September 24, 2026 • 64 mins
According to the authors of horror stories, haunting isn't just for houses. In countless works of fiction, all sorts of objects can become to a spirit -- and, over the centuries, countless people have sworn they encountered a haunted object in real life. Today's episode asks whether an object can be haunted... and the ultimate answer may not be what you expect.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Fellow conspiracy realists, we are coming to you with this
week's classic. We're on the road pretty frequently here toward
the end of the year, and we're returning to old
school spooky stuff. Guys, do you remember back in 2021
when we asked whether an object could be haunted?
Speaker 2 (00:21):
How could I forget? I'm still haunted by it to
this day.
Speaker 3 (00:26):
What is that Stephen King piece of writing about a
haunted car?
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Which one? There are like three.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
There's Christine. There's from a Buick. I can't remember the
year of the Buick.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
It's the eight.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
Yes.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
But then there's the haunted laundry machine. Short story.
Speaker 4 (00:43):
The Mangler.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
Where it just so happened to get gelatin spilled on
it that stood in for horse hooves. And the man
loves the cursed object.
Speaker 3 (00:51):
Does maximum overdrive count?
Speaker 2 (00:53):
Maximum Overdrive absolutely counts. They were technically aliens and not haunted.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
Well, also, guys, I have some artifacts here that some
people would consider haunted, including a very old wooden sculpture
of a baboon.
Speaker 3 (01:09):
Oh, well, here's my big question, guys. With all of
these titles, all these stories, where does the spirit go
to haunt something? Inside an object. Where does it exist?
Speaker 2 (01:19):
That's a good question. If it were a car, I
would say in the engine.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
A catalytic converter.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
Protect the spark plugs.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
If it were a laundry machine, I don't know how
laundry machines work.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
That laundry machine store, the Mangler is such a good
piece of writing.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
It is good. No, it's fun. I'm ragging on it
a little bit, but it is a lot of fun.
But also just... I don't know. I don't really know
how the mechanics of those things work, so I'm not
sure where the soul of the demon would reside.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
They break it down in the story. Okay, I'm derailing us, folks.
This is our classic episode. This asks whether an object
can be haunted, and the ultimate answer surprised us. We
think it's going to surprise you as well.
Speaker 4 (02:01):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies, history is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now Or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of I Heart Radio.
Speaker 3 (02:25):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
My name is Noel.
Speaker 1 (02:28):
They call me Ben. We're joined as always with our
super producer, Paul Mission Control Deccant. Most importantly, you are you,
you are here, and that makes this Stuff They Don't
Want You To Know. Long time listeners, you'll recall that
we have often, we've often touched on the subject of curses.
(02:49):
We've often touched on the subject of people who have
interacted with things in extraordinary ways they cannot explain. In fact,
in an earlier Listener Mail segment, we explored the bizarre
story of an anonymous tourist who stole an artifact from
the ancient disaster site of Pompeii. This tourist... came back
(03:12):
15 years later and returned the object. It's not that
she had some sort of sudden pang of conscience. Instead,
she believed, hardcore believed, this object was cursed, that it
was plaguing her with all sorts of terrible luck that
simply could not be explained by mundane means. And I'm
wondering if maybe a good way for us to set
(03:35):
off on our exploration of today's topic is to talk
about these objects that surround us in our lives. Matt, Noel,
did you all ever have an object in your family
or in your childhood or even in current day that
you felt was on some, maybe hard to explain level, unlucky?
(03:55):
There was something weird about it? Some vibe it gave
off as though you had psychometry?
Speaker 2 (04:00):
Never been a big fan of ceramic clowns, for example.
Nothing specific, but A mutual friend of all three of ours,
Sarah Kotanoff, who does podcast ad sales stuff and we
used to work with years ago, she is obsessed with
haunted objects. So we should ask her. But we went
to that store in New York once. I believe it's called– gosh,
(04:22):
I can't remember what it's called. But there was a
show called Auditorium or Oddities on Science Channel that was
about this quirky couple that runs this oddity shop. And
we went in there with Sarah, and she immediately asked them–
Are any of these objects haunted or cursed? And they're like, no,
we don't do that.
Speaker 3 (04:40):
It's not haunted in the same way that we're going
to be talking about today, but this is my grandfather's
wedding ring, and I've been wearing it for quite a while.
And I have to say, I believe that it's just
my knowledge that I'm wearing his ring. It makes me
think about him a lot. But I swear to you,
he just.
His voice appears to me... not in a, an actual manifestation,
(05:04):
but like I can, I can hear myself thinking his
thoughts way, way more now that I've been wearing this ring. Um,
this is also his stamp. I don't know if you
probably can't read that. This is his stamp.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (05:18):
Nice to stamp things with it. Uh, but yeah, I,
I don't, I don't have anything that is unlucky necessarily.
I've got a story I can tell you about this
house in general. Um, and the luck or the unluck
that it has brought, but that's for another day.
Speaker 1 (05:33):
All right.
Speaker 3 (05:34):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (05:35):
I'm writing it down. You guys know, I keep a
little pad here where I write things in my, my language. So, uh,
we are going to follow up on that. I've got,
I've got a couple of slide. I've got a couple of, uh,
I guess you would call them unusual possessions. Uh, and
it's funny too, that we call objects possessions.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
Don't we?
Speaker 1 (05:57):
Uh, One that I can see off camera now is
one that I personally hesitate to touch. It's a carving
of a mandrill from, I believe, West Africa. It's West
African in origin. And that is also how it came
to me and why it stays in my house, even
(06:20):
though I don't particularly like messing with it i would
say i respect it but that story is a story
for a another day as well the point is that
we all have things like this things that we imbue
with some sort of meaning that we anthropomorphize in a degree.
(06:41):
You might have something that you believe, or you like
to think it has a personality, even if you consider
yourself a really skeptical person. Human beings will name their
cars and their ships and other vessels. There's even an
old cultural belief, I believe in Japan, that once an
object reaches 100 years old, it acquires a kind of
(07:05):
spirit of its own. And These stories of objects inhabited
by something good or bad, they occur throughout human history.
They continue in the modern day in ways that may
surprise some of us. And not all of these objects
have the same type of allegedly supernatural aspects. In fact,
(07:26):
some people, like the infamous Ed and Lorraine Warren, will
tell you that certain objects are not just bringers of misfortune,
but they are home to something somehow sentient. So, can
an object be haunted? By the way, the weather here
in Atlanta today is perfect for this. This is stormy
(07:47):
night weather.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
Tiny Cthulhu says an object can definitely be haunted.
Speaker 3 (07:51):
Well, well, no matter what Cthulhu or any other ancient
one says, there is no scientific proof at this moment
that any object has ever been haunted.
Speaker 1 (08:01):
Here are the facts. Yeah, first things first. At least
at the time of this recording, there's no proof that
is universally accepted that anything in history, including objects, has
been haunted. And by proof, we mean there's nothing in
the world that we know of now that everyone can
(08:23):
point to and agree, yes, there is a ghost in
this toaster, and it speaks to us through messages burned
into the bread. That just hasn't happened yet, or something
like that. And that's because... for something to be haunted,
there would have to be some kind of consciousness attached, right?
Some sort of sentience. And we don't know very much
(08:46):
about our own conscious states. We don't even know what
happens to the thing we call consciousness when our physical
hardware breaks down.
Speaker 2 (08:54):
That's right. Obviously, research is ongoing, and it's the kind
of thing that can go deep in many directions, whether
it's science, the study of the actual hardware you speak of, Ben,
the brain itself, or more into metaphysical or even spiritual
realms as to, you know, is the brain just a brain?
(09:15):
Is it imbued with something more like that's part of
some greater divine connectivity with the universe or some sort
of spiritual deity like a soul? So there are billions
of people across the world who might believe that they,
in particular, or a group that they're associated with, know
exactly what happens when you die, when the brain dies.
(09:39):
Whether it's instant nothingness, you know, that's what I typically picture,
and it's kind of scary. Or reincarnation, seems a lot
more fun. Or a particular type of eternity or afterlife
that might look a certain way or feel a certain
way or be based around a certain set of rules.
Or speaking of rules, if you don't follow them, you
(10:01):
might go to the bad place, the very bad place,
depending on what you've done in your life on this earth,
the way you've chosen to use that equipment that Ben
was talking about. The problem is that among all of
these folks, the scientists, the philosophers, the spiritual leaders, they
(10:23):
all might have a strong case, or at least they
might think they do, as to what the real truth
is behind sentience and understanding and being. But as we
all know, no one really knows. No one really has
that definitive proof that will shut all of those other
perspectives down. There is no right or true answer that
we know of. Therefore, a lot of this exists in
(10:45):
the realm of belief, as does the idea of haunting.
Speaker 3 (10:49):
That is correct. And one of the primary reasons here
is something that we covered a little while back. Can't
remember the exact episode, but we discussed the current impossibility
of measuring whatever the actual thing is, the energy that
would transfer between a consciousness, a human or any animal
(11:10):
or whatever into an object, whatever that stuff is, whether
it's physical, metaphysical, whatever, we have no way of measuring
that thing, that stuff yet, if there is any stuff
at all.
Speaker 1 (11:23):
Right, right. We don't know what we're searching for necessarily.
We don't know how to define it. And to be
absolutely fair, when we're saying that no one has a
right or true answer, one way to look at it is,
The problem is that absolutely no one has ever been
(11:44):
able to convince everyone else that their answer is correct.
So there may be, there may well be an answer
about the afterlife. And it may be very specific. And
one of those many religions or many theories that arose
since the dawn of recorded history may be in fact correct.
It's just like, you know, it's almost 8 billion people
(12:07):
trying to order a pizza. And, you know, we can't
even agree whether it should be a pizza. There's somebody
there's like a whole, you know, group of a billion
other people who say, guys, we should we should have salad.
This is not a cheat day. That's that's kind of
where we're at. And that's where we have been at
for a long time. But we can't we don't know
(12:28):
what to measure. Like if you lose your car keys, great,
because that means you know what you're looking for. We
are looking for something that we cannot really define. And yes,
I think that story about the 21 grams as the
weight of the soul is amazing, but there are a
(12:48):
lot of problems if you look into it. Anyway, so
that's one side of it. There's another side here. There's
a conflicting fact. It is a fact, inarguably, that for
thousands and thousands of years, people around the world, independent
of one another, have decided to revere, to fear, to avoid,
(13:09):
or in some cases, gather toward objects and places they
believe hold extraordinary power. A god under a mountain, a
ghost haunting the site of an ancient grave, an entity,
you know, maybe anchored to a sword or a staff
or a spear. or a demon inhabiting a doll. So
(13:30):
were all of these people, these literally millions and millions
of people across the span of human history, just collectively
making shit up? That seems really unlikely. That seems incredibly unlikely.
And so because of that, it seems like we have
two inarguable facts that appear to be in opposition. No
(13:51):
scientifically accepted proof that ghosts exist, and countless examples, again,
of millions and millions of people believing wholeheartedly that they do.
So in today's episode, we're diving into the space between
these two conflicting facts.
Speaker 3 (14:09):
And that's- Oh, wait, is it liminal?
Speaker 1 (14:11):
I was going to skip it, but you got me.
You got me. It's just such a convenient phrase. We're
diving into this space between these two conflicting facts, and
let's see how we can respond. to this question can
an object be haunted we'll get into it after a
word from our sponsor here's where it gets crazy oddly
(14:41):
enough the best place to begin here is with dolls
did you guys uh like no you said uh you've
got a You've got a particular weakness for creepy ceramic
clown figurines. Those are kind of doll-like.
Speaker 2 (14:55):
I suppose so. I was more, you know, dolls for
young boys, which we call action figures. I was very
into He-Man and Ninja Turtles and, you know, G.I. Joe
and stuff like that. I even had a weird, like,
crossover interest in My Little Pony growing up. I remember
that very distinctly. Dolls, yeah. I mean, they're really just dolls.
(15:16):
They're just poseable figurines of some sort. I guess the
idea of dolls tends to be associated with young girls,
but that also feels a little, you know, in this
day and age overly gendered. I mean, dolls are obviously
for anyone. But they certainly can be creepy, those porcelain
ones with the very, very white and expressionless faces and
(15:42):
seemingly real hair, you know?
Speaker 1 (15:44):
Yeah, gender is a construct. Dolls are for any kind
of creep who wants one.
Speaker 3 (15:51):
Good point, Ben.
Speaker 2 (15:54):
Good point. You think of people's grandmothers, though, having rooms
just overflowing with these things and just looking down upon
you from high shelves. Thankfully, my grandmother was not one
of those people, but bless you to anyone who has
one of those and had to grow up around that
kind of horror.
Speaker 3 (16:08):
I'm just going to posit something here. My son is five.
We've talked about him a couple times. He loves stuffed animals,
so not quite dolls, but similar because a lot of
doll makers– especially when we're going to talk about in
a little bit, we're originally making a stuffed animal or
stuffed animals as a product, and then dolls came later, generally.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
Not always.
