Possession
by Traci Brimhall
Before the employee at the Museum of Shadows lets me touch the haunted doll, she makes me put on a pair of black gloves. She says it’s for my protection, that the spirit in the doll might try attaching to me. I hold the aging boy in a sailor suit, talking to him quietly, rocking him up and down slightly to watch his obedient eyelids close and open, close and open with each soft murmur. His muddy brown hair sports a matting of dust and his flat feet bare themselves below his navy pants. I like that despite these signs of neglect, he is the Doll of the Week. When I ask the employee how they choose which one to feature, she says she asks the dolls who wants a turn, and the eager spirits make themselves known. Although I would claim I don’t believe this small figure of a boy is possessed, I want our interaction to be kind, to respect the object that once was loved, held by some child and propped awake for pretend school lessons, clutched through winter nights. Like many of the dolls in the Museum of Shadows, people report feeling uneasy when they touch him, though I mostly feel a casual amusement. I’m surprised at my own participation in the pageantry of fear around an object that looks human but refuses to age the same ways I do. Still, I thank him for letting me hold him and hand him back to the employee. I slip off the gloves so someone else can handle his dusty form without rousing the spirit inside.
The most infamous haunted doll—Robert—resides in a museum in Key West, where his owner once lived. He’s one-of-a-kind, presumed to be modeled after the owner, Robert Eugene Otto, who went by Gene. Robert and Gene went everywhere together, and when things would break or Gene found himself in trouble, he pointed to Robert and said the doll had done it. Robert’s face is fading. Now a series of holes and flat black eyes, once it was said that Robert listened to the adults around him, his expression changing as they talked. Car accidents, broken bones, job loss, divorce—all these have been attributed to Robert, though why, I don’t know. Letters of apology arrive for him daily, people saying sorry for other people’s disrespect, people wanting to liberate whatever spirit lingers in this aging image of a boy. None of these missives seem to give him peace, though. Electronics are still said to malfunction. Cameras mysteriously go dark. I’ve never made the paranormal pilgrimage to Key West, but if I did, I think I’d still risk it and try to hold him, too. I’ve already been in a car accident, broken a bone, lost a job, gotten a divorce. I have very little left to fear from a ghost in a boy.
My aunt was once a part-time doll maker. She and my mom grew up with scraps and hand-me-downs, but in the United States, she was free to make everything she never had before. She did not make prim dolls in fetching period dresses, but the kinds that looked like babies. In her basement workroom sat a sewing machine for small clothes, huggable torsos in bins, a cup full of glass eyes with fixed gazes, and a row of porcelain heads—their mouths in pouts or smiles or the half frown of a child’s deep sleep. She never seemed to finish these babies. Some half-finished form always sat on the table. I never understood why she couldn’t bear to finish, unless it was because completion would require the freshly glued and stitched child to become a gift. Better, perhaps, to leave these figures in stages of transformation, a perpetual becoming. Although my curiosity often tempted me, I never played with these disembodied babies. The room felt like a reliquary. I respected my aunt’s dolls like a believer who knows even her thoughts are watched.
In the Museum of Shadows, we stand in a dark room full of objects that underwent tests—though the employee won’t describe them—to verify each farm tool and statue and image in the room has a spiritual attachment. Some have a card next to them that tells a brief story of that object’s power, and some rest on their shelves, waiting for their paranormal activities to be described to curious onlookers. I peruse each case with care, pausing my flashlight over old photographs and masks, religious figures and a garden gnome, each with a rumored haunting. Before the employee returns to the front desk to wait for the next set of people to stroll into the gift shop full of t-shirts, crystals, and sage, she tells us the rules:
“Don’t touch any of the objects,” there are security cameras around, and I nod. “That’s also for your own safety. And no photographs.”
Rules around photographs exist in many museums, though usually it is for the flash. I assume like the gloves to hold the doll we are being given superstitions to keep the spirits in their proper attachments and uninterested in us. But when the employee says that people daily send their haunted possessions to the museum, I pull out a pen to write it down. I find the back of my receipt for my entry fee and start to write 60-1000 objects a day before she stops me.
“You can’t have pen and paper in here either,” she tells me. A new rule, and one I’ve never heard in a museum before.
“Oh, why?” I ask.
“Copyright,” she says, as if this is enough explanation, as if it makes any sense that owning the objects is owning the stories of spirits that are believed to live inside them.
