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OK, weird, and the doll looks spooky. But strikes me as a better way of handling extreme feelings of unrequited love than hounding the poor ex. (assuming that he didn't).

Youd be able to get a much better doll now!
 
Loneliness can certainly do some damage to the person who's been rejected. Physical damage even.

Yes, let's hope he relied on the doll instead of stalking his ex.
 
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Don't come and look in our cabinet, where the head has fallen off one of my antique dolls and it now rests against the glass in the door, fortunately with the face towards the back. I don't even know how that happened; the doll next to it has a wobbly head but I thought the now-headless one was okay. Perhaps it didn't like it when the cabinet had to be moved once the flooring was replaced.

One of these days I will get it properly repaired, but it'd finding a decent antique restorer locally that's going to be the issue, methinks.
Eee I remember when you could buy a doll head on every street corner.

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A Texas coastal survey team has been collecting creepy dolls that have washed ashore, sharing photos of them, and even selling them to raise money (then donated to a charity).

Texas researchers find dozens of creepy dolls on Gulf Coast beaches

... Jace Tunnell, director of the Mission-Aransas Reserve at the University of Texas Marine Science Institute, said his team surveys about 40 miles of Golf Coast beach at the reserve twice a week, and they have frequently been finding dolls of various types that were given a creepy aesthetic by their time in the water. ...

Tunnell said the follower count on the Mission-Aransas Reserve Facebook page has skyrocketed since he started sharing photos of the disturbing dolls. He said about 30 dolls have been found since he started posting the photos.

"The creepiest are the ones that have lost all their hair," he said. "The first one we had found was a sex doll, the head of it. I posted a picture of it and I didn't realize that's what it was. We got a lot of followers on the page after that."

Tunnell said that first doll head, found in January 2021, was purchased by a member of the public for $35, and the money was donated a sea turtle rescue program. He said the dolls are now being kept in a bucket to be sold at the reserve's annual fundraising auction. ...

"There's a lot of nightmares out there," Tunnell said. ...
SOURCE (With Photo): https://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2022/0...ng-creepy-dolls-on-Texas-coast/1351651174936/
 
My wife has a few dolls left over from our daughter’s childhood.

I notice she still makes sure the dolls hats and clothes are on the dolls correctly.

She acts like they are watching us, but she moved them to a spare room.
 
My wife has a few dolls left over from our daughter’s childhood.

I notice she still makes sure the dolls hats and clothes are on the dolls correctly.

She acts like they are watching us, but she moved them to a spare room.
Nothing odd about this. Nope. All fine. Perfectly normal behaviour. *whistles, sidles off...*
 
Here's a good one!

When primary school teacher Jonathan Lewis started a DIY project in his new house he was shocked to make a spine-chilling discovery ike something out of a horror movie.

Just days after picking up the keys the 32-year-old decided to knock through a wall to solve a mystery over a loose wire before stumbling across a scene like something straight out of a horror movie.

For hidden inside a wall was a creepy old ragdoll just sitting inside the voide under the stairs.

And, in a shuddering development, Jonathan soon realised the unsettling doll was holding a note which terrifyingly described how she killed the previous owners... for being "too happy".

The eerie incident happened soon after Jonathan moved into the property in Walton, Liverpool.

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/teacher-finds-creepy-ragdoll-new-26931742

I Tweeted the story and got this reply:

Yep, that's the kind of thing we used to do as kid's when we moved house (28 times by age 16) One buyer (we didn't like) we left jars of pickled snakes & lizards in the press for her. We also put scratch marks, in an old locked press with a message, I will die here...

10:30 AM · May 20, 2022·Twitter for Android
 
For hidden inside a wall was a creepy old ragdoll just sitting inside the voide under the stairs.

And, in a shuddering development, Jonathan soon realised the unsettling doll was holding a note which terrifyingly described how she killed the previous owners... for being "too happy".
Oh I love that. Brilliant!:clap:
 
This Florida toddler is completely engrossed with her Halloween surplus doll. Either she's high on demonic possession or sadistically smug about the fact other kids are terrified by her beloved Creepy Chloe.

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Toddler takes terrifying doll everywhere she goes – making other kids cry

The mother of a toddler who is obsessed with a red-eyed demonic doll has said that her daughter’s toy of choice makes children twice her age cry.

Briar Beard, three, has been obsessed with ‘Creepy Chloe’ since her mum Brittany purchased the doll from a Halloween pop-up shop last month.

But now, Brittany has shared that her daughter won’t leave the house without the doll in tow, terrifying other children.

Creepy Chloe’s eyes glow bright red on demand and she comes with a button that triggers a gentle giggling sound, which turns into a demonic evil laugh. ...
FULL STORY: https://metro.co.uk/2022/09/14/todd...everywhere-she-goes-making-kids-cry-17371006/
 
This perhaps isn't the right place as the 'evil' bit doesn't apply (as far as I know), but I’m not sure where else to put it, and a new thread doesn't feel justified - please relocate if necessary.

