I like most dolls and stuffies, really I do, and tend to relate to them as being conscious beings, if of a different sort. This approach has always served me pretty well. I was (surprise, surprise!) the kind of little boy who played with dolls when the right circumstances prevailed, and it took my Pops until I was around six to convince me to be any different.
But there was the Jackie doll when I was a little one. And she was...different. She'd been my Mom's favorite dollie as a child, who Mom had brought home with the sentimental feelings you might expect her to have--which I guess would place Jackie-Doll as having been made in the early to mid 1930s unless my Mom got her second hand. Jackie-Doll was about 2 feet tall and weighed maybe five pounds; she had a stuffed torso and a red and white dress; her limbs and head were made of some kind of composition compound that was probably glue and sawdust.
And she had light brown glass eyes that were always open. A bland little nondescript expression on her molded and painted little face. And she had .light brown hair in two braids, hair that looked just like a little scalp crudely taxidermied onto a doll. She doesn't sound like that big of a deal, does she? She was, though. She surely was.
Her hair might've been the awfullest part of her, visually, or was it her glinty pale-brown eyes? I can conjure up a clear picture of her in my mind's eye--too bloody goddamned clear for my liking, actually--but can't pinpoint what her scariest feature was. For whatever obscure reason, Jackie-Doll terrified me from the moment I first laid eyes on her. I didn't try to play with her, I didn't even touch her unless I had to. And until I was at least seven, I flat-out refused to be alone in the same room with Jackie-Doll. One of my parents figured this out fairly early on, and so Jackie-Doll was esconced in an old rocker in the parental bedroom to keep me from invading the room during parental absence, and, yes, it worked fine.
Nothing real dramatic ever ensued. I got older, and got over my fear of Jackie-Doll to a large extent--but even as a teenager I still didn't like that doll or want to be around her, and the last time I saw her, when I was in my late 20s or early 30s, I still wanted to give her a wide berth. So I did.
I was a weirdly sensitive little cuss, and experienced some peculiar realities, but I can still think of no real reason for Jackie-Doll to have effected me that strongly. She did, though--she just did.