The answer makes no sense to me, but my mind busies itself imagining how objects must prove their possession and what tests must be designed to reveal this. Although the walls, glass cases, and shadow boxes around the room are brimming with things, I’m also trying to do the multiplication without my pen and the back of the receipt. Even at an easy number like five hundred jewelry boxes and statues and old combs each day, that would be tens of thousands of items to test each year. If I don’t believe the dead would form attachments with objects, then this is of no consequence, a warehouse of histories deemed too unhaunted for a museum, sad thrift store aisles with no potential for objects to be rescued and brought home to love.
If I decide I do believe the dead are stuck inside these mirrors and embalming tables in the Museum of Shadows, the objects that did not perform well on their tests become a mausoleum. Though perhaps this is a better fate than having morbidly curious tourists handle you with gloves on every day, waiting to see if the spiritual fragment of you stuck in a doll will give them some unease they can call proof, a sort of anti-miracle that confirms the dead linger and blink when rocked.
When I teach students a class on the Art of Healthcare, we do an exercise in object empathy. We consider different ways to repair and restore an object, to connect with it the way we so often do with people or wide-eyed mammals. The transformations the students create also relate to their fears, giving them a way to face and even handle them. One student brings in photographs collaged onto calendars to express his fears about the passage of time and death. One brings in old crumpled tests flattened and restored with glitter to show they accept their fear of failure. One stands at the front of the room holding what looks like a swaddled doll. She even acts as if it’s heavy. She’s afraid, she says, that she can’t be both the doctor and mother she wants to be. And when she turns the swaddled child towards us, we can see the heavy nothing inside the blanket.
The eerie effect of dolls on the human psyche has been studied numerous times, but a definitive answer for why they unsettle people hasn’t been clear. One possible reason they unnerve is the idea that just as they can be made out of anything, they could turn into anything. Maybe the brain sees this material object and still sees something mutable, a face that could transform, or worse, that could turn its head to watch us with an unchanging expression. Another possible reason they disturb people is that they look human but don’t show emotion. A real infant would copy our faces, their mirror neurons firing to change from frowns to smiles. Even the dolls of my childhood would close their eyes if I laid them down, but they couldn’t repeat my actions back to me, bonding through each smile I think of as affection and not a neurological instinct.
I can’t recall ever loving a doll as a child, though I remember having to pretend I did. My mother gave me a porcelain doll for Christmas one year, and the delight on her face told me I should love it, too. The doll looked like a baby on the day of her christening. She had a silver key in her back to wind so she would stir in her white lace bassinet, over and over moving in a sleep she would never wake from. Although part of me knew I must mirror my mother’s joy so she could be happy, part of me did find it enchanting to wind this peach doll in her white gown and watch her gently stretch and curl in a timeless slumber.
When I ask my friends about the dolls of their childhood, one shows me photos of a porcelain doll with mythic Rapunzel hair, masses of blonde curls past her waist. She wears a satiny blue dress, the same cornflower shade as her half-closed eyes, trimmed in green-and-white lace. My friend’s grandmother brought it from Hungary, an object of beauty, an art piece to behold and not play with. For now, the doll waits in storage until my friend has a home for her. The blue-eyed girl both scares my friend and reminds her of her grandmother’s kindness, and maybe this is the trouble of these objects, how they summon conflicting feelings.
My other friend doesn’t have a doll to show me, only the story of her Raggedy Ann. When my friend and her mother came to the United States, her mother told her the doll could not get on the plane and my friend was forced to abandon it. She discovered later her mother’s disgust for the doll, which my friend apparently sucked on, refusing to break the habit no matter how many times she was admonished. Her mother said the doll smelled awful, all that unwashed child breath soaked into the fabric body. She says her mother never really made it up to her, other than the fact she’s alive to watch her mother spoil her daughter, every holiday filling the closets and toy chests with even more plush and plastic.
The creators of a realistic baby doll called Reborn market each baby with a name and lifelike features. These interactive silicone dolls “breathe,” coo, and have a “heartbeat.” The company says each doll is one “you can love forever.” Although culture urges love to be infinite, and certainly the love for a child to be all-consuming, it is this tag line for a doll that disturbs me. Part of the joy of having a baby was knowing I could, for a time, love him intensely, full-heartedly, and without boundaries. But remaining in that love without change, without the tests of anger and growth, without diapers and sleepless nights, unnerves me. It’s wanting the child without its humanity, it’s wanting the luxury of emotion without paying the price.