20 years ago I was doing my clinical training and had a placement in a child/adolescent mental health unit. The building was a sort of pre-fab place laid out in a linear fashion, with the clinic rooms at one end and the offices at the other, with a corridor going the length of the building with open plan rooms coming off it.

About halfway along the building there was a space with a chair in it that was always unoccupied. Every time I walked past this chair my head turned involuntarily as I was sure I glimpsed an old woman sitting in it. Of course, when I actually looked the chair was empty. This went on for some months. As the end of my placement approached I asked a colleague, a psychiatric nurse, why the chair was there, as no one ever seemed to sit in it, and to my amazement he told me that no one ever did, but that for many years a lifesize doll of an old lady had sat there before it had been removed for reasons unspecified.

I've never since known what to make of this. If a real person had sat in it, I could've come up with something. If I'd ever visited the building previously, when the doll was there, this might've made sense. But a doll, before I'd ever been there, leaving some sort of trace? I dunno. But I saw it. Over and over again. Every time I walked past.
 
This is along the lines of the usual subject, but in a somewhat unusual context.

Quite fascinating, but nonetheless also quite spooky - and I have no doubt that the dolls go a long way to make it that way.

The tiny murder scenes of forensic scientist Frances Glessner Lee:

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The tiny murder scenes of forensic scientist Frances Glessner Lee

Lee was a diorama-maker, criminal investigation educator and the first female police captain in the US.

A husband and wife, lying in their bedroom, their baby in her crib in the adjacent nursery. A typical family on a typical morning, minus the red bloodstains on the beige bedroom carpet and the pink and white striped wallpaper behind the crib. All three family members, mother, father and baby, have been shot to death.

While the scene may sound like something straight out of a true-crime show, it is a diorama called “Three-Room Dwelling” that was built in about 1944 by a 60-something Chicago heiress named Frances Glessner Lee.

It was made to train police officers in the handling and processing of evidence. The blood behind the baby’s crib allows officers to study blood spatter patterns.

Lee crafted her macabre dollhouse-sized crime scenes using miniatures, then considered a feminine craft, to educate in a field dominated by men....etc

Full article, with accompanying audio section here.

Pretty amazing detail - apparently, all doors and drawers opened, and even the mousetraps worked.

Edit: Guardian article, with more images, here.
 
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I loved those murder scene doll's houses, There used to be a full collection of them on flickr back in the day. They were so satisfyingly well constructed and thought out. Definitely macabre, but not in that horror movie, halloweenesque way that always seems a bit cheap and thoughtless to me.

I was fascinated with dolls during my art student days. Antique dolls especially. I loved the whole serene stillness of the settings and decadence which surrounded them (both in museums and old photographs) as well as the exquisite period clothing. I have never understood the hysteria either, but have never been much of a fan of screamer type movies, and the old trope of sticking a menacing looking doll into a fictionally evil child's arms always seems a bit obvious and contrived to me. Many of these associations began life in B&W mystery shows such as the Outer Limits, the Twilight Zone, etc, but the image of dolls as inherently evil just never got an update. I wonder why such an excellent subject hasn't received far more creative (non morbid) attention.

I do recall the craze online for Blythe dolls around 2005. I thought they were a bit nuts, but it takes all sorts... The Blythe obsession rubbed noses with the Korean and Japanese ball jointed doll arts around the same time. A lot of the associated photographic art was astoundingly good, so much so that after earning a healthy commission one month I purchased one from overseas, I think it was called 'MOMO'. It was quite incredible, fully articulated, wondrously beautiful, yet facially stylised enough that it didn't posses that creepy 'absent person' look. I worked on a few creative photo projects with it at the time (along with a curious, jointed white rabbit called Georgie), in a sort of whimsical, lunar setting that I managed to set up a small store for, which ended up earning me a decent passive income for several years.

Dolls have sort of been good to me, although I wasn't much of a fan as a child.

That said, those images at the start of the thread are just ever so slightly depressing. And this is the problem isn't it? When the features and positioning of the dolls make them appear discarded, vacant, unpossessed. They are less intimidating when their features seem to contain personality, something that the creator might be advised to bestow upon them - care.
Mass produced children's dolls of all eras are really quite horrifying, from the materials used to the gormless, submissive facial expressions, the mold that produced a thousand empty stares.... Tiny Tears, Walkie Talkie dolls, dolls that pee and cry, that only exist to be knocked about and discarded soon after, those painfully realistic 'reborn' dolls (therapeutic for some, a step too far for others). They always have depressed me, like those random one-legged examples covered in mud and foliage that you might encounter on a country walk. Or the modded plastic baby doll heads, cheaply zombified for gothic effect. No....