Speaker 3 (16:30):
That's not always the case. But stuffed animals, you guys.
I think you've seen it before, maybe, just everybody on
this call, but my son... was gifted a Mickey Mouse
doll that is like human-sized. It's bigger than my son.
Speaker 1 (16:45):
Oh, I remember that. Yeah, I remember Mickey.
Speaker 2 (16:48):
Is that one of those gifts where as a parent
you're kind of like, thanks?
Speaker 3 (16:51):
Well, I mean, he loved it at the time when
he first got it. He still loves it now. Calls
him Big Mickey. At night when I'm putting my son
to sleep and that thing is in the room, I
am telling you, no matter what my personal beliefs, just
sitting it in the corner in the shadows and seeing
its dimensions there, there is something utterly creepy about it.
(17:15):
And I don't know how it, it doesn't give my
son nightmares. He says he feels safer knowing that it's there.
Speaker 2 (17:21):
Well, I grew up with it, you know, it's true.
Speaker 1 (17:24):
Like I, I've got, um, I probably had a different
background from you guys because in my, uh, earlier years, years,
my very early years, I did have, um, some sketchy
family characters, my loved dearly. Uh, one of them I
may have mentioned to you guys off air before was
(17:45):
my great aunt nine, uh, spelled like the spelled like
the number. And she was, um, regarded as a practitioner
of things that might be considered, you She had quite
a collection of all sorts of interesting things and artifacts.
(18:09):
And this was the first person I met who had
dolls that she considered dangerous. Dolls that were made for
a purpose of specific types. And this is something... that
is going to be familiar with a lot of the
folklorist in the crowd today. It's also an ancient practice
(18:29):
and it's practice I was not aware of at the time,
but we'll, we'll get to it. So I guess in
a way I had early experiences with dangerous dolls and, um,
my aunt nine has passed on to whatever is on
the other side of, uh, this crazy improv exercise we
call life. But I, I also, I think that colored
(18:52):
my perception of, of dolls in general, you know, when
I would see other people with these things, I would
inevitably think like, Oh, what are they, what are they
doing with this one? Is this like a, is this
like a Barbie or is this like a don't touch it?
Someone will get sick kind of thing. We all have
(19:15):
this place. And I love the point about dolls versus
action figures. They're really the same thing. They're figurines of
different genres or types. But yeah, we're talking about the
things that are commonly regarded as toys or collector's items
here in the modern age. For some of us, those
are very nostalgic relics of childhood. For others, they're irredeemably creepy.
(19:41):
It's no surprise that when people talk about haunted objects nowadays,
they tend to talk most often about dolls and And
there are a couple of pop culture reasons that are
very obvious that we'll get to. But one of the
most infamous haunted objects in 2021 is a doll called Annabelle.
(20:01):
And this comes to us from the Warrens that we
mentioned at the top that we also did an episode on.
I forgot about that.
Speaker 3 (20:07):
Is it a two part? No, it's just a one parter.
It's great. Really great info on the Warrens. So let's
talk about them. They are paranormal investigators. They are, I
believe they style themselves as demonologists. Is that true, Ben?
I think.
Speaker 2 (20:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (20:24):
Demonologists.
Speaker 4 (20:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (20:26):
Ed Warren, the, the, or Ed Warren passed away, I believe.
Speaker 1 (20:31):
That's correct.
Speaker 3 (20:32):
But he was a demonologist and Annabelle, first like was
made known to them way back in 1970. And you
probably know it because of the film series, but this
was a real doll that these paranormal investigators and demonologists encountered.
There was a student nurse who contacted them because they
(20:52):
were already kind of known for what they did. She
claimed that the doll was just being weird. Like, Hey,
I got this doll and it's weird. It's not just
weird looking. It's being weird. It's doing stuff. She said
that a psychic told her it was inhabited by the
spirit of a dead person, a girl named Annabelle. And
(21:17):
immediately the Warrens were like, OK, yeah, we need to
see this doll. Let's check it out. And the legend
was born.
Speaker 1 (21:25):
Right.
Speaker 3 (21:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (21:26):
According to the accounts from the Warrens, this nursing student
had a roommate. and she and her roommate, when they
had learned from a psychic that this doll was inhabited
by a spirit of a dead human girl, they tried
to make peace of sorts, to arrive at an armistice,
(21:47):
you know, and respect its space, pay obeisance to it, etc.,
but they had no luck. The events continued, and they accelerated,
and they became worrisome and frightening, and put Potentially, depending
on how you hear it described, dangerous. So in desperation,
the student reaches out to the Warrens, just like you said, Matt.
(22:10):
Long story short, you can hear more about it in
our previous episode. The doll, Annabelle, is currently dead. contained
in a glass display box at the Warren's Occult Museum
there in Monroe, Connecticut. You can go look at it.
It doesn't look like the Annabelle of the movies. I
would argue it looks a little more creepy, but as
(22:34):
you can imagine, skeptics have some issues with the story here.
They're not quite accusing, not everybody is saying, you know,
these folks are con artists or anything like that. There's
a guy named Joseph Laycock, He wrote a fantastic article
about this at the time. He was a Texas State
University assistant professor of religious studies. He thinks the story
(22:56):
may have been influenced by the cultural ecology of the time,
by the zeitgeist, because 1970, you said, right? That's when
the story of Annabelle begins, according to the Warrens. Something
else happened a few years prior. There were other scary
doll tropes, like a great Twilight Zone episode called Living Doll.
(23:18):
which came out just about five years before that Warren story.
And this doesn't prove anything, but the character of the
mother in that episode is also named Annabelle. So if
you're really skeptical or you're kind of cynical, do you
think Ed Warren found this doll and kind of thought
(23:42):
about the Twilight Zone and then said, we'll call it Annabelle?
Speaker 3 (23:46):
Maybe, or even if it's true that this nursing student
really was experiencing something weird, maybe it was because of
that Twilight Zone episode that she caught. You know, who knows?
It's all kind of conjecture, right? Hey, can we just
take a moment and really appreciate Noel's hat right now,
just before we do anything else?
Speaker 2 (24:07):
Well, can we appreciate the fact that this hat was
gifted to me by the magnanimous Ben Bolin? It says
Illuminati on the bottom. And what does it say on
the top?
Speaker 1 (24:17):
Don't trust anyone. Yes.
Speaker 3 (24:20):
That's killer.
Speaker 1 (24:21):
100% not haunted, by the way.
Speaker 2 (24:24):
Yeah, definitely not haunted. I do trust some people. Definitely
trust you too, mostly. But I do like the hat,
and I wanted to rock it today. So thank you, Ben.
Speaker 3 (24:35):
Sorry for taking us away there, guys. I just saw it.
Speaker 1 (24:39):
We're talking about objects, right? That's another object. There's the
nihilistic object. argument that we're all just objects floating in space. Really,
if you think about it, I was going to save
this for later, but if you think about it, you
are listening from a haunted object right now. You are,
(25:00):
as a consciousness, as a mind, you are inhabiting a body.
You are haunting it. You are possessing it. Your body
is a haunted house. It just happens to be growing
all the time.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
So, before I lose my– I love that John Mayer song,
Your Body is a Haunted House.
Speaker 1 (25:20):
Yeah, it's a good one.
Speaker 2 (25:22):
It's a good one.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
It's better than the Temple one. This brings us to
the idea of haunted dolls in the modern day. So,
excellent horror franchise, The Conjuring. They get a hold of
this story. It's been around before. They're like the spooky docuseries,
unsolved mysteries type investigations. But The Conjuring takes it to
(25:44):
the world of fiction, or people might argue even further
into the world of fiction. And Annabelle goes from being
an oddity in a small Connecticut museum to a global phenomenon.
The subject of three different films, and it cements its
status as the world's most famous haunted doll, if not
(26:04):
most famous haunted object. But it's not alone. There are
actually multiple examples of allegedly haunted dolls specifically, and we
found one that you might not have heard of unless
this was already very much your bag of badgers, your
bag of stuffed badgers, your stuffed bag of stuffed badgers. Anyway,
(26:30):
you might be surprised to hear of another doll that
came to prominence around the same time whose name is
simply Robert. Full name, Robert the Doll.
Speaker 3 (26:39):
I just want to go ahead and apologize to Robert
before we even start talking about him. Just, Robert, we're sorry.
We were just talking about you for the purposes of
this show.
Speaker 1 (26:49):
Yeah, you've done a lot for the podcast, Robert. We
just feel like this is a story we need to tell.
In full disclosure, Robert may or may not be on
the board of Illumination Global Unlimited. So we want you
to know. That we're doing our best to be fully
transparent and to not exhibit a conflict of interest. Robert's
(27:10):
a real physical doll. And you guys know how I
hate or I just I don't respect clowning people for
physical features or anything like that. I guess we can
get away with it maybe with Robert. Can we say it?
Can we just say the quiet part out loud? He
is creepy looking.
Speaker 3 (27:30):
Yeah, he really is creepy looking. Um, you can go
online to a lot of places and see actual images
of Robert.
Speaker 2 (27:39):
First and foremost, Robert, the doll.org. Just have to throw
that out there. I love, love that URL exists. That
is why he looked, he's like a creepy sailor. He
looks like kind of like a doll where it's like,
show me where the bad man touched you kind of doll. Um,
also like, like, like maybe like a, a dummy you
would use to do like CPR practice or something like that. But,
(28:02):
Very uncanny, these weird segments of fabric that are joined
together to make the different sections of his face that
seems very Hannibal Lecter-y. I don't know.
Speaker 3 (28:14):
I mean, obviously, no offense, Robert. No offense. So let's
talk about Robert. Robert was, let's say, the possession of?
It's a doll. It's a thing. So it was owned
by Robert Eugene Otto. That is a person.
Speaker 1 (28:30):
I propose we call Robert Eugene Otto Gene for the
purpose of this story, just to keep it clear.
Speaker 2 (28:37):
Fully, 100%.
Speaker 3 (28:37):
Gene was Robert's caretaker, let's say. And you can read
a lot of different stories, origin stories, some that claim
to be original, some that seem to be sort of
fan fiction. You can read just a ton of different
versions of Robert's story.
Speaker 2 (28:59):
But.
Speaker 3 (29:00):
Let's just talk about the official one that you can
find there on that website you just mentioned, Noel.
Speaker 2 (29:05):
Yes, it was created as a one-of-a-kind creepy doll by
the Stief Company. I'm thinking it might be Stief. I'm
going to go with Stief Company of Germany near the
turn of the century. I don't want to irritate Robert.
He is 40 inches tall and stuffed with With wood wool,
which is known as Excelsior, which I am tickled by
(29:30):
because Excelsior is also a term that journalists would maybe
use to define something of excellent quality, maximum luxury. And
it was... Marvel Comics legend Stan Lee's personal life motto, Excelsior,
with an exclamation mark at the end. But it's also
wood wool shavings. It's basically like wood sawdust-y type shavings
(29:51):
that you can use to stuff something with. So probably
already has a bit of a, you know, shed-like smell
to it. And yes, he is in fact dressed like
a sailor. In a little sailor suit. And at one point,
he was painted kind of like a court jester. But
all that stuff has worn off over the years. And
(30:12):
he is quite large, right?
Speaker 1 (30:14):
Yes. Yeah. He's a big Mickey, all his own. So
the official story is that the Otto family was a
pretty prominent family in Key West, Florida.
Speaker 2 (30:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (30:28):
And Otto's grandfather was on a trip to Germany in 1904.
This is where he is believed to have picked up
Robert as a gift for his grandson. The story is,
as Matt said, a little murky at this point because
the legends get a little bit juicier. You'll see one
(30:49):
that claims a young woman of, quote, Bahamian descent gave
Otto this doll either as a gift or as a curse,
kind of a poison apple for some unspecified slight. And
whatever the case, whether the legend or the official story,
the truth of the matter is that Otto becomes incredibly
(31:10):
enamored of and attached to this doll. He names it
after himself, Robert the Doll. Something interesting happens psychologically. He builds,
or he gets his folks to build something a boy's
home a boy's room in the attic in the family
attic just for robert you know complete with toys chairs
(31:32):
a bed the whole nine and then he started blaming
anything wrong that he did on this stall so someone
would say hey did you track in uh mud on
the floor or sand or something like that and he
would say that wasn't me that was robert and they
would say oh okay gene But this is starting to
(31:52):
get a little weird. Is this your imaginary friend, et cetera?
They probably didn't think about it at the time, but
I know a lot of our fellow conspiracy realists in
the audience are wondering, was this boy making a tulpa,
a thought form? Interesting.
Speaker 3 (32:06):
Yeah, or was he dealing with something mental health-like in
his life, some kind of disassociation or some kind of–
application of his own actions onto this thing. Anyway, I'm
not a psychologist. Who knows what was going on inside
(32:26):
Gene and or Robert, but it's definitely strange because it
wasn't just a childhood thing, right? This relationship between Robert
the man and Robert the doll continued.
