In my mind.
ED LARSON
Fuck, I'll just dress like Freddie Krueger.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That would be awesome.
MARCUS PARKS
That'd be cool.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Scare people.
ED LARSON
Use it.
MARCUS PARKS
And so the mother crafted a doll named Katja to remember her murdered baby and use the ashes of the child in the porcelain mixture.
ED LARSON
Yeah, probably shouldn't have done that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And indeed, Katja is terrifying. It has a white porcelain face that seems as if it was purposefully made to look angry and it has eyes of two different colors. Rob, if you could show Ed Katja for a reaction, I would appreciate it.
ED LARSON
I checked out Katya earlier. She's pretty good looking.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was crazy that when you were saying you had a weird coincidence too.
MARCUS PARKS
I had a very weird coincidence. I was discussing Rupaul's Drag Race with Maddie who does all of her social media here.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And just as I was writing about Katja, about 30 minutes later Maddie texted me about a contestant on Drag Race named Katya who's named after the haunted doll.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow.
ED LARSON
Wow, yeah. I mean it's a doll-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Coincidence?
ED LARSON
It's the one with the cracked head, second one, right?
MARCUS PARKS
Katja with a J.
ED LARSON
Katja with a J.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Katja.
MARCUS PARKS
It's Russian. Katja. There we go.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, that is not good looking.
ED LARSON
Yeah. I mean it's old.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Whoa, it's got vitiligo!
ED LARSON
It's got one bad eye, one good eye.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No man, it's got Michael Jackson disease!
ED LARSON
Yeah man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You're ignorant. Oh man, oh shit. That's Michael Jackson, that's what he looked like when Tito asked to be cut in.
ED LARSON
Maybe the doll just needs to be fixed up a little bit. Maybe it needs a little love.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Honestly-
ED LARSON
Paint it again, give it a new eye.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
All we have to do is get it between 20-25 different plastic surgeries and then maybe it'll be able to marry Lisa Marie Presley, also RIP. Very sad.
ED LARSON
Yeah, double RIP.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, everybody's dead.
ED LARSON
Did you know Michael Jackson, he got burned up in that Pepsi commercial?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah, thank god for the people on set because he could have become Freddy Krueger.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh he was already halfway there.
ED LARSON
He had the hat and the glove.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's all we need.
MARCUS PARKS
The child molestation and everything.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Boom, done. All he needs is a sweater.
MARCUS PARKS
Now when the tsar learned of this macabre object, he ordered it to be destroyed just like he ordered the baby to be destroyed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ah, get it out there, ah!
MARCUS PARKS
But the mourning mother told him that if he killed her child again, he would be forever cursed. Erring on the side of caution, the tsar decided it wasn't worth the risk.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And Katja has survived to this day, or at least a doll that people claim is Katja has survived.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Russian accent) It's probably good to not mess anymore bad luck because I hear a lot of people getting angry about not having anything out there, throwing rutabagas at the stations.
ED LARSON
Now I know the doll is cursed but why not, if the doll is killing people... Because basically if you give a cursed doll to someone, you're cursing them more than you're cursing the doll, right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's manslaughter.
MARCUS PARKS
Second degree manslaughter.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
ED LARSON
All right. So why not curse the doll in a way where the doll dies?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Doll's already not real, doll can't die.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
But if it's running around, it's real. If it's running around like Robert, you're calling Robert not real?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No!
ED LARSON
You gonna say that he's not real right now? You saying Robert's not real?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm just saying that that doll technically just should be arrested.
ED LARSON
Yeah, exactly.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't think you get rid of the doll. I think the doll-
ED LARSON
It is in a prison.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The doll needs to be arrested and put into doll jail, which is a curio cabinet inside of a haunted-
ED LARSON
But do you see what my thinking is a little bit here?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. What you're thinking is that we should put laws in place to make living dolls illegal.
ED LARSON
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Like if you're a doll that's living, you are an illegal being.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I actually want to fight. So I'm then gonna call the ACLU because now the doll is alive, that's a voter. That doll is an American citizen and it needs to be treated as such and it has the same unalienable rights as other citizens of this great country of ours.
ED LARSON
Robert is German, Katja is Russian.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. So they can't vote but we accept them. Unless the Statue of Liberty is full of shit. Who is the biggest haunted doll of all.
ED LARSON
Could be a giant haunted doll, yes. It's definitely filled with people.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well a few years ago, a person claiming that their doll was the legendary Katya tried selling the doll on eBay but something went wrong with the listing again and again as if the doll didn't want to be sold. The alleged Katya does still exist somewhere, although I was unable to figure out its location or owner. But if you're able to find it, legend says that if you stare into its eyes for 20 seconds, Katya will blink. And if she blinks, a terrible fate awaits you in the future.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You get the blinkies.
ED LARSON
All right. So I just thought of a great movie, okay. So we round up all these haunted dolls, all these famous haunted dolls. And we're like we gotta get rid of these haunted dolls, we don't know what to do. We put them in a spaceship and we send them into space. And then the astronauts are getting haunted by the dolls.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Eddie, I have pitched this.
MARCUS PARKS
Actually I think that's Puppet Master V
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
ED LARSON
Really?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm pretty certain. And I pitched something like this, literally like a planet of haunted dolls.
ED LARSON
No one wanted it?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No. I said planet of haunted dolls. And I mean it. And nothing.
ED LARSON
Where's Elijah Wood?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Honestly he's a fan. Elijah, you gotta hear us.
ED LARSON
We're gonna make you an astronaut, you're gonna be killed by all these dolls.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That'd be incredible.
ED LARSON
It's gonna be wonderful.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. It's like Critters 4 meets Puppet Master III.
ED LARSON
Yes!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Meets Apollo 13. If we can get Tom Hanks.
MARCUS PARKS
No, wait. Yeah, Critters 4 was Critters in space. That's right. Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Critters 3 was Critters in the city with Leonardo DiCaprio.
ED LARSON
Oh.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow, I didn't know that.
MARCUS PARKS
It was one of his first movies.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh wow. Let me email him.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Critters 2, also fantastic.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Leonardodicaprio@mindspring.net.
MARCUS PARKS
Now Katja, Joliet, and Robert are all dolls that allegedly have the souls of babies trapped inside for nefarious or vengeful purposes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Or seem to.
MARCUS PARKS
Seem to. There are other haunted dolls however in which a spirit has chosen to inhabit the object.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Much like, can I bring up the one that creeps me out the most? I just want to show Eddie, it's Okiku.