As my friends and I walk into Doll Hall in the Museum of Shadows, there’s more to see and read than we can take in. Up high hang marionettes. Below, posed and propped up old dolls with notecards and names next to them. On the opposite walls, shelves and shelves of odd bisque faces and stuffed bodies, Victorian porcelain, and rag dolls. Their names sound classic, even ageless. Their stories feel overly redacted, reduced to meager sentences—this one found in the wall of a house, this one sent to the Museum because it spooked someone’s family, this one found under a floorboard. They often have abandonment in common. Some do nothing that seems haunted other than unsettle people, adults sending away objects based on the proof of their feelings.
“Have you noticed these stories are mostly about violence against women?” one friend asks, and she’s right. Many of the brief notes on the cards around the room relate tales of children hurt, women murdered.
“And here’s another one found in a wall,” she says.
It seems almost a formula—a woman in peril, a home to hide in, a ghost that carries out some form of post-mortem justice. Maybe that’s part of the fantasy of the haunted doll—the idea that debts could be repaid, vengeance fulfilled. Before we’d come to the Museum of Shadows I’d read online that sometimes women who visit the basement feel their throats squeezed, and it’s meant to be the ghost of a man who trafficked women. I probably shouldn’t have come after knowing that the suffering of real women had become something to titillate the living, but I wanted to see a room full of haunted dolls. They seem like stories easy enough for anyone to make up, and we joke that we should stuff a doll in a wall to inspire other rumors, but I don’t really like this trick. I’d already invented this lie when I was a child, turning a mound in a friend’s backyard into the story of a dead teenager who crashed his motorcycle and would lay on us in our sleeping bags at night. It was an invention made of other ghosts I’d heard of, other rumors I knew to fear. I understand the pleasure of a small terror, but it obscures the real dangers. We need more truth, need more justice than ghosts.
We all lean in a little closer to some dolls, separating to lean down and read the lower stories or see what lies around the corner, sweeping our dim flashlights over the rows upon rows of broken faces and eerie glass eyes in a black hallway. The sheer number should make me afraid, but the image loses its power and starts to feel like a history of girlhood pedagogies. There are ones with tidy bows in their hair, the ones with untainted aprons, instructing gender norms, inducting girls into the cult of domesticity.
After the Christmas when my mother got me the sleeping baby in white, she started collecting porcelain dolls for me—one that looked like a toddler with curly red hair, ones that looked like Victorian girls with stoic faces, and ones that a friend of hers would make, initialing their heads with a Sharpie. I could find her maker’s tattoo behind their ears when I would lift up their synthetic hair. Patricia Hogan says there is a “strong tradition of using dolls to reflect cultural values and how we see children or how we wish to see children.” It’s the second thought that catches me, the idea that dolls represent an adult invention of idealized children, to pretend they are innocent, easy creatures with untangled hair and no complaints or nightmares. I once tried to be that child. A man visiting my dad mistook me for a doll when I was an infant because I sat so still in the corner. It seems from birth I knew to make my needs small. Though the porcelain collection sat in my room, I knew the dolls were my mother’s. She would come in and straighten them, pose them in new ways, but neither of us played with them. Neither of us knew to rock and shush their imagined cries or soothe their pretend fears. Neither of us knew the right ways to be a mother.
Although I believe the Museum of Shadows employee when she tells me people send their dolls and haunted objects here, I also know dolls with disturbing faces and haunted stories can be bought online. eBay does not allow people to sell intangible items so sellers cannot guarantee that the eerie baby-faced porcelain they sell is definitively haunted, but pages and pages of sellers claim to possess a doll with a spiritual attachment. It’s its own sort of museum—rows of unwavering expressions lined up next to their stories of dolls that move themselves, turn their heads, of ones that talk, of ones that have the trapped souls of children. People comment on the nature of the stories, wanting to know more about each doll, leaving excited feedback that they “can’t wait to start experiencing things.” It’s a liminal space where the unwanted find those who will cherish their uncanniness, not just as an object, but as an experience of some kind of beyond, a mystery that can be owned. Not everyone in this online marketplace has a gift for storytelling, but I think that’s part of what offends me about the Museum of Shadows—not only do they claim copyright over people’s lives, their stories are a paranormal stereotype in two flat sentences. Like the customers online, I came to encounter something I’d hoped was real, for the evidence of afterlife in the eerie turn of a doll’s head. Despite all my vocal claims of doubt, I’d wanted to be converted but got a hallway that only told a hundred small histories of old childhoods and disrepair.
My friends and I wander the Museum’s basement and upstairs, each crowded with an array of objects meant to disturb the viewer, though the constant exposure to the odd and unsettling numbs us to most images. Upstairs hangs a veil and a card that tells the quick story. The man who donated it was a widower who’d found someone else. His new wife, unnerved by the dead one, said the veil troubled her, and he needed to get rid of it. The card does not say it hurt the new wife or anyone else for that matter. It did not flutter hauntingly or bring disaster. A sense of creepiness condemned this wedding memento—a former beloved’s veil to a supernatural museum to pleasantly disturb strangers. More than the dolls, this abandonment grieves me.