Speaker 1 (32:40):
Yes, Gene became a pretty well-known regional artist who was
widely considered an eccentric and The partnership between Robert the
guy and Robert the doll continued well into adulthood. That's
an interesting point about disassociation, too. We would have to
ask where it came from. Could there have been some
(33:01):
sort of traumatic situation occurring? If so, that's lost to history. Eventually,
Robert the man, Robert Eugene Otto, passes away. His wife,
who survives him, has always hated this thing. You know
what I mean? She's of the mind that, you know,
call her conservative, but she's thinking a marriage is between
(33:24):
two people, not two people and a doll. Anyhow, as
soon as he passes away, she orders that this doll
be locked up in a cedar chest and hidden in
the attic, never touched again. She passes away, and years
and years after her death, This doll, Robert, is rediscovered.
(33:48):
And now, if you wish, you can visit Robert at
the East Martello Museum. Oh, we should mention, it wasn't
just a situation of Gene, Robert the man, being weird
around the doll. Other people said the doll would do
weird stuff. Like it would move, it would exhibit facial expressions.
Speaker 3 (34:10):
Maybe it would change.
Speaker 1 (34:11):
Yeah, it would change. It would people would hear voices
around it, things like that. And now, if you wish,
you can visit Robert. He still has his stuffed teddy bear, too,
because he had his own toys.
Speaker 2 (34:26):
Remember?
Speaker 3 (34:27):
Oh, dude, I forgot about that. That was that was
the whole thing. If you if you check out Robert
at the museum right now, he's holding a doll himself.
So it is a.
Speaker 2 (34:39):
I don't know, man.
Speaker 3 (34:41):
I wonder if that teddy bear then becomes the next thing.
Speaker 1 (34:47):
Somehow infected or it's a host. But it's strange because
if you look at the history of this guy, it
came into the public eye kind of around the same
time as Annabelle or its discovery, which means it was
also a few years after that Twilight Zone episode.
Speaker 2 (35:08):
Where does Teddy Ruxpin figure into all this? That's my
big question.
Speaker 1 (35:12):
My Teddy Ruxpin asked me not to include them in
this episode.
Speaker 2 (35:16):
Fair enough. My Teddy Ruxpin also has a bit of
a hold over me, so we'll just change the subject.
Speaker 3 (35:23):
Still my absolute favorite thing as a kid.
Speaker 1 (35:25):
Wait, did you put the other tapes in?
Speaker 3 (35:28):
Oh, I had so many tapes.
Speaker 2 (35:30):
Yeah, but did you put in, like, your Megadeth tapes? Oh, yeah.
Speaker 3 (35:35):
Well, no, it was.
Michael W.
Speaker 2 (35:38):
Smith.
Speaker 3 (35:39):
Well, that's not evil at all.
Speaker 2 (35:43):
Takes on a whole different feel when you put in
some Satan music. Did you hear that? Holy cow. Right
when I said Satan music, there was this huge thunderclap.
Speaker 1 (35:55):
I don't know if you guys can hear it on
my end, but it's still going. It's been going.
Speaker 3 (35:59):
That was the first big one I've heard in this recording.
And it was right after you said that.
Speaker 2 (36:05):
So.
Speaker 1 (36:06):
We know that when people go to visit Robert at
this museum, some people will still report that they've experienced
something they can't explain, and a lot of people write
to the doll after visiting him. Isn't that correct?
Speaker 3 (36:22):
That's right. Apology letters are often written to Robert for
visiting him without his permission. If you go to many
YouTube videos about Robert the doll, you will see in
the comments section, Post after post after post of people saying, hey, sorry, Robert,
just we want to learn about your story. Didn't mean
to disturb you or, you know, sorry for watching or
(36:42):
learning about you without your permission.
Speaker 2 (36:44):
Well, that's why I was joking about that earlier. I,
for one, would like to extend a heartfelt apology to
Robert for all the terrible things I said earlier in
the podcast. So please, for my humblest apologies, Robert, please,
please forgive me. Forgive me.
Speaker 1 (37:01):
Robert, I hope you're doing well. I feel no need
to apologize to you. I do wish you the best,
but I will point out that you seem to be
treated better than a lot of human beings these days.
Speaker 3 (37:14):
Oh, man, throw a shade at Robert. I am so
glad that we have an image of like looking behind you, Ben.
So when Robert just kind of creeps up behind your shoulder,
we'll be able to give you just a split second warning.
Speaker 1 (37:28):
That's not a ding. That's not a ding on Robert.
That's a ding on the human species. Treat each other better.
You know what I mean? Who else should you be
apologizing to, folks? Anyway, that's... Anyway, anyway, those are the circumstances.
We just thought that's an interesting story because it shows
that there's not just one example of this. In fact,
(37:51):
there are multiple other examples. There's Leta the doll in Australia.
There's Okiku in Japan. The list goes on and on.
So we have these cases of things that predate Annabelle,
the most famous haunted doll, by a bit. But the
truth of the matter is that the story goes much,
(38:12):
much deeper. You see, haunted dolls, or some version of them,
date back into antiquity What are we talking about? We'll
tell you after a word from our sponsors. We're back.
And we're going back in time. We're going far, far
(38:34):
earlier than the turn of the 20th century. We're going far,
far past the creation of the U.S., We're looking at
early civilization. The earliest predecessors of things like Annabelle and
Robert were effigies. They were something called poppets, P-O-P-P-E-T-S. In folklore,
(38:56):
these are dolls that are made to represent a specific
person for a specific reason. And they were created by
all sorts of early civilizations.
Speaker 2 (39:04):
Yeah. Wasn't there a thing about poppets in The Crucible?
Speaker 1 (39:07):
No.
Speaker 3 (39:08):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (39:08):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (39:08):
Yeah. to eat or something, but yeah, no, I'm pretty
sure that was definitely a cursed object or it was
an art item in the crucible that maybe was tied
back to the bewitching of, of many of these children
(39:32):
in the, in the village.
Speaker 4 (39:33):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (39:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (39:34):
You're correct.
Speaker 3 (39:35):
There's a cousin to the poppet that we're going to
talk about. That's basically the thing that you probably have
in your mind, even while we're talking about them, if
you are not remembering the crucible stuff, but, but these
were made all over the place. We're talking Rome and,
In Africa, West Africa, in Egypt, these poppets were used
or these specific types of effigies. And a lot of
(39:57):
times it wasn't necessarily for a bad thing. That's what's
kind of cool about these. Sometimes it was almost like
a sin eater, spirit eater kind of thing where. The
poppet could help somebody like you could remove a curse
from somebody by using one of these things. You could
heal somebody perhaps by using one of these things. And
(40:18):
if it was made of, you know, a specific human,
a specific person. But the other thing is, and this
is where the kind of cousin to it comes in.
You could perhaps make one of a person and then
curse the doll. And then it would imbue that curse
into the actual person that it represented.
Speaker 1 (40:36):
Right. break the legs, put nails into the eyes, things
of that nature. That's correct. Versions of this practice continue
in the modern day. It's not as widespread. You hear that?
Or is it? This is the perfect weather to record this.
(41:00):
So versions of it do continue. They're probably just not
as widespread. We do at this point want to make
an important statement about so-called voodoo dolls.
Speaker 3 (41:12):
Yeah, and that is the cousin that I was referring
to that you may have heard of before.
Speaker 1 (41:16):
Got it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You can find them
in novelty stores. There's even a couple of like Instructable
or WikiHow articles about how to make your own legit ones.
The term voodoo doll usually describes several different kinds of
effigy creation that These different cultures across the world, but
to be absolutely clear, these kinds of things don't really
(41:40):
have a prominent place in Haitian voodoo or Louisiana voodoo,
which are two distinct yet related actual religions. So a
lot of the conflation of these sorts of effigies with
the practices that we would term loosely voodoo come about
(42:01):
from racism in the past. This was probably more common.
The people practicing that kind of stuff in the crucible
are being accused of doing so. They're being accused of
having a lineage dating back to European pre-Christian or pagan practices.
It's a very important distinction. Dolls are not the only
(42:24):
thing that has been alleged to be haunted. They steal
the spotlight today. But let's remember fiction is full of
things like haunted cars, a love of Stephen King's, haunted boxes,
haunted houses, haunted shoes, etc. It turns out there is
an entire cottage industry of haunted objects out there today.
(42:48):
And thanks to the great work by a New York
Times journalist, Alicia DeSantis, you can take a closer look
at this subculture today. that is selling haunted items on
eBay and they want to give you an opportunity to
buy one. Spoiler, most of them are dolls, but there's
(43:09):
other stuff.
Speaker 2 (43:12):
Too.
Speaker 3 (43:13):
I'll give you an example right here. I am looking
at an active item for sale right now. It is
titled Haunted Active Dolls Paranormal Spirit of Vanessa. And it
is a Looks like an American Girl doll, maybe a little,
maybe even a little better made.
Speaker 2 (43:35):
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (43:35):
The craftsmanship on American Girl dolls is very high, but
this looks pretty incredible. The blue eyes are haunting.
Speaker 1 (43:43):
There we go. I found one that I was reading earlier.
I just felt the vibe of this. Gothic cursed item, devil, Satan,
Ouija board, Baphomet, paranormal, psychic tarot.
Speaker 2 (43:58):
That is a winning combination right there, my friend. Is
that all in one item?
Speaker 1 (44:03):
13 watchers right now. Yeah, it's all one item. It's
only 55 bucks, OBO, or best offer. So for that
and $ 14 shipping, you could get all those keywords together today.
Speaker 2 (44:15):
That's like a cursed turducken. It is. Yeah, that's a
good way to say it.
Speaker 1 (44:20):
A cursed turducken.
Speaker 3 (44:23):
Dude, just you guys, I'm looking at, I don't know
what this is. It's an authentic... Dybbuk.
Speaker 2 (44:30):
Dybbuk?
Speaker 1 (44:31):
Dybbuk.
Speaker 2 (44:32):
Dybbuk. That's a gremlin or goblin from the Jewish faith,
if I'm not mistaken.
Speaker 1 (44:38):
You are correct. A malevolent spirit that can enter and
possess the body of a living person unless they're exercised.
And there's an idea that has something in common with
the myths about jinn, that they could be restrained in
a specific type of container under the correct type of ritual.
Speaker 3 (44:58):
Whoa, there are a lot of these for sale on eBay.
Speaker 2 (45:01):
Can you imagine what it must be like on the
dark web? That's where the real stuff is.
Speaker 3 (45:09):
Jeez, okay.
Speaker 1 (45:10):
Yeah, so you can go and see this stuff yourself
right now. And if you peruse eBay, like Noel, Matt,
and I are doing, you'll find everything from haunted jewelry
to haunted UPS boxes, for some reason, feathers, pieces of frankly,
ordinary looking wood. But DeSantis has something to note about this.
(45:35):
I like the way she put it. She said that
they might be said not to be haunted so much
as enchanted for specific reasons, for luck, for fortune, for
that you have to have a positive environment, you have
to have a good attitude when you're handling this stuff,
and that not all good luck applies the same. So
there are notes in these things or these biddings where
(45:57):
they'll say things like, quote, this chip is for money
luck only, not general good fortune or finding love, which
are different spells. And one thing I enjoyed was the disclaimers.
Because when you buy a lot of stuff online, you'll
see the fine print and the notices. Someone will say, okay, hey,
(46:20):
this is a PS5 or whatever, but it ships without
the box. Or I've got this GI Joe, but it
doesn't have the little backpack. There are things like this
on the paranormal listings, and they say stuff like, quote,
As required per eBay's policy on the sale of paranormal items,
(46:42):
this is for the sale of the tangible item only.
No promise of a spirit attached.
Speaker 2 (46:47):
Sorry.
Speaker 3 (46:49):
Sorry. There may be no game inside.
Speaker 2 (46:52):
It's just a console.
Speaker 1 (46:54):
Yeah, this is just the box, to be clear. Yeah,
the complaints can give you a chuckle, too, because there
are people who seem to be genuinely concerned that shipping
this item is may disassociate it from the spirit, or
they feel like they ordered something believing it to be
paranormal or inhabited by something, and they're just not catching
(47:17):
any Jeff Goldblum-esque vibes off of it. So they think
that it's... No, there is a typical response, too, from
the sellers. They say it takes time. You have to
spend time with it. You have to be familiar with
it so that it feels comfortable enough to speak with you.
Speaker 3 (47:34):
You know what we should do, Ben? What? We should
build a panopticon and then in every cell put one
of these haunted objects and lock it in there. And then,
you know, just observe them with cameras and other sensors for,
I don't know, 20 years, something like that.
Speaker 1 (47:51):
Yeah, I think we could probably work something like that
out in the show budget. Folks, we need volunteers. Let
us know what your favorite haunted objects are that could
occupy our panopticon. Extra points for a Big Mickey-esque figure.
Speaker 3 (48:07):
Yeah, or like a fridge that survived an earthquake or
something or a building collapse. And then if there isn't
a person actively looking at it, it does something.
Speaker 1 (48:20):
Or like a telephone that is detached but still speaks
to forces beyond our dimension.
Speaker 3 (48:31):
Yeah, oh, that would be amazing.
