Some childhood symbols straddle the line between adorable and terrifying. Like clowns. Or Furbys.
Some dolls fit the category, too, with spooky eyes that seem to move or a porcelain pallor. They're not all Chucky, but some of them just don't seem quite right.
Listener Anne McLaughlin grew up with a cabinet full of dolls — including a pretty dancer doll and a set of wooden nesting dolls. But one, she says, stood out.
"One of the dolls in the cabinet was absolutely terrifying," she says. "Very tall, thin doll, and her face was not a doll face. It was a grown woman, so she didn't have big eyes she didn't have a smile. She had tiny little eyes. She always looked like she stepped out of one of those New Orleans ghost stories."
The lady doll was also a music box, and it spun slowly to music when wound. The doll gave Anne the creeps.
So one night, when she was about 10, McLaughlin thought to herself: "I'm going to take her out of the cabinet just to prove that I'm not scared of this doll" — even though she was very scared of it.
So she wound up the doll, left it on the bedside table and walked away. Suddenly there was a crash.
"And right when I turned around, she had just walked to the side of the bedside table, and fallen to the floor with a big crash, " McLaughlin can't even finish her sentence. "I went and slept with my parents."
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