MARCUS PARKS
Sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Okiku the doll.
ED LARSON
Okiku?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There's really nothing much to it. Its hair grows.
MARCUS PARKS
Okiku the doll is a haunted doll that its hair grows and people regularly cut its hair and no matter how much hair you cut off the doll, the doll's hair still grows.
ED LARSON
That's terrifying.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is like Cabin in the Woods frightening.
ED LARSON
Okiku looks cool. Okiku looks fine.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Okiku scares the shit out of me. I don't know. I think it's cause it's in the ceremonial holding chamber, like that sort of like-
MARCUS PARKS
It's in a shrine.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's in shrine. If you look this up, that thing creeps me the fuck out. I hate that thing.
ED LARSON
Now are we sure people don't just put more hair in the doll?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We have no idea what they do. But they say they've cut the hair, they said it is human hair, they say it was born with this, it was made with a sort of geisha-style cut that looked like a bob but the hair keeps growing on it. That thing creeps me out, I don't like it.
ED LARSON
Yeah, maybe it doesn't want bangs.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Maybe it's like hey-
ED LARSON
Let me grow this out then dye it back, I'm sick of these bangs. Show your face, beautiful.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
How many times do I have to tell you I want the Rachel?
MARCUS PARKS
Well the most famous example of a doll being haunted by a spirit is of course Annabelle. And even though we just talked about all kinds of wacky, unbelievable shit, I'm always reticent to talk about anything involving Ed and Lorraine Warren.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Because they were proven scam artists who were only in the paranormal investigation game to push a scaremongering fundamentalist Christian agenda.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's the problem is they truly are. And also the Pittsburgh erasure of hiring Patrick Wilson to play Ed Warren. Because if you look at Ed Warren-
MARCUS PARKS
Piggy boy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He looks like a Pittsburgh man through and through. He looks like a Steelers defensive coach. He is not supposed to be-
ED LARSON
Dan Marino is from Pittsburgh. He's very attractive.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm just saying
ED LARSON
He's very attractive.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Patrick Wilson plays this man in the films. If you bring it, he's got a Mr. Magoo style about him.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
He's quite piggy. What I'd call him is I'd call him a real hog.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I mean he's got sensuous lips.
ED LARSON
He looks like he has a neck on his neck.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He does. Look at that guy. Style icon though, I like the chain.
ED LARSON
Yeah, I know. He looks good.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But they were scam artists and their whole thing is that they wanted to scare people into being Christians by saying that demons are real again and again and again, we found demons, we have a whole basement full of demons, demons are everywhere, be scared, be Christian.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
ED LARSON
Yes. Now I thought that Robert was Annabelle.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No.
MARCUS PARKS
No.
ED LARSON
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, these guys are all separate characters. Annabelle is the plot of Conjuring 2 I believe.
MARCUS PARKS
No, Annabelle had its own movie.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh it has its own thing. But I thought it had a spin-off of The Conjuring.
ED LARSON
It was at the end of the first Conjuring movie, right? That's when they teased Annabelle and then Annabelle had three movies I think.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Yeah, I think so.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I love Annabelle 2 is better than Annabelle 1.
MARCUS PARKS
I think Annabelle Origins-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, Annabelle Origins is fun.
MARCUS PARKS
Annabelle Origins is really fun. But nevertheless-
ED LARSON
Annabelle orgy is worse.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, yikes.
MARCUS PARKS
But nevertheless, the broad strokes of Annabelle is that it was a Raggedy Ann doll that was supposedly inhabited by a demon who was on its way to possessing the woman who owned it. But this woman was saved from this terrible fate when the Warrens swooped in and took Annabelle back to their haunted curio cabinet. Supposedly as the Warrens tell it, their car ride home from the house where Annabelle was found was full of fail brakes and near crashes. And it was only when Ed pulled out his black bag of magic tricks and doused the doll with holy water that it finally stopped trying to kill them.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's one of those things that's always like that's where we take the consciousness out of haunting and where they're dead ass wrong. Because there are certain things of like why would it necessarily... I know you believe everything's a demon, that's their thing is that everything's a demon.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So it would respond to holy water. But you never really know. If it does have something attached to it, why would they necessarily find holy images to be offensive? Maybe it's something else entirely.
MARCUS PARKS
I don't know. I think the Warrens are full of shit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They are.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But after they got it home, Annabelle was then put in its famous 'warning positively do not open' case and has remained there ever since. For me though, a far more interesting haunted doll tale is a modern one involving an entity named Peggy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Damn it, Peggy! Now here, just looking upon, Eddie, you just did it.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You looked upon Peggy the doll. There's an image of Peggy the doll.
MARCUS PARKS
I don't like looking at Peggy.
ED LARSON
She looks like Betty White.
MARCUS PARKS
Actually she does look like Betty White.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes, she does. And now maybe that's where she went.
ED LARSON
Yeah, I mean have we heard from Peggy lately? Does she like animals now?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, I don't know. But Peggy the doll curses you.
ED LARSON
Really?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The second you look upon it.
MARCUS PARKS
I really don't like Peggy.
ED LARSON
Peggy doesn't bother me, Peggy just looks like a fucking evangelical.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
People get heart attacks, they talk about feeling pressure in their brains, people have seizures looking at Peggy the doll.
ED LARSON
Really?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, we'll get into all the Peggy stuff here in a minute.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
See about 10 years ago, a British paranormal investigator named Jane Harris got a frantic email from a woman who'd bought a doll named Peggy at a yard sale. Somewhat large, Peggy has a blonde bob, blue eyes, and an unnervingly long neck.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Super long neck.
MARCUS PARKS
The buyer, known only as JW, said that they hadn't gotten a wink of sleep since buying the doll because the figure of a dark woman would stand at the foot of her bed every night.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(metal guitar riff) That's fuking sweet.
MARCUS PARKS
Now supposedly, Peggy the doll is inhabited not by the spirit of a child but a woman from London who was born in the mid 40s and died from a respiratory illness of some sort. Had bad asthma.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(British accent) I'm dead then, innit?
ED LARSON
Yeah. I think she looks like a baker. Maybe the woman died from having too much flour down her throat.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Great British Bake Off for haunted dolls. Peggy would kill it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, Prue. Yeah, yeah, everybody gets it.
MARCUS PARKS
It is not however known at all why this spirit inhabits this doll because the dozens of seances done with Peggy have revealed nothing about its origins. It's all guess work here. Now the woman who originally bought Peggy wanted nothing more than to just get rid of the thing. But that's what puzzles me about these dolls. You brought this up earlier. From what I can tell, nobody just burns the goddamn thing or just throws it in the trash.