Speaker 1 (48:32):
Or a microwave. Just like a badass, crazy microwave. I
don't know why.
Speaker 3 (48:39):
It's just a badass microwave.
Speaker 1 (48:42):
It's like the Wolverine of the crew.
Speaker 2 (48:43):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (48:43):
Do you think.
Speaker 2 (48:45):
The brave little toaster was haunted, Ben? Do you think
he was somehow embodied by some sort of malevolent spirit?
I know he was brave and super cute, but toasters
aren't supposed to hop around like that and go exploring,
going on adventures.
Speaker 1 (48:59):
That's true.
Speaker 3 (48:59):
100%. Even the Ghostbusters....
Speaker 1 (49:02):
Toaster just kind of jumped around a little. Yeah, I
don't know. I'd be all for haunted kitchen appliances. As
a matter of fact, that's going to kind of come
into play because we have a twist for you at
the end of this, folks. But here we have it
as it stands, ancient folklore. Spiritual practices live on. Commodified
(49:23):
to a degree due to the nature of the society
in which we live. Some people just doubtlessly enjoy the stories.
I mean, it's cool. You know, like, hey, I got
this haunted accordion on eBay. That's a true story on
my part. It was advertised as haunted. And I was like,
the price is right. If by haunted they meant some
(49:45):
of the reeds were broken, then yes, I guess it
is haunted. But other people really enjoy the mythology of
these things. And then some people truly do believe there
is something inexplicable and supernatural afoot. We can say there's
psychology behind it, definitely. There's this urgent need to anthropomorphize everything.
(50:06):
Because it's our way of explaining the familiarity or discomfort
we feel around certain objects. Almost everybody has a lucky
insert here. This is my lucky hat. This is my
lucky shirt kind of thing.
Speaker 3 (50:24):
Mostly underwear, but yeah.
Speaker 1 (50:25):
Mostly underwear, yeah. These are my business underoos. These are
my going out underoos.
Speaker 3 (50:34):
These are my business Tommy Johns.
Speaker 1 (50:39):
Cue Flight of the Conchords.
Speaker 3 (50:41):
There you go.
Speaker 1 (50:43):
It makes sense then, though, doesn't it, guys, that dolls
would be so prominent in this kind of folklore? Because
they already look just enough like a person. Oh, yeah.
Speaker 3 (50:53):
For sure. I wonder if you guys are doing this
more recently, actually. Anthropomorphizing dolls. stuff in your house or I,
or any of you guys doing that right now?
Speaker 2 (51:05):
I always have to remorifies the backs of trucks. I
feel like they have faces on them.
Speaker 3 (51:09):
I see like, yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (51:12):
That's awesome.
Speaker 1 (51:13):
Cars are designed in, in the front end, at least
a little kind of like face. Like you could just
have one big headlight that goes across. You could have three,
you could have eight and have like a spider looking car,
but no two and a grill, a little mouth, little
face and, Is there hurdles towards you at 85 plus
miles an hour? And you have just enough time to go, aw.
Speaker 3 (51:38):
I'm wondering, Noel, about the backs of trucks.
Speaker 2 (51:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (51:43):
Like a semi trailer?
Speaker 2 (51:44):
Yeah, semi.
Speaker 3 (51:45):
Uh-huh.
Speaker 2 (51:46):
They sort of have like, you know, the seam going
down the back of it is like the bridge of
the nose. And then like the little guardrail is sort
of the nose. And sometimes there's like mud flaps. Those
are like the teeth kind of, you know what I mean?
Speaker 3 (51:58):
Oh, okay. I see it.
Speaker 1 (51:59):
So are the doors, the loading doors for the trailer,
are they like big eyes or are they more like
the cheek area?
Speaker 2 (52:05):
It depends. It depends on where the lights are attached
and whether there is any signage or anything that adds
to the illusion. But, yeah, they certainly can be, Ben.
They can be cheeks. I'm having a hard time explaining it.
It's something you just have to see for yourself. But
be on the lookout. Next time you're stuck behind a semi,
just look for the face.
Speaker 3 (52:24):
A lorry for anyone.
Speaker 2 (52:26):
A lorry, indeed. One last thing for me is, you
know those little hooks you use to hang coats on?
They look like drunken octopuses that are trying to put
their dukes up to fight with you.
Speaker 1 (52:38):
I saw something on Reddit about that and I can't
unsee it. It's like, especially when they're screwed in with
two screws.
Speaker 2 (52:45):
And they're offset a little bit. So it's like one
of them is kind of like a little bit.
Speaker 1 (52:48):
It's a drunkard.
Speaker 4 (52:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (52:50):
Yeah. It's a drunkard octopus. But we all have things
like this. There's so many things that you probably encountered
in your life where you thought, that looks like a
face or that looks like a figure, a humanoid figure.
And that's because your brain has been evolved to see
those sorts of patterns. So like, I'll admit during this pandemic,
(53:14):
as you said, Matt, we all kind of, because we
were in a smaller environment, most of the time we
may have accelerated some of this anthropomorphization about eight months in,
you know, I looked around, I realized, all this in
my kitchen has a personality. Now there's the good bowl,
the trustworthy one. You know what I mean? There's, there's,
(53:37):
there's the fork is kind of bold. It has panache.
And then there's that one spoon. You can't trust it.
There's that one spoon. It's the Judas spoon. And that's like,
clearly that's just psychology. Maybe that's just the force of
boredom and a bottle.
Speaker 3 (53:55):
I think we're all, We're all just terribly damaged by
all of this, but it's okay.
Speaker 1 (54:02):
I think it's going to stay with us. I think
Noah is still going to be seeing truck faces. I
think all our listeners are going to still see weird
things in like vacuums or trash can lids that open
up like mouths. And yeah, I don't trust that spoon.
And I don't. It knows what it did. So for now,
the answer to can an object be haunted seems to
(54:24):
be primarily something like, yes, at least it can be
haunted by the human need to explain the inexplicable and
to create personalities as a way of defining our own
self-perceived relationships with things. And yes, of course, caveat, if
science achieves a breakthrough... and proves that non-physical events can
(54:46):
indeed leave impact on physical objects, this changes everything. This
changes absolutely everything. We'll have to redo this episode. Until then,
right now, as much of a bummer as it is
to say it, there is no proof, universally accepted proof,
of genuinely haunted objects. But there is one last twist,
(55:08):
something we wanted to save until the end, in the
very near future, We may have haunted objects, fellow conspiracy realists.
We may very well build our own ghost.
Speaker 3 (55:24):
Uh, yes, we may build ourselves into ghosts or build
a ghost out of some. I think it'll be some very,
very smart person that we want to keep around to
be like, no, don't go. We, we, we need you still. We,
we need to know what we need to do next. Um, So,
you know, Mark Zuckerberg or somebody.
Speaker 2 (55:44):
Oh, boy.
Speaker 3 (55:46):
Anyway, but no, it's so true because we've talked about
this before in our attempts to achieve immortality in some
way or another. We are using computer simulations or attempts
at computer simulation and very, very, very fast computers with
(56:06):
tons of memory to be able to simulate a person
or a consciousness. And we've been attempting to do this,
and we may perfect it.
Speaker 1 (56:16):
Yeah, which is terrifying, should be terrified. If you're more
excited than terrified, then congratulations, kind of like me. And
we both have a lot of stuff we should work
on in that case. Yeah, Matt, you're on the money.
The first truly haunted object on the way is probably
not a dusty stuffed animal. It's probably not some cursed
(56:38):
spear from an ancient war. will instead be the result
of something called whole brain emulation, or WBE. The idea
of uploading the entirety of the human brain, modeling it, thoughts, memories, feelings, personalities,
putting it on a hard drive, putting it in the cloud.
This is a possibility. Now, conceptually, we can understand how
(57:07):
it would be done. We can see the horizons. where
this occurs. We have a lot of technological hurdles there.
We have a lot of ethical hurdles that we haven't
considered yet. The main obstacle right now, ship of thesis aside,
is that first we have to manage to achieve something
(57:28):
called the connectome, just like connect, O-M-E, a complete map
of the human brain. We have been able to do
one complete map, Of one creature, it's a nematode. So
we know it can be done, in theory. But a
nematode has about 302 neurons. Human brain has about 86 billion.
(57:51):
So we don't know how to map it.
Speaker 3 (57:53):
We just need a couple thousand more years and we'll
be there.
Speaker 2 (57:55):
We'll be good.
Speaker 1 (57:56):
Well, we'd also want to map a living human brain, right?
Ethics aside, would it be easier to map a living
human brain if you didn't have to worry about what
happened to that brain.
Speaker 4 (58:13):
Ew.
Speaker 2 (58:14):
I know.
Speaker 1 (58:15):
It gets sticky really quickly.
Speaker 3 (58:17):
I was going to say, I'm wondering if there's some
kind of, because obviously it's our inability to see into
the brain, deep into the brain enough with enough resolution
to be able to pick out those, you know, each
neural pathway. Because you could definitely get a pretty cool
image of brains just by scanning them. but it's not
(58:38):
the same thing as looking at, like you said, all
of the neurons.
Speaker 1 (58:42):
Right, and the tools we have, things like MRI and
so on, it's exactly as you described. There's just not
the level of sophistication we need here. But if someone
can map a brain and all its interconnections, the next
step would be trying to make an emulation of it
that could run, you know, run the copy of Paul
(59:05):
Mission Control Deccan, creating something that we'll call a substrate
independent mind, or to be cutesy about it, a sim.
If this sim could exist, then it would inherently be conscious,
even if we don't understand what consciousness is for us.
It would be literally a ghost in the machine. For now,
(59:27):
this is hypothetical. For now, this is hypothetical. But the
technology and the research are continuing at a breakneck pace.
I think it's very optimistic, Matt, that you say the
first immortal, the first ghost, first thing to haunt an
object like this might be one of the world's smartest people.
(59:47):
I am tempted to say I think it would be
one of the world's wealthiest people who was terrified of dying.
What do you guys think about that?
Speaker 4 (59:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (59:56):
I think my example would hold true for probably both
of those.
Speaker 2 (59:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:00:00):
Yeah, you did nail it on that one.
Speaker 3 (01:00:03):
Ben, that's exactly... I can't remember which season of Westworld
it is, but that's exactly one of the main plot
points in one of HBO's Westworld seasons where it's essentially
Ghost in the Machine. It's physical... Well, it's programs that
are software built into hardware that then the software gets
(01:00:25):
transferred as a ghost into a server where now they
only exist virtually. But it's the full consciousness of those,
at one point, physical beings.
Speaker 2 (01:00:38):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (01:00:39):
That's interesting.
Speaker 1 (01:00:40):
Kind of like San Junipero, right? Yeah, Black Mirror. This.
There's a reason that fiction centers on this kind of
stuff and orbits these sort of concepts. Science fiction in
particular as a genre is often prescient in one way
or another. So don't be surprised if within your lifetimes
(01:01:04):
humanity finally has the haunted dolls it has loved and
feared since the dawn of recorded time. They may just
end up being computers. And one of those ghosts one day,
might be you. So what do you think, folks? Have
you had any experience with mysterious or cursed objects? Let
us know. What objects appeared at personalities and faces for you?
(01:01:29):
That's a very interesting question too, right?
Speaker 3 (01:01:31):
Oh, and if you have those things, I want to
see pictures of the thing from your point of view.
I definitely want to see that. I'll take a picture
of the container that holds all my dog food that
has a giant flap on it. And it's exactly how
you described it, Ben. It totally talks and yeah, it's,
it's pretty amazing.
Speaker 1 (01:01:52):
Does it have its own like favorite dog food?
Speaker 3 (01:01:55):
Oh yeah. And it gets so upset if I give
it the grain free stuff. Cause it's like, you know,
this is bad for these dogs.
Speaker 1 (01:02:02):
And I'm like, God, man, just, It's talking trash to you.
It's like, oh, oh, Frederick came to play today. Well,
guess what, buddy?
Speaker 2 (01:02:10):
No games.
Speaker 3 (01:02:11):
I thought grain-free dog food was good for my dogs.
I thought that's how it worked, but apparently it's not.
Speaker 2 (01:02:17):
So, sorry.
Speaker 1 (01:02:18):
And send us, yes, send us your favorite pictures of
things that appear to have faces, bonus points, if they
are trucks, automobiles. Send us your classics. And let us know, seriously,
what you think about what we've touched on here. And
if you believe that you have found a genuinely haunted
object or you have witnessed one, of course we want
(01:02:40):
to hear about it. We try to make it easy
to find us online.
Speaker 2 (01:02:43):
That's right. You can find us on Facebook, on Twitter,
where we're Conspiracy Stuff. We're Conspiracy Stuff Show on Instagram.
You can also join our Facebook group, Here's Where It
Gets Crazy. Just navigate over to Facebook, type in Here's
Where It Gets Crazy, and answer a couple of super
basic questions that any listener of the show should be
able to answer, and you're in. Lots of fun memery
and discussion to be had. And hey, while you're on
(01:03:03):
the internet, why don't you go over to Apple Podcasts
and write us a review for the show? That really
helps people discover the show and helps us get ranked
on that old Apple Podcasts chart.