One of the stories my mother told me often about her parentless youth was about her doll sacrifice. Raised in a missionary orphanage, she and the other children only had the toys that came as donations from the United States, and she’d once pulled a prized plastic girl from the box. She was a treasure, a rare opportunity for possession, this flaxen-haired figure. Another friend received a hand-me-down tea set, and they played together, a party of three, until my mother convinced them both that God required believers to sacrifice what they held most dear. My mother and her friend threw their doll and tea set into the village’s open pit toilet. Years later, it did not become a funny story about the seriousness with which my mother took her faith as a child. She did not think it was sweet and silly that she convinced a friend they needed to offer their most beloved possessions to God. I can still recall her telling the story while she stared almost blankly out of the minivan’s windshield, recounting the loss of an object so dear. How she’d chosen that loss, how her unaging grief stood as a testament to belief.
The small dark rooms of the Museum of Shadows made attachment seem like a form of entrapment. If the spirits of the dead resided in these objects, I can’t imagine that this was a fate they’d imagined—collected, tested, having their pain displayed in crowded glass cases. Each thing on a shelf represented a person and a life, but their stories were reduced to rumors read by flashlights, their deaths helping strangers profit from their traumatic ends. How could the dead want to use their last bit of agency to turn a doll’s head and titillate strangers in a small Nebraska town? And how could the people who own the Museum divorce the spirits they believe in from the humanity of the previous life?
Before leaving, we take a last look at the doll named Ayda. The Museum claims she was awarded “Most Haunted Doll in America,” and it takes a minute before I even think to wonder how one achieves this status or what governing board of paranormal metrics can even assess such a thing. There’s an old photograph of a child sitting next to the doll, whom the employee tells us was the real Ayda, who went by another name; Ayda is her chosen name as a spirit. The employee says the girl’s uncle beat her to death, but she won’t tell us what the girl’s real name is or the uncle’s or why a girl would want a different name in death, though she does say that the FBI confirmed the story. The FBI confirms all their stories, she says, without clarifying the FBI’s interest in ghosts. Ayda sits in her plexiglass case in a plum velvet dress and long curls, her eyes lost but her shoes still on. Next to her stand are toys that people have sent for her and letters they’ve written to this ghost of a girl trapped in a doll. It’s so strange to me, this affection for a ghost when the person she used to be has been erased. The story of the girl now is a fragment for terror, a grainy video of movements, a voice caught on a recorder.
Ayda—or whoever she once was—can never be Doll of the Week. The employee says she’s too powerful. Anyone who holds her would risk her attaching to them and taking home her spirit. That doesn’t seem so bad to me, offering to release someone from being a display, to instead pretend to put her down for a nap or throw an afternoon tea party, gently remarking that she should finish her Earl Grey before it gets cold.
When I get home, I take the porcelain doll my mother gave me down from my son’s closet. I’d almost forgotten I still had her. My longings trouble me often, but my possessions inspire so little thoughtfulness in me. The silver key in her back clicks with each twist as I wind her to watch her stir once more. Her porcelain cheeks have the look of milkfat and the brushstrokes of her painted eyelashes are as delicate as insect legs. Her unbloomed hands won’t grip my finger in instinct. And when her lullaby starts to play and she starts to move in her faux restless sleep, I pick her up, her head rolling in my palm. She’s too small for unassisted life, none of the joyful heft of my son, whom I can barely fit in my lap anymore. Her song chimes through its melody, both strange and familiar, like her face. I am not unnerved by the dust that has settled on the creases of her eyes and between her fingers, but I am saddened at the evidence that, like my mother, I am sometimes guilty of neglect. The music ends. I feel nothing cold, nothing frightful, no lingering sense of a spirit with a will. Disappointed, I settle her back in her bassinet, sliding my hand from beneath her cold head like a magician with a tablecloth. Like a practiced mother who knows how to leave the sleeping undisturbed.
Traci Brimhall is the author of four collections of poetry: Come the Slumberless from the Land of Nod (Copper Canyon Press), Saudade (Copper Canyon Press), Our Lady of the Ruins (W.W. Norton), and Rookery (Southern Illinois University Press). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Slate, The Believer, The New Republic, Orion, and Best American Poetry. She’s received a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship and is currently Director of Creative Writing at Kansas State University.