ED LARSON
Yeah!
MARCUS PARKS
The owners seem to have a compulsion to either keep the cursed object or give it to someone else to deal with. There's some kind of power that prevents them from destroying it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I have a couple of explanations. One is in general, the Newkirks talked about this that I thought was really interesting is that they view haunted objects as like when they receive them for their museum, they view them as a blank slate. They want you to treat it with a blank slate. But they also want to honor the fact that you are arriving and saying this thing scares the fuck out of me, I don't know what's going on with this thing, this thing's alive. So they want to treat you with respect and believing you and your story. So I think that's part of it is that okay, this thing's freaking you out.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You're obviously so freaked out, you think it's alive. There's something attached to this thing or whatever you think is attached to this thing. And so at least I'm going to validate you and I'm going to take this and not destroy it. I feel like that's one thing is that people feel this thing and then they don't wanna transgress, right, because they do think it's alive. And then two, what does every single piece of pop culture tell us not to do? Destroy the cursed object.
ED LARSON
Yeah because the movie would be over.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. True! It's very funny. But also I think that this is about collective unconscious and it's about our attachment, right. We are idolatrous in nature. We like objects, we treat objects as sacred. We use them as kind of extensions of our spiritual beliefs all the fucking time. I think that that is a part of our like DNA memory, is that like if something's really fucking scary, you fucking bury it. You don't destroy it because it seems like all that does is fucking like an atomic bomb, fucking spread it out into the fucking air. But you're gonna burn this thing.
ED LARSON
But no one knows.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But you know and now you're carrying that out with you. And then you have this idea everywhere you go, I'm a cursed man, I destroyed this cursed object. And whether or not the curse is objectively real-
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You are putting yourself in a cursed frame of mind.
ED LARSON
See why not feel like you're a fucking badass who killed the goddamn demon?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because that's not how, because by force... Again, it's just every single-
MARCUS PARKS
He doesn't have an answer to that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There is none! Because there is none. I mean it. I think that it's because it's bad form.
ED LARSON
Yeah?
MARCUS PARKS
And I mean going back to what you were saying about imagining that the object is alive, it could be that these people have an aversion to murder.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
That they do see like there's something in this doll that is some sort of human-like entity. And if I destroy the doll, then I am killing someone.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm killing someone.
ED LARSON
Yeah. You know what's always bad? When someone has a haunted gun. It's just like every time I shoot this thing, it kills somebody.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The only thing that this gun seems to want is to kill and kill and kill.
MARCUS PARKS
Now that's the movie you should be pitching.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I love that.
MARCUS PARKS
The Haunted Gun.
ED LARSON
Jerry the Haunted Gun.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. I sure wish you could use me for something else. Try to use me as a spatula! Just say the word.
ED LARSON
You ever try to brush your teeth with me?
MARCUS PARKS
Now when JW met paranormal investigator Jane Harris to make the handoff of Peggy the haunted doll, the former owner was visibly shaking and appeared to be suppressing the urge to cry and scream at the same time. But the handoff was made nevertheless. And the second Jane took possession of Peggy, her body reacted. As Jane put it, her ears began ringing and buzzing as if a radio transmission was being fed through her skull. This was followed by panic and a complete numbness of the head. This lasted for about a minute and yet Jane still took the doll and put it in her car. Possibly as a paranormal investigator, I think Jane may have sensed a jackpot.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah. Because they are morbidly curious.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And the idea of like-
MARCUS PARKS
That's what she's there for.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah. It's being like yes!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But just as Jane and her husband were about to drive away, JW gave them a classic horror movie warning. She said, quote:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
"That doll nearly ruined my life. I want to forget it ever existed. And I hope god protects you all."
MARCUS PARKS
Oh I get that doll.
ED LARSON
Then she hits a flask.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. Glug-glug-glug. I don't want that. You know what I mean? Like it's hard because it puts you again, cursed frame of mind.
MARCUS PARKS
Now once they got the doll home, Jane and Simon put Peggy in a sealed glass cabinet and began a full modern paranormal investigation. Because this is like 2007 I think, maybe 2004.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Oh so this is new.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is new.
MARCUS PARKS
This is new, yeah. They used nightvision, motion detectors, temperature gauges, EMF meters, and spirit boxes. You know what a spirit box is?
ED LARSON
It's a box that has a spirit in it?
MARCUS PARKS
Nope.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Nope. Got his fucking ass. Woo! Fuck yeah! Gotchu!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
It's a vagina with a spirit in it?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, you fucking idiot. It is a machine that basically randomly goes through AM and FM radio broadcasting lines and through signals. And then the idea is that you speak at it and then it will spit out words that are chosen by swish-swish-swish air quotes that are "chosen" by either an entity you're talking to or an intelligence like a ghost.
ED LARSON
It's a Furby.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's not a Furby, it's a piece of material, I think it costs like $100. I have one.
ED LARSON
Oh you do?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
It'll go through all the AM radio stations and you hear like (gibberish) because it goes through it fairly quickly.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Kill your mother. (gibberish) Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And you listen for it to come and give you answers.
ED LARSON
Let's fuck with it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's more organized EVP.
ED LARSON
$84?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, buddy.
MARCUS PARKS
For a spirit box, you can spend $84 on a BSB77 spirit box on Amazon.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There is a healthy ghost hunting economy out there.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh yeah.
ED LARSON
104.1, that's a classic rock station.
MARCUS PARKS
It really is. 104.1 The Bear.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I mean Robert the doll keeps asking to get the Led out?
MARCUS PARKS
Actually I think 104.1 was the classic radio station when I grew up. Either that or 102.7. but it was The Bear either way.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The Bear.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, The Bear. What animal was your classic radio station?
ED LARSON
Gator. Are you kidding me? 98.7. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
See I had K-Rock, 92.3.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And that was nice. But they didn't have an animal attached to it?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, no, it was cool.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh yeah. Well six weeks after Jane came into possession of the doll, she began suffering from migraines, fatigue, nausea, and dizziness. She was barely able to walk and yet medical science could find nothing wrong. The only thing that had changed in her life was the presence of Peggy, which sounds like a terrible piece of softcore pornography.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
ED LARSON
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The presence of Peggy brought on the boner of Greg.
ED LARSON
I was about to make a tasteless pegging joke.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, no, no. The presence of Peggy the talking peg stick is again a controversial Pixar film.