Speaker 3 (01:03:12):
That's right. Also, don't forget to go to youtube.com slash
conspiracy stuff. That's where you can see videos of these
conversations and episodes. And you can also subscribe, tell your friends,
make sure you click the buttons that alert you when
new episodes come out. I don't know which ones those are,
but you'll figure it out. If you don't want to
do that stuff, you can always give us a call.
Speaker 1 (01:03:32):
That's correct. If you feel like you're more of an
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You have three minutes. Those three minutes are yours. Tell
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(01:03:54):
if you have a message that you would prefer to
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We're grateful for all of them. You can send us
(01:04:16):
yourself a good old-fashioned email where we are.
Speaker 2 (01:04:19):
Conspiracy at iHeartRadio.com.
Speaker 3 (01:04:40):
Stuff They Don't Want You To Know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Fellow conspiracy realists, we are coming to you with this
week's classic. We're on the road pretty frequently here toward
the end of the year, and we're returning to old
school spooky stuff. Guys, do you remember back in 2021
when we asked whether an object could be haunted?
Speaker 2 (00:21):
How could I forget? I'm still haunted by it to
this day.
Speaker 3 (00:26):
What is that Stephen King piece of writing about a
haunted car?
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Which one? There are like three.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
There's Christine. There's from a Buick. I can't remember the
year of the Buick.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
It's the eight.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
Yes.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
But then there's the haunted laundry machine. Short story.
Speaker 4 (00:43):
The Mangler.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
Where it just so happened to get gelatin spilled on
it that stood in for horse hooves. And the man
loves the cursed object.
Speaker 3 (00:51):
Does maximum overdrive count?
Speaker 2 (00:53):
Maximum Overdrive absolutely counts. They were technically aliens and not haunted.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
Well, also, guys, I have some artifacts here that some
people would consider haunted, including a very old wooden sculpture
of a baboon.
Speaker 3 (01:09):
Oh, well, here's my big question, guys. With all of
these titles, all these stories, where does the spirit go
to haunt something? Inside an object. Where does it exist?
Speaker 2 (01:19):
That's a good question. If it were a car, I
would say in the engine.
Speaker 1 (01:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
A catalytic converter.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
Protect the spark plugs.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
If it were a laundry machine, I don't know how
laundry machines work.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
That laundry machine store, the Mangler is such a good
piece of writing.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
It is good. No, it's fun. I'm ragging on it
a little bit, but it is a lot of fun.
But also just... I don't know. I don't really know
how the mechanics of those things work, so I'm not
sure where the soul of the demon would reside.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
They break it down in the story. Okay, I'm derailing us, folks.
This is our classic episode. This asks whether an object
can be haunted, and the ultimate answer surprised us. We
think it's going to surprise you as well.
Speaker 4 (02:01):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies, history is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now Or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of I Heart Radio.
Speaker 3 (02:25):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
My name is Noel.
Speaker 1 (02:28):
They call me Ben. We're joined as always with our
super producer, Paul Mission Control Deccant. Most importantly, you are you,
you are here, and that makes this Stuff They Don't
Want You To Know. Long time listeners, you'll recall that
we have often, we've often touched on the subject of curses.
(02:49):
We've often touched on the subject of people who have
interacted with things in extraordinary ways they cannot explain. In fact,
in an earlier Listener Mail segment, we explored the bizarre
story of an anonymous tourist who stole an artifact from
the ancient disaster site of Pompeii. This tourist... came back
(03:12):
15 years later and returned the object. It's not that
she had some sort of sudden pang of conscience. Instead,
she believed, hardcore believed, this object was cursed, that it
was plaguing her with all sorts of terrible luck that
simply could not be explained by mundane means. And I'm
wondering if maybe a good way for us to set
(03:35):
off on our exploration of today's topic is to talk
about these objects that surround us in our lives. Matt, Noel,
did you all ever have an object in your family
or in your childhood or even in current day that
you felt was on some, maybe hard to explain level, unlucky?
(03:55):
There was something weird about it? Some vibe it gave
off as though you had psychometry?
Speaker 2 (04:00):
Never been a big fan of ceramic clowns, for example.
Nothing specific, but A mutual friend of all three of ours,
Sarah Kotanoff, who does podcast ad sales stuff and we
used to work with years ago, she is obsessed with
haunted objects. So we should ask her. But we went
to that store in New York once. I believe it's called– gosh,
(04:22):
I can't remember what it's called. But there was a
show called Auditorium or Oddities on Science Channel that was
about this quirky couple that runs this oddity shop. And
we went in there with Sarah, and she immediately asked them–
Are any of these objects haunted or cursed? And they're like, no,
we don't do that.
Speaker 3 (04:40):
It's not haunted in the same way that we're going
to be talking about today, but this is my grandfather's
wedding ring, and I've been wearing it for quite a while.
And I have to say, I believe that it's just
my knowledge that I'm wearing his ring. It makes me
think about him a lot. But I swear to you,
he just.
His voice appears to me... not in a, an actual manifestation,
(05:04):
but like I can, I can hear myself thinking his
thoughts way, way more now that I've been wearing this ring. Um,
this is also his stamp. I don't know if you
probably can't read that. This is his stamp.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (05:18):
Nice to stamp things with it. Uh, but yeah, I,
I don't, I don't have anything that is unlucky necessarily.
I've got a story I can tell you about this
house in general. Um, and the luck or the unluck
that it has brought, but that's for another day.
Speaker 1 (05:33):
All right.
Speaker 3 (05:34):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (05:35):
I'm writing it down. You guys know, I keep a
little pad here where I write things in my, my language. So, uh,
we are going to follow up on that. I've got,
I've got a couple of slide. I've got a couple of, uh,
I guess you would call them unusual possessions. Uh, and
it's funny too, that we call objects possessions.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
Don't we?
Speaker 1 (05:57):
Uh, One that I can see off camera now is
one that I personally hesitate to touch. It's a carving
of a mandrill from, I believe, West Africa. It's West
African in origin. And that is also how it came
to me and why it stays in my house, even
(06:20):
though I don't particularly like messing with it i would
say i respect it but that story is a story
for a another day as well the point is that
we all have things like this things that we imbue
with some sort of meaning that we anthropomorphize in a degree.
(06:41):
You might have something that you believe, or you like
to think it has a personality, even if you consider
yourself a really skeptical person. Human beings will name their
cars and their ships and other vessels. There's even an
old cultural belief, I believe in Japan, that once an
object reaches 100 years old, it acquires a kind of
(07:05):
spirit of its own. And These stories of objects inhabited
by something good or bad, they occur throughout human history.
They continue in the modern day in ways that may
surprise some of us. And not all of these objects
have the same type of allegedly supernatural aspects. In fact,
(07:26):
some people, like the infamous Ed and Lorraine Warren, will
tell you that certain objects are not just bringers of misfortune,
but they are home to something somehow sentient. So, can
an object be haunted? By the way, the weather here
in Atlanta today is perfect for this. This is stormy
(07:47):
night weather.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
Tiny Cthulhu says an object can definitely be haunted.
Speaker 3 (07:51):
Well, well, no matter what Cthulhu or any other ancient
one says, there is no scientific proof at this moment
that any object has ever been haunted.
Speaker 1 (08:01):
Here are the facts. Yeah, first things first. At least
at the time of this recording, there's no proof that
is universally accepted that anything in history, including objects, has
been haunted. And by proof, we mean there's nothing in
the world that we know of now that everyone can
(08:23):
point to and agree, yes, there is a ghost in
this toaster, and it speaks to us through messages burned
into the bread. That just hasn't happened yet, or something
like that. And that's because... for something to be haunted,
there would have to be some kind of consciousness attached, right?
Some sort of sentience. And we don't know very much
(08:46):
about our own conscious states. We don't even know what
happens to the thing we call consciousness when our physical
hardware breaks down.
Speaker 2 (08:54):
That's right. Obviously, research is ongoing, and it's the kind
of thing that can go deep in many directions, whether
it's science, the study of the actual hardware you speak of, Ben,
the brain itself, or more into metaphysical or even spiritual
realms as to, you know, is the brain just a brain?
(09:15):
Is it imbued with something more like that's part of
some greater divine connectivity with the universe or some sort
of spiritual deity like a soul? So there are billions
of people across the world who might believe that they,
in particular, or a group that they're associated with, know
exactly what happens when you die, when the brain dies.
(09:39):
Whether it's instant nothingness, you know, that's what I typically picture,
and it's kind of scary. Or reincarnation, seems a lot
more fun. Or a particular type of eternity or afterlife
that might look a certain way or feel a certain
way or be based around a certain set of rules.
Or speaking of rules, if you don't follow them, you
(10:01):
might go to the bad place, the very bad place,
depending on what you've done in your life on this earth,
the way you've chosen to use that equipment that Ben
was talking about. The problem is that among all of
these folks, the scientists, the philosophers, the spiritual leaders, they
(10:23):
all might have a strong case, or at least they
might think they do, as to what the real truth
is behind sentience and understanding and being. But as we
all know, no one really knows. No one really has
that definitive proof that will shut all of those other
perspectives down. There is no right or true answer that
we know of. Therefore, a lot of this exists in
(10:45):
the realm of belief, as does the idea of haunting.
Speaker 3 (10:49):
That is correct. And one of the primary reasons here
is something that we covered a little while back. Can't
remember the exact episode, but we discussed the current impossibility
of measuring whatever the actual thing is, the energy that
would transfer between a consciousness, a human or any animal
(11:10):
or whatever into an object, whatever that stuff is, whether
it's physical, metaphysical, whatever, we have no way of measuring
that thing, that stuff yet, if there is any stuff
at all.
Speaker 1 (11:23):
Right, right. We don't know what we're searching for necessarily.
We don't know how to define it. And to be
absolutely fair, when we're saying that no one has a
right or true answer, one way to look at it is,
The problem is that absolutely no one has ever been
(11:44):
able to convince everyone else that their answer is correct.
So there may be, there may well be an answer
about the afterlife. And it may be very specific. And
one of those many religions or many theories that arose
since the dawn of recorded history may be in fact correct.
It's just like, you know, it's almost 8 billion people
(12:07):
trying to order a pizza. And, you know, we can't
even agree whether it should be a pizza. There's somebody
there's like a whole, you know, group of a billion
other people who say, guys, we should we should have salad.
This is not a cheat day. That's that's kind of
where we're at. And that's where we have been at
for a long time. But we can't we don't know
(12:28):
what to measure. Like if you lose your car keys, great,
because that means you know what you're looking for. We
are looking for something that we cannot really define. And yes,
I think that story about the 21 grams as the
weight of the soul is amazing, but there are a
(12:48):
lot of problems if you look into it. Anyway, so
that's one side of it. There's another side here. There's
a conflicting fact. It is a fact, inarguably, that for
thousands and thousands of years, people around the world, independent
of one another, have decided to revere, to fear, to avoid,
(13:09):
or in some cases, gather toward objects and places they
believe hold extraordinary power. A god under a mountain, a
ghost haunting the site of an ancient grave, an entity,
you know, maybe anchored to a sword or a staff
or a spear. or a demon inhabiting a doll. So
(13:30):
were all of these people, these literally millions and millions
of people across the span of human history, just collectively
making shit up? That seems really unlikely. That seems incredibly unlikely.
And so because of that, it seems like we have
two inarguable facts that appear to be in opposition. No
(13:51):
scientifically accepted proof that ghosts exist, and countless examples, again,
of millions and millions of people believing wholeheartedly that they do.
So in today's episode, we're diving into the space between
these two conflicting facts.
Speaker 3 (14:09):
And that's- Oh, wait, is it liminal?
Speaker 1 (14:11):
I was going to skip it, but you got me.
You got me. It's just such a convenient phrase. We're
diving into this space between these two conflicting facts, and
let's see how we can respond. to this question can
an object be haunted we'll get into it after a
word from our sponsor here's where it gets crazy oddly
(14:41):
enough the best place to begin here is with dolls
did you guys uh like no you said uh you've
got a You've got a particular weakness for creepy ceramic
clown figurines. Those are kind of doll-like.
Speaker 2 (14:55):
I suppose so. I was more, you know, dolls for
young boys, which we call action figures. I was very
into He-Man and Ninja Turtles and, you know, G.I. Joe
and stuff like that. I even had a weird, like,
crossover interest in My Little Pony growing up. I remember
that very distinctly. Dolls, yeah. I mean, they're really just dolls.
(15:16):
They're just poseable figurines of some sort. I guess the
idea of dolls tends to be associated with young girls,
but that also feels a little, you know, in this
day and age overly gendered. I mean, dolls are obviously
for anyone. But they certainly can be creepy, those porcelain
ones with the very, very white and expressionless faces and
(15:42):
seemingly real hair, you know?
Speaker 1 (15:44):
Yeah, gender is a construct. Dolls are for any kind
of creep who wants one.