Humans have always created small versions of themselves. From objects of desire and beauty, to symbols of strength and power to imaginative play. Mass production changed the game. There is so much creative potential to explore with dolls, I think they are just going through a bad phase in culture :chuckle: They have the ability to fire the imagination, to assist in resolving or unlocking what lies hidden (therapy, art, fear), to enable the projection of feelings and ideas in a safe way (enacting scenes, creating worlds, exploring personalities) and for many are a delight to clothe, style and fuss about with.

I no longer have much to do with them myself, but they need some positive press.

I can see why so many people are unnerved by them. Many of the circulating images might strike a resemblance to those Victorian memorial photographs of deceased children dressed up in their Sunday best, posed in their grieving mother's arms; they can provoke a similar sense of tragedy or horror in us. Like empty shells with only half human faces, many of them designed to look ever so slightly in pain....like tragic masks, dehumanised.

The Jan Svankmajer film 'Alice', one of my old favourites, and his other short film 'Jabberwocky' really play on the timeless, surreal relationship that we share with dolls. Where elements of innocence and brutality are perpetually intertwined. Anyone even remotely interested in art films using dolls that are not in the vein of crappy horror might also want to check out the Brothers Quay.

Enjoy! :evillaugh:

 
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I wonder if anyone's ever converted one of those crying 'Tiny Tears' dolls so it can cry fake blood tears instead of just water? .. that could make a good Halloween prop.

 
@Swifty Fake blood? FAKE blood? You need to up your game next year young-fella-me-lad! :p
Good point. I'm getting soft.

I've just done a quick youtube search to see if anyone's ever done the fake tears of blood stunt with one of these dolls and someone's posted a video review thingy stating that the rubber in some of these older tiny tears would petrify/erode/whatever so they could end up crying reddish brown tears instead. The presenter of the video's a bit 'like OMG!' annoying though. Skip to 2:45 for her to start talking about the dolls.

 
Good point. I'm getting soft.

I've just done a quick youtube search to see if anyone's ever done the fake tears of blood stunt with one of these dolls and someone's posted a video review thingy stating that the rubber in some of these older tiny tears would petrify/erode/whatever so they could end up crying reddish brown tears instead. The presenter of the video's a bit 'like OMG!' annoying though. Skip to 2:45 for her to start talking about the dolls.

I used to have a Tiny Tears and really didn't take to it. I'd fill it's head with water, tea or anything I could get my hands on and then squeeze it's chops so the liquid shot out of it's mouth. When this failed to excite me I spun it's head around until it snapped off then propped it back on again with cellotape. You didn't really get your money's worth of fun with those things. I'm sure it ended up with a Ker-Plunk stick through it's eye - tears before bedtime indeed :curt:
 
I used to have a Tiny Tears and really didn't take to it. I'd fill it's head with water, tea or anything I could get my hands on and then squeeze it's chops so the liquid shot out of it's mouth. When this failed to excite me I spun it's head around until it snapped off then propped it back on again with cellotape. You didn't really get your money's worth of fun with those things. I'm sure it ended up with a Ker-Plunk stick through it's eye - tears before bedtime indeed :curt:
You've just reminded me about when I made my big Sister's 'Girl's World' mannequin into a ghoul using my Mum's make up when I was about 5. I got told off for that.
 
You've just reminded me about when I made my big Sister's 'Girl's World' mannequin into a ghoul using my Mum's make up when I was about 5. I got told off for that.
I think there should be a national museum of bad makeup on Girl's World heads. Imagine the horrors. I saw a few shockers back in the day.
 
I think there should be a national museum of bad makeup on Girl's World heads. Imagine the horrors. I saw a few shockers back in the day.
I always found them creepy anyway. I think they count as a doll sort of?.

 
Bargain Hunt becomes a horror show

Bargain Hunt's Charlie Ross 'haunted' by effigy doll with human eyes and hair that gives people headaches​

Charlie Ross was told "They would get headaches and their eyes would start hurting, so they took him to a few mediums and apparently George wants his eyes and hair back, he can’t rest without them."

Bargain Hunt took an unexpected spooky turn today, as an ominous doll by the name of George made an unnerving appearance. Today's episode, March 17, saw the Red and Blue teams sniff around Newark Antiques Fair in Nottinghamshire, one of the biggest in Europe, for bargains, whilst presenter Charlie Ross kept a close eye on their buys.
As the teams went on tour around the fair, Charlie met with Marie Wesson from Nottingham Haunted Museum, who had brought along some death-related Victorian items, all of which had interesting histories. But one vintage doll in particular stole the show with its frightening presence, and left Charlie with a headache.



https://www.devonlive.com/news/cele...resEvVJGg2sXka_zLek4CeM3xrnUsPKMH5vCCzXgo3Mn8
 
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