ED LARSON
A shitty movie.
MARCUS PARKS
Now since the scientific paranormal investigations using instruments had turned up nothing, Jane figured that a seance was the next step. But when she contacted her go-to psychic, a friend named Hazel Myers, the psychic dragged her feet, seemingly afraid to even approach the doll.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's the type of stuff, that's one of my favorite new, that's like more new horror movies. My favorite is like it started with Paranormal Activity. They did that the best when the psychic shows up and goes nope! And just like leaves immediately.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Not for more money though.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No!
MARCUS PARKS
I would never do it for more money.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I am getting this message from Abraham Lincoln.
ED LARSON
Chase Bank, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
So Jane reached out to another psychic named Patricia Redmond. But when Jane arrived to her appointment, Redmond said that she couldn't read for Jane that day because the energy in the room was so heavy it was giving her a headache. She also passed off Peggy. Finally though the first psychic, Hazel Myers, took Peggy the doll out of Jane's house for a few days so Jane could get a reprieve from the so-called dark energies. And supposedly Jane's health returned to normal soon after the doll left the house. While Peggy was in Hazel's care, a spell of psychic projection was cast around Jane and her family to protect them. And after Peggy was returned to Jane, the adverse health effects stayed away and the spell supposedly works to this day.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's the power of perception. And I think that's why, like I feel like when you guys, if you do end up watching The Unbinding, it's very similar to Hellier because they do mix the concept of ritual magic with a scientific exploration of these ideas. And I think it's why it works really well for them is because it's all about your fucking mindset. It's really about how you approach these things. It's like if you believe this thing is like atomic, like it's radiating negative energy, maybe, and you believe that, the way to get yourself out of it... Which is what we talk about with possessions too, it's why it happens to people that believe like in a really intense orthodox version of a religion is that well the only way to get them out of it is they religioused their way into it, we gotta religion their way out of it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And use the same thing. So like all right, if you do believe that this thing's got nasty vibes and it's making you sick, I will then make a thing that reverses the nasty vibes that allows you to believe that you have reversed the nasty vibes. And then the problem has been fixed.
MARCUS PARKS
The human brain is extraordinarily powerful when it comes to convincing yourself something. Like the human brain does have like quite a bit of control over the body.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But just because it's in your head, does it mean it's not necessarily real if it's all a theory.
MARCUS PARKS
Ah but what is real?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Exactly, bro!
MARCUS PARKS
I know, bro!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Fucking bro!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Because that's the thing, think about this.
ED LARSON
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Batman exists but he is not real. Or is Batman not real but he does exist?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Batman exists.
MARCUS PARKS
Batman exists.
ED LARSON
He's real and he exists.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
But not in the sense that there is a Batman out there.
ED LARSON
Oh okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But Batman is real.
MARCUS PARKS
Batman is real.
ED LARSON
Because it's a character written by something.
MARCUS PARKS
Exactly.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But enough Batman has been around that Batman is like considered.
ED LARSON
It's a vigilante, it's a detective.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm just saying Batman is a concept we take seriously as if it is real, as if it is real.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Do people think that Batman's real?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They spent hundreds of millions of dollars making a Batman movie.
ED LARSON
Yeah. But it's a movie.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's Batman.
ED LARSON
He's as real as Baby Tugs.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
A man arrives to a place and drives... Baby Tugs was real. It's Man Tugs you gotta watch out for. Because again, Man Tugs is actually a really good example of like the fact that Robert Pattinson did arrive to a set.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He was Batman for a period of time. He put a suit on every day, he arrived, he talked like Batman, he drove the bat car, he fucking talked to Alfred. That was for that time period Batman was real because a lot of people were making-
ED LARSON
Banged Catwoman on top of the car apparently.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Exactly.
MARCUS PARKS
Nice.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow.
ED LARSON
Which is fucking cool.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's fucking the way you do that.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's what you do is number one.
ED LARSON
During COVID.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's irresponsible.
MARCUS PARKS
Well the spell that Hazel the psychic put over Peggy's family does not cover anyone else. And people genuinely believe that the curse of Peggy the doll can reach out through a JPEG on the internet to affect their health in minor and major ways.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
See when the first photo of Peggy the doll went public in February of 2015, Jane claimed that she received almost 100 messages within 48 hours from people claiming that the photo she posted of Peggy either made them feel sick or just otherwise kind of weird.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And that's where in the video footage of Last Podcast on the Left, we're gonna put it right here.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
One person even claimed that their dog had a seizure after watching a video of Peggy that Jane posted. And I gotta admit, like whether I don't know if it's psychosomatic or not, when I look at pictures of Peggy, I get a little queasy.
ED LARSON
Really?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It creeps me out.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, if I watch the videos, my stomach kind of, it just feels... Like it makes me feel weird.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This shit all freaks me out. Haunted dolls freak me out.
ED LARSON
I was totally unaffected by the sight of Peggy personally.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
But I do have a call with my doctor in a little bit so we'll see what happens.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sorry sir, you've got mouth ass syndrome.
ED LARSON
What?
MARCUS PARKS
Well I mean it's person to person because while Henry was like super creeped out by the Winchester house, I loved the Winchester House.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I loved it.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But I loved it as like an object of like wonder. I didn't feel sadness in that room, like I felt the wonder of everyone who had walked through that house and seen this architectural like masterpiece.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Experiment.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, I mean this architectural experiment I guess is what you would call it. So we all react to different objects, different paranormal places. It does kind of go back to the thing that the Newkirks are talking about, it's what you bring to it.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Your head is the thing that makes the thing haunted.
ED LARSON
I tell you what, if I ever went back to my Aunt Patty's old house where all the shit was crazy, my mom thought she was pushed down the stairs.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Dude, we should do-
ED LARSON
I'd be fucking terrified.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We should do a full ghost hunt.
ED LARSON
I mean we'll have to talk to the people who live on Bachelor Ave but we'll find out.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Do you think that we could get in there?
MARCUS PARKS
It was called Bachelor Avenue?
ED LARSON
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We could do a full Jersey weekend. We could go get pork roll.
ED LARSON
I love it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We could do exactly what I've been trying to get us to do.
ED LARSON
10.5 please.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But you know what I mean? We could get out there. We could fucking finally do-
ED LARSON
Great Brazilian food.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But a haunted Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives.
ED LARSON
Ooh!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We're this close.
MARCUS PARKS
It's not bad.
ED LARSON
Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dies.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah!
ED LARSON
There we go. Fuck you, Guy Fieri.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, we love him. We love him.