Speaker 3 (15:51):
Good point, Ben.
Speaker 2 (15:54):
Good point. You think of people's grandmothers, though, having rooms
just overflowing with these things and just looking down upon
you from high shelves. Thankfully, my grandmother was not one
of those people, but bless you to anyone who has
one of those and had to grow up around that
kind of horror.
Speaker 3 (16:08):
I'm just going to posit something here. My son is five.
We've talked about him a couple times. He loves stuffed animals,
so not quite dolls, but similar because a lot of
doll makers– especially when we're going to talk about in
a little bit, we're originally making a stuffed animal or
stuffed animals as a product, and then dolls came later, generally.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
Not always.
Speaker 3 (16:30):
That's not always the case. But stuffed animals, you guys.
I think you've seen it before, maybe, just everybody on
this call, but my son... was gifted a Mickey Mouse
doll that is like human-sized. It's bigger than my son.
Speaker 1 (16:45):
Oh, I remember that. Yeah, I remember Mickey.
Speaker 2 (16:48):
Is that one of those gifts where as a parent
you're kind of like, thanks?
Speaker 3 (16:51):
Well, I mean, he loved it at the time when
he first got it. He still loves it now. Calls
him Big Mickey. At night when I'm putting my son
to sleep and that thing is in the room, I
am telling you, no matter what my personal beliefs, just
sitting it in the corner in the shadows and seeing
its dimensions there, there is something utterly creepy about it.
(17:15):
And I don't know how it, it doesn't give my
son nightmares. He says he feels safer knowing that it's there.
Speaker 2 (17:21):
Well, I grew up with it, you know, it's true.
Speaker 1 (17:24):
Like I, I've got, um, I probably had a different
background from you guys because in my, uh, earlier years, years,
my very early years, I did have, um, some sketchy
family characters, my loved dearly. Uh, one of them I
may have mentioned to you guys off air before was
(17:45):
my great aunt nine, uh, spelled like the spelled like
the number. And she was, um, regarded as a practitioner
of things that might be considered, you She had quite
a collection of all sorts of interesting things and artifacts.
(18:09):
And this was the first person I met who had
dolls that she considered dangerous. Dolls that were made for
a purpose of specific types. And this is something... that
is going to be familiar with a lot of the
folklorist in the crowd today. It's also an ancient practice
(18:29):
and it's practice I was not aware of at the time,
but we'll, we'll get to it. So I guess in
a way I had early experiences with dangerous dolls and, um,
my aunt nine has passed on to whatever is on
the other side of, uh, this crazy improv exercise we
call life. But I, I also, I think that colored
(18:52):
my perception of, of dolls in general, you know, when
I would see other people with these things, I would
inevitably think like, Oh, what are they, what are they
doing with this one? Is this like a, is this
like a Barbie or is this like a don't touch it?
Someone will get sick kind of thing. We all have
(19:15):
this place. And I love the point about dolls versus
action figures. They're really the same thing. They're figurines of
different genres or types. But yeah, we're talking about the
things that are commonly regarded as toys or collector's items
here in the modern age. For some of us, those
are very nostalgic relics of childhood. For others, they're irredeemably creepy.
(19:41):
It's no surprise that when people talk about haunted objects nowadays,
they tend to talk most often about dolls and And
there are a couple of pop culture reasons that are
very obvious that we'll get to. But one of the
most infamous haunted objects in 2021 is a doll called Annabelle.
(20:01):
And this comes to us from the Warrens that we
mentioned at the top that we also did an episode on.
I forgot about that.
Speaker 3 (20:07):
Is it a two part? No, it's just a one parter.
It's great. Really great info on the Warrens. So let's
talk about them. They are paranormal investigators. They are, I
believe they style themselves as demonologists. Is that true, Ben?
I think.
Speaker 2 (20:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (20:24):
Demonologists.
Speaker 4 (20:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (20:26):
Ed Warren, the, the, or Ed Warren passed away, I believe.
Speaker 1 (20:31):
That's correct.
Speaker 3 (20:32):
But he was a demonologist and Annabelle, first like was
made known to them way back in 1970. And you
probably know it because of the film series, but this
was a real doll that these paranormal investigators and demonologists encountered.
There was a student nurse who contacted them because they
(20:52):
were already kind of known for what they did. She
claimed that the doll was just being weird. Like, Hey,
I got this doll and it's weird. It's not just
weird looking. It's being weird. It's doing stuff. She said
that a psychic told her it was inhabited by the
spirit of a dead person, a girl named Annabelle. And
(21:17):
immediately the Warrens were like, OK, yeah, we need to
see this doll. Let's check it out. And the legend
was born.
Speaker 1 (21:25):
Right.
Speaker 3 (21:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (21:26):
According to the accounts from the Warrens, this nursing student
had a roommate. and she and her roommate, when they
had learned from a psychic that this doll was inhabited
by a spirit of a dead human girl, they tried
to make peace of sorts, to arrive at an armistice,
(21:47):
you know, and respect its space, pay obeisance to it, etc.,
but they had no luck. The events continued, and they accelerated,
and they became worrisome and frightening, and put Potentially, depending
on how you hear it described, dangerous. So in desperation,
the student reaches out to the Warrens, just like you said, Matt.
(22:10):
Long story short, you can hear more about it in
our previous episode. The doll, Annabelle, is currently dead. contained
in a glass display box at the Warren's Occult Museum
there in Monroe, Connecticut. You can go look at it.
It doesn't look like the Annabelle of the movies. I
would argue it looks a little more creepy, but as
(22:34):
you can imagine, skeptics have some issues with the story here.
They're not quite accusing, not everybody is saying, you know,
these folks are con artists or anything like that. There's
a guy named Joseph Laycock, He wrote a fantastic article
about this at the time. He was a Texas State
University assistant professor of religious studies. He thinks the story
(22:56):
may have been influenced by the cultural ecology of the time,
by the zeitgeist, because 1970, you said, right? That's when
the story of Annabelle begins, according to the Warrens. Something
else happened a few years prior. There were other scary
doll tropes, like a great Twilight Zone episode called Living Doll.
(23:18):
which came out just about five years before that Warren story.
And this doesn't prove anything, but the character of the
mother in that episode is also named Annabelle. So if
you're really skeptical or you're kind of cynical, do you
think Ed Warren found this doll and kind of thought
(23:42):
about the Twilight Zone and then said, we'll call it Annabelle?
Speaker 3 (23:46):
Maybe, or even if it's true that this nursing student
really was experiencing something weird, maybe it was because of
that Twilight Zone episode that she caught. You know, who knows?
It's all kind of conjecture, right? Hey, can we just
take a moment and really appreciate Noel's hat right now,
just before we do anything else?
Speaker 2 (24:07):
Well, can we appreciate the fact that this hat was
gifted to me by the magnanimous Ben Bolin? It says
Illuminati on the bottom. And what does it say on
the top?
Speaker 1 (24:17):
Don't trust anyone. Yes.
Speaker 3 (24:20):
That's killer.
Speaker 1 (24:21):
100% not haunted, by the way.
Speaker 2 (24:24):
Yeah, definitely not haunted. I do trust some people. Definitely
trust you too, mostly. But I do like the hat,
and I wanted to rock it today. So thank you, Ben.
Speaker 3 (24:35):
Sorry for taking us away there, guys. I just saw it.
Speaker 1 (24:39):
We're talking about objects, right? That's another object. There's the
nihilistic object. argument that we're all just objects floating in space. Really,
if you think about it, I was going to save
this for later, but if you think about it, you
are listening from a haunted object right now. You are,
(25:00):
as a consciousness, as a mind, you are inhabiting a body.
You are haunting it. You are possessing it. Your body
is a haunted house. It just happens to be growing
all the time.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
So, before I lose my– I love that John Mayer song,
Your Body is a Haunted House.
Speaker 1 (25:20):
Yeah, it's a good one.
Speaker 2 (25:22):
It's a good one.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
It's better than the Temple one. This brings us to
the idea of haunted dolls in the modern day. So,
excellent horror franchise, The Conjuring. They get a hold of
this story. It's been around before. They're like the spooky docuseries,
unsolved mysteries type investigations. But The Conjuring takes it to
(25:44):
the world of fiction, or people might argue even further
into the world of fiction. And Annabelle goes from being
an oddity in a small Connecticut museum to a global phenomenon.
The subject of three different films, and it cements its
status as the world's most famous haunted doll, if not
(26:04):
most famous haunted object. But it's not alone. There are
actually multiple examples of allegedly haunted dolls specifically, and we
found one that you might not have heard of unless
this was already very much your bag of badgers, your
bag of stuffed badgers, your stuffed bag of stuffed badgers. Anyway,
(26:30):
you might be surprised to hear of another doll that
came to prominence around the same time whose name is
simply Robert. Full name, Robert the Doll.
Speaker 3 (26:39):
I just want to go ahead and apologize to Robert
before we even start talking about him. Just, Robert, we're sorry.
We were just talking about you for the purposes of
this show.
Speaker 1 (26:49):
Yeah, you've done a lot for the podcast, Robert. We
just feel like this is a story we need to tell.
In full disclosure, Robert may or may not be on
the board of Illumination Global Unlimited. So we want you
to know. That we're doing our best to be fully
transparent and to not exhibit a conflict of interest. Robert's
(27:10):
a real physical doll. And you guys know how I
hate or I just I don't respect clowning people for
physical features or anything like that. I guess we can
get away with it maybe with Robert. Can we say it?
Can we just say the quiet part out loud? He
is creepy looking.
Speaker 3 (27:30):
Yeah, he really is creepy looking. Um, you can go
online to a lot of places and see actual images
of Robert.
Speaker 2 (27:39):
First and foremost, Robert, the doll.org. Just have to throw
that out there. I love, love that URL exists. That
is why he looked, he's like a creepy sailor. He
looks like kind of like a doll where it's like,
show me where the bad man touched you kind of doll. Um,
also like, like, like maybe like a, a dummy you
would use to do like CPR practice or something like that. But,
(28:02):
Very uncanny, these weird segments of fabric that are joined
together to make the different sections of his face that
seems very Hannibal Lecter-y. I don't know.
Speaker 3 (28:14):
I mean, obviously, no offense, Robert. No offense. So let's
talk about Robert. Robert was, let's say, the possession of?
It's a doll. It's a thing. So it was owned
by Robert Eugene Otto. That is a person.
Speaker 1 (28:30):
I propose we call Robert Eugene Otto Gene for the
purpose of this story, just to keep it clear.
Speaker 2 (28:37):
Fully, 100%.
Speaker 3 (28:37):
Gene was Robert's caretaker, let's say. And you can read
a lot of different stories, origin stories, some that claim
to be original, some that seem to be sort of
fan fiction. You can read just a ton of different
versions of Robert's story.
Speaker 2 (28:59):
But.
Speaker 3 (29:00):
Let's just talk about the official one that you can
find there on that website you just mentioned, Noel.
Speaker 2 (29:05):
Yes, it was created as a one-of-a-kind creepy doll by
the Stief Company. I'm thinking it might be Stief. I'm
going to go with Stief Company of Germany near the
turn of the century. I don't want to irritate Robert.
He is 40 inches tall and stuffed with With wood wool,
which is known as Excelsior, which I am tickled by
(29:30):
because Excelsior is also a term that journalists would maybe
use to define something of excellent quality, maximum luxury. And
it was... Marvel Comics legend Stan Lee's personal life motto, Excelsior,
with an exclamation mark at the end. But it's also
wood wool shavings. It's basically like wood sawdust-y type shavings
(29:51):
that you can use to stuff something with. So probably
already has a bit of a, you know, shed-like smell
to it. And yes, he is in fact dressed like
a sailor. In a little sailor suit. And at one point,
he was painted kind of like a court jester. But
all that stuff has worn off over the years. And
(30:12):
he is quite large, right?
Speaker 1 (30:14):
Yes. Yeah. He's a big Mickey, all his own. So
the official story is that the Otto family was a
pretty prominent family in Key West, Florida.
Speaker 2 (30:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (30:28):
And Otto's grandfather was on a trip to Germany in 1904.
This is where he is believed to have picked up
Robert as a gift for his grandson. The story is,
as Matt said, a little murky at this point because
the legends get a little bit juicier. You'll see one
(30:49):
that claims a young woman of, quote, Bahamian descent gave
Otto this doll either as a gift or as a curse,
kind of a poison apple for some unspecified slight. And
whatever the case, whether the legend or the official story,
the truth of the matter is that Otto becomes incredibly
(31:10):
enamored of and attached to this doll. He names it
after himself, Robert the Doll. Something interesting happens psychologically. He builds,
or he gets his folks to build something a boy's
home a boy's room in the attic in the family
attic just for robert you know complete with toys chairs
(31:32):
a bed the whole nine and then he started blaming
anything wrong that he did on this stall so someone
would say hey did you track in uh mud on
the floor or sand or something like that and he
would say that wasn't me that was robert and they
would say oh okay gene But this is starting to
(31:52):
get a little weird. Is this your imaginary friend, et cetera?
They probably didn't think about it at the time, but
I know a lot of our fellow conspiracy realists in
the audience are wondering, was this boy making a tulpa,
a thought form? Interesting.
Speaker 3 (32:06):
Yeah, or was he dealing with something mental health-like in
his life, some kind of disassociation or some kind of–
application of his own actions onto this thing. Anyway, I'm
not a psychologist. Who knows what was going on inside
(32:26):
Gene and or Robert, but it's definitely strange because it
wasn't just a childhood thing, right? This relationship between Robert
the man and Robert the doll continued.
Speaker 1 (32:40):
Yes, Gene became a pretty well-known regional artist who was
widely considered an eccentric and The partnership between Robert the
guy and Robert the doll continued well into adulthood. That's
an interesting point about disassociation, too. We would have to
ask where it came from. Could there have been some
(33:01):
sort of traumatic situation occurring? If so, that's lost to history. Eventually,
Robert the man, Robert Eugene Otto, passes away. His wife,
who survives him, has always hated this thing. You know
what I mean? She's of the mind that, you know,
call her conservative, but she's thinking a marriage is between
(33:24):
two people, not two people and a doll. Anyhow, as
soon as he passes away, she orders that this doll
be locked up in a cedar chest and hidden in
the attic, never touched again. She passes away, and years
and years after her death, This doll, Robert, is rediscovered.
(33:48):
And now, if you wish, you can visit Robert at
the East Martello Museum. Oh, we should mention, it wasn't
just a situation of Gene, Robert the man, being weird
around the doll. Other people said the doll would do
weird stuff. Like it would move, it would exhibit facial expressions.
Speaker 3 (34:10):
Maybe it would change.
Speaker 1 (34:11):
Yeah, it would change. It would people would hear voices
around it, things like that. And now, if you wish,
you can visit Robert. He still has his stuffed teddy bear, too,
because he had his own toys.
Speaker 2 (34:26):
Remember?
Speaker 3 (34:27):
Oh, dude, I forgot about that. That was that was
the whole thing. If you if you check out Robert
at the museum right now, he's holding a doll himself.
So it is a.
Speaker 2 (34:39):
I don't know, man.
Speaker 3 (34:41):
I wonder if that teddy bear then becomes the next thing.
Speaker 1 (34:47):
Somehow infected or it's a host. But it's strange because
if you look at the history of this guy, it
came into the public eye kind of around the same
time as Annabelle or its discovery, which means it was
also a few years after that Twilight Zone episode.
Speaker 2 (35:08):
Where does Teddy Ruxpin figure into all this? That's my
big question.
Speaker 1 (35:12):
My Teddy Ruxpin asked me not to include them in
this episode.
Speaker 2 (35:16):
Fair enough. My Teddy Ruxpin also has a bit of
a hold over me, so we'll just change the subject.
Speaker 3 (35:23):
Still my absolute favorite thing as a kid.
Speaker 1 (35:25):
Wait, did you put the other tapes in?
Speaker 3 (35:28):
Oh, I had so many tapes.
Speaker 2 (35:30):
Yeah, but did you put in, like, your Megadeth tapes? Oh, yeah.
Speaker 3 (35:35):
Well, no, it was.
Michael W.
Speaker 2 (35:38):
Smith.
Speaker 3 (35:39):
Well, that's not evil at all.
Speaker 2 (35:43):
Takes on a whole different feel when you put in
some Satan music. Did you hear that? Holy cow. Right
when I said Satan music, there was this huge thunderclap.
Speaker 1 (35:55):
I don't know if you guys can hear it on
my end, but it's still going. It's been going.
Speaker 3 (35:59):
That was the first big one I've heard in this recording.
And it was right after you said that.
Speaker 2 (36:05):
So.
Speaker 1 (36:06):
We know that when people go to visit Robert at
this museum, some people will still report that they've experienced
something they can't explain, and a lot of people write
to the doll after visiting him. Isn't that correct?
Speaker 3 (36:22):
That's right. Apology letters are often written to Robert for
visiting him without his permission. If you go to many
YouTube videos about Robert the doll, you will see in
the comments section, Post after post after post of people saying, hey, sorry, Robert,
just we want to learn about your story. Didn't mean
to disturb you or, you know, sorry for watching or
(36:42):
learning about you without your permission.
Speaker 2 (36:44):
Well, that's why I was joking about that earlier. I,
for one, would like to extend a heartfelt apology to
Robert for all the terrible things I said earlier in
the podcast. So please, for my humblest apologies, Robert, please,
please forgive me. Forgive me.
Speaker 1 (37:01):
Robert, I hope you're doing well. I feel no need
to apologize to you. I do wish you the best,
but I will point out that you seem to be
treated better than a lot of human beings these days.
Speaker 3 (37:14):
Oh, man, throw a shade at Robert. I am so
glad that we have an image of like looking behind you, Ben.
So when Robert just kind of creeps up behind your shoulder,
we'll be able to give you just a split second warning.
Speaker 1 (37:28):
That's not a ding. That's not a ding on Robert.
That's a ding on the human species. Treat each other better.
You know what I mean? Who else should you be
apologizing to, folks? Anyway, that's... Anyway, anyway, those are the circumstances.
We just thought that's an interesting story because it shows
that there's not just one example of this. In fact,
(37:51):
there are multiple other examples. There's Leta the doll in Australia.
There's Okiku in Japan. The list goes on and on.
So we have these cases of things that predate Annabelle,
the most famous haunted doll, by a bit. But the
truth of the matter is that the story goes much,
(38:12):
much deeper. You see, haunted dolls, or some version of them,
date back into antiquity What are we talking about? We'll
tell you after a word from our sponsors. We're back.
And we're going back in time. We're going far, far
(38:34):
earlier than the turn of the 20th century. We're going far,
far past the creation of the U.S., We're looking at
early civilization. The earliest predecessors of things like Annabelle and
Robert were effigies. They were something called poppets, P-O-P-P-E-T-S. In folklore,
(38:56):
these are dolls that are made to represent a specific
person for a specific reason. And they were created by
all sorts of early civilizations.
Speaker 2 (39:04):
Yeah. Wasn't there a thing about poppets in The Crucible?
Speaker 1 (39:07):
No.
Speaker 3 (39:08):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (39:08):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (39:08):
Yeah. to eat or something, but yeah, no, I'm pretty
sure that was definitely a cursed object or it was
an art item in the crucible that maybe was tied
back to the bewitching of, of many of these children
(39:32):
in the, in the village.
Speaker 4 (39:33):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (39:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (39:34):
You're correct.
Speaker 3 (39:35):
There's a cousin to the poppet that we're going to
talk about. That's basically the thing that you probably have
in your mind, even while we're talking about them, if
you are not remembering the crucible stuff, but, but these
were made all over the place. We're talking Rome and,
In Africa, West Africa, in Egypt, these poppets were used
or these specific types of effigies. And a lot of
(39:57):
times it wasn't necessarily for a bad thing. That's what's
kind of cool about these. Sometimes it was almost like
a sin eater, spirit eater kind of thing where. The
poppet could help somebody like you could remove a curse
from somebody by using one of these things. You could
heal somebody perhaps by using one of these things. And
(40:18):
if it was made of, you know, a specific human,
a specific person. But the other thing is, and this
is where the kind of cousin to it comes in.
You could perhaps make one of a person and then
curse the doll. And then it would imbue that curse
into the actual person that it represented.
Speaker 1 (40:36):
Right. break the legs, put nails into the eyes, things
of that nature. That's correct. Versions of this practice continue
in the modern day. It's not as widespread. You hear that?
Or is it? This is the perfect weather to record this.
(41:00):
So versions of it do continue. They're probably just not
as widespread. We do at this point want to make
an important statement about so-called voodoo dolls.
Speaker 3 (41:12):
Yeah, and that is the cousin that I was referring
to that you may have heard of before.
Speaker 1 (41:16):
Got it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You can find them
in novelty stores. There's even a couple of like Instructable
or WikiHow articles about how to make your own legit ones.
The term voodoo doll usually describes several different kinds of
effigy creation that These different cultures across the world, but
to be absolutely clear, these kinds of things don't really
(41:40):
have a prominent place in Haitian voodoo or Louisiana voodoo,
which are two distinct yet related actual religions. So a
lot of the conflation of these sorts of effigies with
the practices that we would term loosely voodoo come about
(42:01):
from racism in the past. This was probably more common.
The people practicing that kind of stuff in the crucible
are being accused of doing so. They're being accused of
having a lineage dating back to European pre-Christian or pagan practices.
It's a very important distinction. Dolls are not the only
(42:24):
thing that has been alleged to be haunted. They steal
the spotlight today. But let's remember fiction is full of
things like haunted cars, a love of Stephen King's, haunted boxes,
haunted houses, haunted shoes, etc. It turns out there is
an entire cottage industry of haunted objects out there today.
(42:48):
And thanks to the great work by a New York
Times journalist, Alicia DeSantis, you can take a closer look
at this subculture today. that is selling haunted items on
eBay and they want to give you an opportunity to
buy one. Spoiler, most of them are dolls, but there's
(43:09):
other stuff.
Speaker 2 (43:12):
Too.
Speaker 3 (43:13):
I'll give you an example right here. I am looking
at an active item for sale right now. It is
titled Haunted Active Dolls Paranormal Spirit of Vanessa. And it
is a Looks like an American Girl doll, maybe a little,
maybe even a little better made.
Speaker 2 (43:35):
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (43:35):
The craftsmanship on American Girl dolls is very high, but
this looks pretty incredible. The blue eyes are haunting.
Speaker 1 (43:43):
There we go. I found one that I was reading earlier.
I just felt the vibe of this. Gothic cursed item, devil, Satan,
Ouija board, Baphomet, paranormal, psychic tarot.
Speaker 2 (43:58):
That is a winning combination right there, my friend. Is
that all in one item?
Speaker 1 (44:03):
13 watchers right now. Yeah, it's all one item. It's
only 55 bucks, OBO, or best offer. So for that
and $ 14 shipping, you could get all those keywords together today.
Speaker 2 (44:15):
That's like a cursed turducken. It is. Yeah, that's a
good way to say it.
Speaker 1 (44:20):
A cursed turducken.
Speaker 3 (44:23):
Dude, just you guys, I'm looking at, I don't know
what this is. It's an authentic... Dybbuk.
Speaker 2 (44:30):
Dybbuk?
Speaker 1 (44:31):
Dybbuk.
Speaker 2 (44:32):
Dybbuk. That's a gremlin or goblin from the Jewish faith,
if I'm not mistaken.
Speaker 1 (44:38):
You are correct. A malevolent spirit that can enter and
possess the body of a living person unless they're exercised.
And there's an idea that has something in common with
the myths about jinn, that they could be restrained in
a specific type of container under the correct type of ritual.
Speaker 3 (44:58):
Whoa, there are a lot of these for sale on eBay.
Speaker 2 (45:01):
Can you imagine what it must be like on the
dark web? That's where the real stuff is.
Speaker 3 (45:09):
Jeez, okay.
Speaker 1 (45:10):
Yeah, so you can go and see this stuff yourself
right now. And if you peruse eBay, like Noel, Matt,
and I are doing, you'll find everything from haunted jewelry
to haunted UPS boxes, for some reason, feathers, pieces of frankly,
ordinary looking wood. But DeSantis has something to note about this.
(45:35):
I like the way she put it. She said that
they might be said not to be haunted so much
as enchanted for specific reasons, for luck, for fortune, for
that you have to have a positive environment, you have
to have a good attitude when you're handling this stuff,
and that not all good luck applies the same. So
there are notes in these things or these biddings where
(45:57):
they'll say things like, quote, this chip is for money
luck only, not general good fortune or finding love, which
are different spells. And one thing I enjoyed was the disclaimers.
Because when you buy a lot of stuff online, you'll
see the fine print and the notices. Someone will say, okay, hey,
(46:20):
this is a PS5 or whatever, but it ships without
the box. Or I've got this GI Joe, but it
doesn't have the little backpack. There are things like this
on the paranormal listings, and they say stuff like, quote,
As required per eBay's policy on the sale of paranormal items,
(46:42):
this is for the sale of the tangible item only.
No promise of a spirit attached.
Speaker 2 (46:47):
Sorry.
Speaker 3 (46:49):
Sorry. There may be no game inside.
Speaker 2 (46:52):
It's just a console.
Speaker 1 (46:54):
Yeah, this is just the box, to be clear. Yeah,
the complaints can give you a chuckle, too, because there
are people who seem to be genuinely concerned that shipping
this item is may disassociate it from the spirit, or
they feel like they ordered something believing it to be
paranormal or inhabited by something, and they're just not catching
(47:17):
any Jeff Goldblum-esque vibes off of it. So they think
that it's... No, there is a typical response, too, from
the sellers. They say it takes time. You have to
spend time with it. You have to be familiar with
it so that it feels comfortable enough to speak with you.
Speaker 3 (47:34):
You know what we should do, Ben? What? We should
build a panopticon and then in every cell put one
of these haunted objects and lock it in there. And then,
you know, just observe them with cameras and other sensors for,
I don't know, 20 years, something like that.