MARCUS PARKS
Well others took the claim of Peggy's power to the highest level, it goes way beyond queasiness for some people. The worst outcome befell a Scottish woman named Katrin Reddick who claimed that she had a heart attack within an hour of looking at Peggy the doll's picture.
ED LARSON
It had nothing to do with the pie full of blood that she was eating.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No. That's iron.
MARCUS PARKS
Interestingly though, many of the messages that Jane got said that the cross that had been placed on the necklace around Peggy's neck was actually making the spirit angry and the longer the cross was around her neck, the more trouble Peggy was gonna cause.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It showed in the Newkirk The Unbinding documentaries, they saw this, they basically put it in their little museum area in their office. And this object, like they walked away and one of the first signs of the haunting was that they heard a noise in the office and they came in and there was a crucifix hanging above where the doll was and this like little totem was laying. And somehow the Jesus from the crucifix was popped off with its arm still attached to it. They don't know how, you would literally have to yank it off to pull it off and the Jesus was laying in the center of the room.
MARCUS PARKS
And the cross was still on the wall.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Wow.
ED LARSON
See wouldn't demons like crosses because the cross is what killed Jesus?
MARCUS PARKS
You'd think so.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You'd think so.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
We gotta talk to these demons.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah man, like hey, we gotta get into this.
MARCUS PARKS
Well this is not however because Peggy was inhabited by a demon. Instead some went big and suggested that the spirit inside Peggy was not a Londoner but a holocaust victim.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Whoa!
MARCUS PARKS
And putting a Christian cross around her neck was offensive to her Jewish heritage.
ED LARSON
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They already survived the holocaust or they didn't survive the holocaust. I don't know if a cross would make it that upset. You know what I mean? It'd be more like if it was a-
ED LARSON
An iron cross.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That would be different.
MARCUS PARKS
That would be bad. But still they said I'm not Christian, I'm Jewish.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sure.
MARCUS PARKS
Don't be pushing your Christianity on me.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What are we doing?
ED LARSON
Fucking eh.
MARCUS PARKS
Eventually though, Peggy and Hazel began performing seances to communicate with the spirit using a pendulum and a talking board, which is similar to using a Ouija board but not quite the same thing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Same mechanism, different device.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. The biggest difference is that a pendulum is used by a single person while a Ouija board is a group activity with a planchette.
ED LARSON
Yeah, made by the Parker brothers.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
I mean we did a whole thing on the Ouija... I'll give you a book.
ED LARSON
Thank you.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But in the end, both pretty much work the same way, answering yes or no or spelling out words. Thankfully though in her book about Peggy the doll called 'Peggy the Doll', Jane Harris transcribed both the psychic's questions and Peggy's answers from one of their most fruitful seances. I would like the two of you to now recreate this seance with Ed in the part of Hazel the psychic and Henry playing Peggy the doll.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(giggling) Let me prepare.
MARCUS PARKS
You gotta have a different voice than Robert though.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(giggling) Yes, yes. Peggy!
ED LARSON
Peggy? Peggy, are you there?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
ED LARSON
Do you fear crossing over into the light?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No fear. Next.
ED LARSON
Are you happy communicating with us?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Happy. More.
ED LARSON
Peggy, were you responsible for the recent health problem?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No.
ED LARSON
Are you aware of the lady we mean, Katrin Reddick?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. Weak.
ED LARSON
What do you mean, Peggy?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Take care. Heart help.
ED LARSON
Oh you were trying to help?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
ED LARSON
Do you feel you have a purpose here?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. I know.
ED LARSON
What do you know?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Too much for me.
ED LARSON
It's too much for all of us.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. Yeah.
ED LARSON
Goddamnit, Peggy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Will Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce get married? I'm curious.
MARCUS PARKS
Now at that point in the seance for whatever reason, the priest who'd been invited butted in and told Peggy that she needed to respect his church.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You need to... Goddamn it, Peggy. I need you to fucking think about Jesus Christ.
MARCUS PARKS
But he also asked for clarity on how he could help. Peggy of course left the seance soon after, I'm not gonna deal with this bullshit. But she returned with a cryptic message. After the group asked if Peggy needed their help moving on, she said no. There was a pause, then Peggy said 'tell them'. When Jane asked tell them what? Peggy said 'all'. And with that, the spirit departed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Noice. Cool.
ED LARSON
Cryptic. Tell them everything?
MARCUS PARKS
All. I don't know.
ED LARSON
All?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Who knows?
MARCUS PARKS
It's up to you.
ED LARSON
It doesn't mean anything.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Riddles on riddles on riddles on riddles. We're listening to the doll.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Okay? At this point-
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, you're listening to a doll.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. We can't talk about it not making sense or not because we're in a room with a man dressed up like a fucking X-Men for Jesus Christ and we've got a fucking doll there and we're talking to it like it's real.
ED LARSON
This is why I hate possession movies because they just all end with people yelling at the possessed thing and it just gets annoyed back to hell.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. Well it never really works like that. A lot of times they end up starving them to death.
ED LARSON
Oh okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. That that does happen sometimes. Yeah. I mean my favorite book on possession is called 'Hostage To the Devil', it's written by this priest who lies a lot. But he has like five possession stories that are all like incredible, really scary, really weird. And I mean it's a lot of annoying to death but it's also just strange shit like a guy does astral projection but while his soul is out of his body, the demon inhabits the body. And when he comes back, he has to share the body with the demon and then Malachi has to come and go get out of here.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's Insidious.
ED LARSON
Interesting.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. That is insidious.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Insidious, which is basically scary Beetlejuice.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
In a way, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Now after the séance, Jane continued her investigation of Peggy the doll. But one day she got a call from ghost bro number one, Zak Bagans, who wanted to feature Peggy the doll on his show Deadly Possessions.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What's funny about Zak Bagans too is that he is actually deathly afraid of dolls. He is scared of dolls.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. I mean he said while filming the segment it was the most uncomfortable he'd ever been in his 17 years of dealing with the paranormal. And one of the production staff suffered a stroke shortly after being in Peggy's presence.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Did you watch it?
MARCUS PARKS
No, I didn't watch it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's fun because they bring... I love all of this shit. I'm a sucker. I love all of this stuff. And so Jane comes in with Peggy and Peggy's got a bag over her head, right, because they don't want to look at it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And they put Peggy in a chair next to it and Zak Bagans is just like okay, what is it? He does his like 'so why does the doll have a bag on his head?' And she's like (British accent) because, oh you got to say, so when the doll looks into your eyes, you got to be cursed immediately. And he's like well I guess we gotta get that bag off its head. Like so ready to do it. And then they like whip the bag off its head and it's all like... But then it is weird because then one of the cameras shut down.
ED LARSON
I'm Zak Bagans!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Why are we here?
MARCUS PARKS
Well not too long after the filming, a trainee paranormal investigator named Olivia Taylor was participating in a vigil in another attempt to contact the spirit within Peggy. But just as the EMF meter finally went off after six hours, Olivia felt a tingling down her arm and a sharp pain in her head.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That was one of the creepiest things from The Unbinding is that when they showed, they put the EMF reader next to the thing and it fucking spikes. It was fucking weird.
MARCUS PARKS
The next thing this girl knew she was surrounded by paramedics, having also suffered a stroke. Likewise, viewers took to Twitter immediately after the Deadly Possessions episode aired. Some claimed they had to go to the hospital because of severe pains and one person even said that his mother had an aneurysm during the seance scene. Eventually Zak Bagans took possession of Peggy and as per a press release from 2017, she was at least at one time on display in Zak's Haunted Museum in Las Vegas.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey man, that's all I want. A residency.
ED LARSON
A haunted museum?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
ED LARSON
In Las Vegas.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, buddy. Can you imagine us in the museum in a cage? You know what I mean? And just being like every half an hour as the tour comes through, being like cum! Ass! Like look, the paranormal podcasters.
ED LARSON
Would you hit up a dispensary for me?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Knock, knock, knock. What's outside like?
MARCUS PARKS
Now obviously there are plenty of haunted dolls out there with plenty of evil stories.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We could do this three more times.
ED LARSON
So Peggy's in Vegas?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, Peggy's in Vegas, living life.
MARCUS PARKS
Yep, Peggy's in Vegas in a creepy little display case built just for her.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's awesome. It's awesome.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. You got Sargamos.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Which You got Saros uh which is supposedly possessed by an ancient Sumerian demon by the same name.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's my fucking boy. Sargamos also, he ran one of my favorite halal carts right outside of my work in New York City.
ED LARSON
Red sauce, white sauce. Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Both! Always.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Both.
MARCUS PARKS
There's also the shadow doll supposedly made from human bones and used in satanic rituals.
ED LARSON
Very cool.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Fuck yeah, dog.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. The shadow doll supposedly scares you to death in your sleep or it haunts your dreams for years if you take its picture without permission.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like Sean Penn.
ED LARSON
Have you ever made a doll out of bones?
MARCUS PARKS
No.
ED LARSON
You have all these bones, you should make a doll.
MARCUS PARKS
I've never made a doll. I like my bones to be free.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I want to see-
MARCUS PARKS
And I just like the bones themselves.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I have an idea.
MARCUS PARKS
I don't want to hide the bones in a doll.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We should get our own doll and try to make it haunted here in the studio.
ED LARSON
Fill it with bones, fill it. I got a tooth at home, when they took my tooth, I kept it. And we could put my tooth in the doll, see if that works.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You wouldn't want to do that actually because then it bonds it to you.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And then it becomes like a voodoo doll for you.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And then I could torture that thing every time I'm mad at you.
ED LARSON
I don't have a tooth.
MARCUS PARKS
But in the more innocent realm though, there's a doll from Australia adorably named Letta Me Out.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's very cute.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's a scary looking doll.
MARCUS PARKS
It's scary looking, yeah. Supposedly the doll got its name after its owner found it in the crawlspace of an abandoned farmhouse.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just like all right, buddy, that's what we want to do?
MARCUS PARKS
He put it in a sack and on the way home the sack moved. And so the owner and his brother were in the car, they gave it a funny voice saying let me out, let me out!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Let me out! Yeah, yeah, it was like funny.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But then it looks like this and it's actually very frightening.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Whoa!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Letta Me Out isn't as dangerous as Peggy or even Robert but he is among the creepiest looking haunted dolls out there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And that's like made creepy, that's not... You know what I like about this type of creepy doll is that Hollywood, they overproduce everything. Annabelle looks so fucking stupid in the Annabelle movies.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I hate when they overproduce a creepy doll. That's how the Letta Me Out doll is exactly how you make something creepy without fucking putting a hat on a hat on a hat.
ED LARSON
It does look like an English prisoner.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It does.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. I'd say it looks like a rapacious pirate captain.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sure. Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And supposedly it's haunted by the spirit of a young boy that drowned to death. And the doll's supposed to resemble the boy in some way but it looks like a 40 year old man.
ED LARSON
It looks like the boy is a man.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Boys are different. That's Man Tugs.
MARCUS PARKS
The doll can be reliably aged back to at least 200 years, they analyzed the nails used to make the doll.
ED LARSON
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
And while no one is exactly sure why it was being kept in a crawlspace in an abandoned farmhouse, it's estimated that it sat there collecting dust for about 60 years.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, dude.
ED LARSON
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
But regardless of why it was hidden, Letta Me Out is similar to Robert in the way that its owner, Kerry Walton, seemed unable to part with it no matter how much money he was offered. At one point, someone tried giving him $10,000 for Letta Me Out but Walton found himself unable to make the transaction when it came time for the handoff.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There's something about a personal relationship between you and the thing.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's what I really mean instead of destroying it, it's because you do come to believe that it's fucking alive.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
You don't think he was trying to get an extra $5,000?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I mean he would have got it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, he would have got it. Because he would meet up with people, they'd say hey, I'll give you $10,000, I'll give you $3000, whatever. And he'd say okay, this time I'm finally doing it. And he'd show up and they were about to do the trade, $10,000 for the doll, and he'd just go I can't do it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
I can't do it. And then he'd take the doll back home.
ED LARSON
Finders Keepers.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Now the location where Letta Me Out was found was already haunted, which was why Kerry Walton was there in the first place. It was said that one could see the ghost of an old man dragging a sack full of heads out in front of the house on spooky nights. And during that investigation, Kerry and his brother found Letta Me Out. Once Kerry got home with the doll, which his entire family hated-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's creepy.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
I'd be furious if someone came home with this fucking thing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You wait, buddy. Oh man, this is fun.
ED LARSON
We're not living together again.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I want to do it. Think about our divorces. And how nice and how fun that'll be, Eddie.
MARCUS PARKS
Well Kerry found that Letta Me Out moved about rooms on its own, it made people feel sick or lightheaded when in its presence, and it caused dogs to go berserk. But other than that, Letta Me out is... I mean you can see a picture here.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's creepy.
MARCUS PARKS
I mean but there's a picture of Letta Me Out-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Next to a bunch of Foster's, they're drinking at a bar. It's cute.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, he's drinking at a bar. No, he's pretty cute. I mean as far as they go he's the creepiest looking but I think also the most harmless.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You know why? He's Australian.
MARCUS PARKS
You think so? They're very friendly people.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They're friendly, they're fun loving. Even their haunted stuff is like (Australian accent) I bet you can still drink a couple of beers with it. They're having beers with it. That's just how they live.
ED LARSON
Yeah. Is it still in Australia?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Let's invite them to the show.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Can we get, actually could someone bring-
ED LARSON
Someone, yeah. Whoever, let's talk to these guys, let's get the haunted doll at the fucking show.
MARCUS PARKS
I'd love that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sidestorieslpotl@gmail.com. Can we get Letta Me Out at our show?
ED LARSON
We'll book them!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Full VIP access.
MARCUS PARKS
Full VIP.
ED LARSON
He has access to like 1500 souls.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We're gonna be dead.
MARCUS PARKS
Now all this begs the question as to why someone would actually want a haunted doll in their house considering how much trouble they cause.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cool.
MARCUS PARKS
Well that's the thing. Both eBay and Etsy are filled with listings for haunted dolls. And those sales skyrocketed after the release of the Annabelle movie in 2017. It's leveled off though. Now instead of just saying hey, this doll is haunted, the sellers of these cursed objects sometimes claim to go through an arduous authentication process to ensure the doll they're selling is indeed haunted. Mostly they use the more scientific equipment, the EVP recorders, the K-II EMF meters, and the ever present PSB7, the spirit box.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sure.
MARCUS PARKS
To add legitimacy, the listings will often be accompanied by videos of EVP meters lighting up when they're held next to the doll. But of course each of these sellers have different methods and one seller in particular outlined his process top to bottom.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because EVP, well EVP is interesting. EVP would be an EMF meter because an EVP is the electronic voice projection, that is like when you talk and you like record a thing. And then you ask a spirit questions and then you don't hear it in person but when you play it back, you hear something on the recording.
ED LARSON
Oh, I thought it was an abbreviation for ET vs Predator, the movie.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's just lost. He's just in his own mind, imagining ET being torn apart by fucking... It's just like a predator with four ET skulls fucking attached to his belt. That's a fucking great movie though.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh that's incredible.
ED LARSON
I'm pitching them all over the place today.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because you know what it is too? Because ET, no one talks about what its fucking weaponry would be like. Is there a warrior class in the ET world?
ED LARSON
Yeah, who knows?
MARCUS PARKS
Because remember, ET was a child.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. It's a little boy.
ED LARSON
Interesting.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Because remember at the end of the movie you've got ET's parents are sitting there waiting for him like where the fuck have you been? So yeah, ET is a child. We don't know like what a fully grown like full powered ET is capable of.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Would do.
ED LARSON
Yeah, ET, he could hop over a log, he was a quick little fucker.
MARCUS PARKS
He was quick.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah and he had no legs. He had weird little stumps.
ED LARSON
And he could fucking fly.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, it was cool.
MARCUS PARKS
You've seen the ET porno, right?
ED LARSON
No.
MARCUS PARKS
You haven't?
ED LARSON
I mean I've made a couple.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What does that mean?
MARCUS PARKS
It's horrible.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. We'll send it to you tonight.
MARCUS PARKS
We'll send it to you. It's infamous. But yeah, it's horrible. It's a woman like in full ET makeup, like an ET head.
ED LARSON
Oh they make ET a woman?
MARCUS PARKS
They make ET a woman and ET gets fucked.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, it's really bad. Yeah.
ED LARSON
Oh.
MARCUS PARKS
There it is.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, you're not gonna like that.
ED LARSON
Oh I'll watch that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sucking the dick is the worst part I think.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think that's the part that really disconcerts me.
ED LARSON
Well I mean you know, I'd figure ET would great at head with that long throat.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I miss my home planet.
MARCUS PARKS
Well let's go through this seller's authentication process.
ED LARSON
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
First the doll is separated from other paranormal objects and examined by a K-II EMF meter for 3-5 days in a soundproof box next to a voice activated recorder to see if it lets loose with a sound or a phrase. Then the seller conducts a lucid dreaming session in her bed next to the doll to see if she has any weird dreams. Finally she writes a 15 page report on how haunted the doll is and what sort of spirit might be haunting it, whether it be demon, dead child, fairy, or if you're lucky a leprechaun.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't think that there's anything lucky about it being a leprechaun. Because I don't want to get involved with the leprechaun's business.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
One bad leprechaun ruins it for all of them.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Leprechauns are bad.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, leprechauns have always been bad.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Leprechauns are bad.
MARCUS PARKS
They're bad.
ED LARSON
Then why are they considered lucky?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They're not. We turned it into lucky because of a marketing campaign to make St. Patrick's Day a fucking big holiday in America. But they're not, they're evil. They're small.
ED LARSON
They're rich.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well they're mischievous and they're neutral. That's the biggest problem is that neutrality means that they don't think about our agendas.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Chaotic neutral.
ED LARSON
Sounds like a good guy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He worked too long at a cheesesteak restaurant.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. You worked in the back of too many restaurants.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah.
ED LARSON
Some people are just misunderstood.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, this is it. Yeah, he is talking about the entire restaurant industry.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
A fully chaotic neutral industry.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. As a caveat though, selling paranormal objects on eBay can run afoul of eBay's terms of use because eBay explicitly forbids the auctioning or sale of human souls. It's actually in the fucking rules.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I believe it came from someone trying to sell a soul that was like on a piece of paper.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Oh interesting.
MARCUS PARKS
The reasoning is that if the soul does exist, it would violate eBay's policy of selling human body parts or remains.
ED LARSON
Can you sell a dog?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Not on eBay, I don't think.
MARCUS PARKS
I think you can sell like a stuffed dog?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
A stuffed dog.
ED LARSON
A stuffed dog, sure.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Oh like a taxidermy dog.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. You can't sell a live dog.
MARCUS PARKS
Can you not auction off a living dog?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think that's fucked up.
MARCUS PARKS
Why?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wouldn't you have to put it in a box and ship it?
MARCUS PARKS
You could do local only.
ED LARSON
Yeah, you figure it out. Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm looking it up right now.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I love what this is gonna do to me. Can you sell a live dog on eBay?
ED LARSON
Go to eBay. I got the app.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, I'm just looking at questions.
MARCUS PARKS
Living dog does not show anything.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They are not. Pets and most live animals are not allowed on eBay.
ED LARSON
Okay, all right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They said there's a few, there's a live animals policy.
ED LARSON
You can probably buy worms.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You can get fertilized eggs.
ED LARSON
Human?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You can get bees, you can buy a whole shit ton of bees.
ED LARSON
You can definitely buy bees.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You can buy lobsters.
ED LARSON
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And you can buy mice as food for pets.
ED LARSON
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And then stud services.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh yeah, stud services.
ED LARSON
Oh testicle, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
No, stud services meaning-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You can sell cum.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, you can get-
ED LARSON
Yeah, pig cum and shit like that.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, a bunch of pig cum.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well that's great.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Now you know what to get for my birthday.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Here's some pork juice.
MARCUS PARKS
I'm gonna be so upset if a fucking huge jar of pig cum shows up at our PO box.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We've been waiting for it for years. We've been talking about buying and selling livestock fucking cum for literally a dozen years.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, we really have.
ED LARSON
PO box 470, North Hollywood, California, 91603.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, come on down. Ship it with some ice.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You know what I mean? Because we only check it every once in a while.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And don't just jerk off a pig into a mason jar.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We want an actual farmer to do it.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But if the soul does not exist, this is the other side of the soul argument when it comes to eBay's terms of service. If the soul does not exist, then eBay can't allow the auction because there's nothing to sell. So either way, selling a doll explicitly on the merit that it contains the soul of something or other is explicitly forbidden. That rule however is usually skirted by including the phrase "for entertainment purposes only".
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
ED LARSON
Yeah. Or like haunted looking doll.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And so to end this episode, in honor of our haunted doll sellers on eBay, Henry will read the description for an item titled Succubus Doll Mystical Metaphysical Paranormal Sexual Haunt Doll Spirit, which sold last Tuesday for $25.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
"This demon succubus will use her charm and seductive powers to manipulate you. She will use illusions and enchantments to entice you. She will flaunt her body at you, wearing lace, leather, and whatever else she feels you are attracted to. A seductress that will shapeshift into any form. She will call upon her sisters and even her mother Lilith. A relationship with her could get out of hand and unhealthy. Remember to stay focused while allowing her to take advantage of you. If you are lusting with desire and in need of a sexual explosion experience, then she will prove to be the key. Any questions, please message. eBay requires me to state that this is buying a tangible item and not a paranormal experience. Shipped priority mail, insured."
MARCUS PARKS
A sexual explosion experience.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just being like man, I fucking don't need this. I heard what it was like to date Angelina Jolie in the late 90s. And it seemed like it-
ED LARSON
$25 is cheap.
MARCUS PARKS
It is.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
For a sexual explosion experience?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Oh yeah, people pay way more than $25 for a sexual explosion experience.
ED LARSON
Oh yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey man, they really do. They pay with their whole fucking lives.
MARCUS PARKS
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Guys, I think it's important to remember that when we are talking about haunted dolls, a lot of people want proof. They want objective proof. We've said this all, we talked about it on the UFO stream last time, we all want objective proof. We want to catch these things in a fucking bottle, all right. And we wanna be able to put them on display, we want dissect them in a lab. But it don't really work like that because more than any other expression of the capital P Phenomena, I feel like this is one of those that's about you and the haunted object and it's a consciousness thing. We just don't understand.
MARCUS PARKS
That's it.
ED LARSON
Does that mean it's not real?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think that it's about if it's extremely real to you, it's real to you.
ED LARSON
Yeah. Yeah, of course.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well it's also the concept of magic is that it doesn't matter whether it's real or not, it only matters that it works.
ED LARSON
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And that you think it's real.
ED LARSON
I went to the Magic Castle and there was this dude like heckling the magician and shit talking about how-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's not real!
ED LARSON
Yeah and stuff like that. And I'm not a magic fan either.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's weird.
ED LARSON
But I was like what the fuck are we doing here? But the guy, the magician had the best explanation I think I ever heard. He said yes, I do tricks of sleight of hand and my hands sometimes are quicker than your eyes. So you can choose to see magic or you could choose to see something fake. Just like when someone plays the violin, you can choose to hear horse hair scratching against cat intestines or you could hear music.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. I love that.
MARCUS PARKS
That's an incredible explanation.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I love that. Yeah because magic's a skill.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's a ritual school. Because you're not going to see a warlock, you're going to see a magician.
MARCUS PARKS
I saw an incredible magician the other day do something with like a Rubik's cube. I mean I was blown away.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Shove it up his ass?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, that's what happened is that he got the Rubik's cube, he handed it to a guy, he said jumble it up, jumble it up, jumble it up.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Great, great, great. Now!
MARCUS PARKS
Shoves it straight up his ass.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We'll go into my magic cabinet! And you will see. He and just like shoves it all covered in shit and it's like perfectly done.
MARCUS PARKS
Nah dude, he fucking pulled it out, it was a full set Monopoly game.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow. Oh my god. What a great episode.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. What a fun time.
ED LARSON
This was fun.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Really good work.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Let's hope that we didn't fuck up our entire lives by covering these haunted dolls.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm sorry, Robert the haunted doll.
MARCUS PARKS
I'm sorry, Robert. I'm sorry, Peggy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep. We're very sorry. We love you.
ED LARSON
I apologize to Robert.
MARCUS PARKS
Not to Peggy?
ED LARSON
Not to Peggy, I don't believe in Peggy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's fucked.
MARCUS PARKS
Really?
ED LARSON
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Wow.
ED LARSON
Robert seems real to me.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm not going anywhere near him. I'm not gonna drive him home, I'm not fucking going, we're not gonna go to anything with scaffolding.
MARCUS PARKS
Is it because you've been to Key West but you've never been to England?
ED LARSON
I guess that might have something to do with it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Distrust.
ED LARSON
And I know that Key West, there's something wrong there.
MARCUS PARKS
Gotcha.
ED LARSON
Yeah. And I love going.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
It's not a negative aspect.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's like New Orleans.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
ED LARSON
Yeah, I love going to Key West.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well when we go to England you're gonna find out there's something wrong there too.
ED LARSON
Hell yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. Everywhere we go. Everywhere there's humans. Well hail Satan!
MARCUS PARKS
Hail Gein, everybody.
ED LARSON
Hail Robert!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That'll fix it.
MARCUS PARKS
Goodbye!