Speaker 1 (47:51):
Yeah, I think we could probably work something like that
out in the show budget. Folks, we need volunteers. Let
us know what your favorite haunted objects are that could
occupy our panopticon. Extra points for a Big Mickey-esque figure.
Speaker 3 (48:07):
Yeah, or like a fridge that survived an earthquake or
something or a building collapse. And then if there isn't
a person actively looking at it, it does something.
Speaker 1 (48:20):
Or like a telephone that is detached but still speaks
to forces beyond our dimension.
Speaker 3 (48:31):
Yeah, oh, that would be amazing.
Speaker 1 (48:32):
Or a microwave. Just like a badass, crazy microwave. I
don't know why.
Speaker 3 (48:39):
It's just a badass microwave.
Speaker 1 (48:42):
It's like the Wolverine of the crew.
Speaker 2 (48:43):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (48:43):
Do you think.
Speaker 2 (48:45):
The brave little toaster was haunted, Ben? Do you think
he was somehow embodied by some sort of malevolent spirit?
I know he was brave and super cute, but toasters
aren't supposed to hop around like that and go exploring,
going on adventures.
Speaker 1 (48:59):
That's true.
Speaker 3 (48:59):
100%. Even the Ghostbusters....
Speaker 1 (49:02):
Toaster just kind of jumped around a little. Yeah, I
don't know. I'd be all for haunted kitchen appliances. As
a matter of fact, that's going to kind of come
into play because we have a twist for you at
the end of this, folks. But here we have it
as it stands, ancient folklore. Spiritual practices live on. Commodified
(49:23):
to a degree due to the nature of the society
in which we live. Some people just doubtlessly enjoy the stories.
I mean, it's cool. You know, like, hey, I got
this haunted accordion on eBay. That's a true story on
my part. It was advertised as haunted. And I was like,
the price is right. If by haunted they meant some
(49:45):
of the reeds were broken, then yes, I guess it
is haunted. But other people really enjoy the mythology of
these things. And then some people truly do believe there
is something inexplicable and supernatural afoot. We can say there's
psychology behind it, definitely. There's this urgent need to anthropomorphize everything.
(50:06):
Because it's our way of explaining the familiarity or discomfort
we feel around certain objects. Almost everybody has a lucky
insert here. This is my lucky hat. This is my
lucky shirt kind of thing.
Speaker 3 (50:24):
Mostly underwear, but yeah.
Speaker 1 (50:25):
Mostly underwear, yeah. These are my business underoos. These are
my going out underoos.
Speaker 3 (50:34):
These are my business Tommy Johns.
Speaker 1 (50:39):
Cue Flight of the Conchords.
Speaker 3 (50:41):
There you go.
Speaker 1 (50:43):
It makes sense then, though, doesn't it, guys, that dolls
would be so prominent in this kind of folklore? Because
they already look just enough like a person. Oh, yeah.
Speaker 3 (50:53):
For sure. I wonder if you guys are doing this
more recently, actually. Anthropomorphizing dolls. stuff in your house or I,
or any of you guys doing that right now?
Speaker 2 (51:05):
I always have to remorifies the backs of trucks. I
feel like they have faces on them.
Speaker 3 (51:09):
I see like, yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (51:12):
That's awesome.
Speaker 1 (51:13):
Cars are designed in, in the front end, at least
a little kind of like face. Like you could just
have one big headlight that goes across. You could have three,
you could have eight and have like a spider looking car,
but no two and a grill, a little mouth, little
face and, Is there hurdles towards you at 85 plus
miles an hour? And you have just enough time to go, aw.
Speaker 3 (51:38):
I'm wondering, Noel, about the backs of trucks.
Speaker 2 (51:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (51:43):
Like a semi trailer?
Speaker 2 (51:44):
Yeah, semi.
Speaker 3 (51:45):
Uh-huh.
Speaker 2 (51:46):
They sort of have like, you know, the seam going
down the back of it is like the bridge of
the nose. And then like the little guardrail is sort
of the nose. And sometimes there's like mud flaps. Those
are like the teeth kind of, you know what I mean?
Speaker 3 (51:58):
Oh, okay. I see it.
Speaker 1 (51:59):
So are the doors, the loading doors for the trailer,
are they like big eyes or are they more like
the cheek area?
Speaker 2 (52:05):
It depends. It depends on where the lights are attached
and whether there is any signage or anything that adds
to the illusion. But, yeah, they certainly can be, Ben.
They can be cheeks. I'm having a hard time explaining it.
It's something you just have to see for yourself. But
be on the lookout. Next time you're stuck behind a semi,
just look for the face.
Speaker 3 (52:24):
A lorry for anyone.
Speaker 2 (52:26):
A lorry, indeed. One last thing for me is, you
know those little hooks you use to hang coats on?
They look like drunken octopuses that are trying to put
their dukes up to fight with you.
Speaker 1 (52:38):
I saw something on Reddit about that and I can't
unsee it. It's like, especially when they're screwed in with
two screws.
Speaker 2 (52:45):
And they're offset a little bit. So it's like one
of them is kind of like a little bit.
Speaker 1 (52:48):
It's a drunkard.
Speaker 4 (52:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (52:50):
Yeah. It's a drunkard octopus. But we all have things
like this. There's so many things that you probably encountered
in your life where you thought, that looks like a
face or that looks like a figure, a humanoid figure.
And that's because your brain has been evolved to see
those sorts of patterns. So like, I'll admit during this pandemic,
(53:14):
as you said, Matt, we all kind of, because we
were in a smaller environment, most of the time we
may have accelerated some of this anthropomorphization about eight months in,
you know, I looked around, I realized, all this in
my kitchen has a personality. Now there's the good bowl,
the trustworthy one. You know what I mean? There's, there's,
(53:37):
there's the fork is kind of bold. It has panache.
And then there's that one spoon. You can't trust it.
There's that one spoon. It's the Judas spoon. And that's like,
clearly that's just psychology. Maybe that's just the force of
boredom and a bottle.
Speaker 3 (53:55):
I think we're all, We're all just terribly damaged by
all of this, but it's okay.
Speaker 1 (54:02):
I think it's going to stay with us. I think
Noah is still going to be seeing truck faces. I
think all our listeners are going to still see weird
things in like vacuums or trash can lids that open
up like mouths. And yeah, I don't trust that spoon.
And I don't. It knows what it did. So for now,
the answer to can an object be haunted seems to
(54:24):
be primarily something like, yes, at least it can be
haunted by the human need to explain the inexplicable and
to create personalities as a way of defining our own
self-perceived relationships with things. And yes, of course, caveat, if
science achieves a breakthrough... and proves that non-physical events can
(54:46):
indeed leave impact on physical objects, this changes everything. This
changes absolutely everything. We'll have to redo this episode. Until then,
right now, as much of a bummer as it is
to say it, there is no proof, universally accepted proof,
of genuinely haunted objects. But there is one last twist,
(55:08):
something we wanted to save until the end, in the
very near future, We may have haunted objects, fellow conspiracy realists.
We may very well build our own ghost.
Speaker 3 (55:24):
Uh, yes, we may build ourselves into ghosts or build
a ghost out of some. I think it'll be some very,
very smart person that we want to keep around to
be like, no, don't go. We, we, we need you still. We,
we need to know what we need to do next. Um, So,
you know, Mark Zuckerberg or somebody.
Speaker 2 (55:44):
Oh, boy.
Speaker 3 (55:46):
Anyway, but no, it's so true because we've talked about
this before in our attempts to achieve immortality in some
way or another. We are using computer simulations or attempts
at computer simulation and very, very, very fast computers with
(56:06):
tons of memory to be able to simulate a person
or a consciousness. And we've been attempting to do this,
and we may perfect it.
Speaker 1 (56:16):
Yeah, which is terrifying, should be terrified. If you're more
excited than terrified, then congratulations, kind of like me. And
we both have a lot of stuff we should work
on in that case. Yeah, Matt, you're on the money.
The first truly haunted object on the way is probably
not a dusty stuffed animal. It's probably not some cursed
(56:38):
spear from an ancient war. will instead be the result
of something called whole brain emulation, or WBE. The idea
of uploading the entirety of the human brain, modeling it, thoughts, memories, feelings, personalities,
putting it on a hard drive, putting it in the cloud.
This is a possibility. Now, conceptually, we can understand how
(57:07):
it would be done. We can see the horizons. where
this occurs. We have a lot of technological hurdles there.
We have a lot of ethical hurdles that we haven't
considered yet. The main obstacle right now, ship of thesis aside,
is that first we have to manage to achieve something
(57:28):
called the connectome, just like connect, O-M-E, a complete map
of the human brain. We have been able to do
one complete map, Of one creature, it's a nematode. So
we know it can be done, in theory. But a
nematode has about 302 neurons. Human brain has about 86 billion.
(57:51):
So we don't know how to map it.
Speaker 3 (57:53):
We just need a couple thousand more years and we'll
be there.
Speaker 2 (57:55):
We'll be good.
Speaker 1 (57:56):
Well, we'd also want to map a living human brain, right?
Ethics aside, would it be easier to map a living
human brain if you didn't have to worry about what
happened to that brain.
Speaker 4 (58:13):
Ew.
Speaker 2 (58:14):
I know.
Speaker 1 (58:15):
It gets sticky really quickly.
Speaker 3 (58:17):
I was going to say, I'm wondering if there's some
kind of, because obviously it's our inability to see into
the brain, deep into the brain enough with enough resolution
to be able to pick out those, you know, each
neural pathway. Because you could definitely get a pretty cool
image of brains just by scanning them. but it's not
(58:38):
the same thing as looking at, like you said, all
of the neurons.
Speaker 1 (58:42):
Right, and the tools we have, things like MRI and
so on, it's exactly as you described. There's just not
the level of sophistication we need here. But if someone
can map a brain and all its interconnections, the next
step would be trying to make an emulation of it
that could run, you know, run the copy of Paul
(59:05):
Mission Control Deccan, creating something that we'll call a substrate
independent mind, or to be cutesy about it, a sim.
If this sim could exist, then it would inherently be conscious,
even if we don't understand what consciousness is for us.
It would be literally a ghost in the machine. For now,
(59:27):
this is hypothetical. For now, this is hypothetical. But the
technology and the research are continuing at a breakneck pace.
I think it's very optimistic, Matt, that you say the
first immortal, the first ghost, first thing to haunt an
object like this might be one of the world's smartest people.
(59:47):
I am tempted to say I think it would be
one of the world's wealthiest people who was terrified of dying.
What do you guys think about that?
Speaker 4 (59:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (59:56):
I think my example would hold true for probably both
of those.
Speaker 2 (59:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:00:00):
Yeah, you did nail it on that one.
Speaker 3 (01:00:03):
Ben, that's exactly... I can't remember which season of Westworld
it is, but that's exactly one of the main plot
points in one of HBO's Westworld seasons where it's essentially
Ghost in the Machine. It's physical... Well, it's programs that
are software built into hardware that then the software gets
(01:00:25):
transferred as a ghost into a server where now they
only exist virtually. But it's the full consciousness of those,
at one point, physical beings.
Speaker 2 (01:00:38):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (01:00:39):
That's interesting.
Speaker 1 (01:00:40):
Kind of like San Junipero, right? Yeah, Black Mirror. This.
There's a reason that fiction centers on this kind of
stuff and orbits these sort of concepts. Science fiction in
particular as a genre is often prescient in one way
or another. So don't be surprised if within your lifetimes
(01:01:04):
humanity finally has the haunted dolls it has loved and
feared since the dawn of recorded time. They may just
end up being computers. And one of those ghosts one day,
might be you. So what do you think, folks? Have
you had any experience with mysterious or cursed objects? Let
us know. What objects appeared at personalities and faces for you?
(01:01:29):
That's a very interesting question too, right?
Speaker 3 (01:01:31):
Oh, and if you have those things, I want to
see pictures of the thing from your point of view.
I definitely want to see that. I'll take a picture
of the container that holds all my dog food that
has a giant flap on it. And it's exactly how
you described it, Ben. It totally talks and yeah, it's,
it's pretty amazing.
Speaker 1 (01:01:52):
Does it have its own like favorite dog food?
Speaker 3 (01:01:55):
Oh yeah. And it gets so upset if I give
it the grain free stuff. Cause it's like, you know,
this is bad for these dogs.
Speaker 1 (01:02:02):
And I'm like, God, man, just, It's talking trash to you.
It's like, oh, oh, Frederick came to play today. Well,
guess what, buddy?
Speaker 2 (01:02:10):
No games.
Speaker 3 (01:02:11):
I thought grain-free dog food was good for my dogs.
I thought that's how it worked, but apparently it's not.
Speaker 2 (01:02:17):
So, sorry.
Speaker 1 (01:02:18):
And send us, yes, send us your favorite pictures of
things that appear to have faces, bonus points, if they
are trucks, automobiles. Send us your classics. And let us know, seriously,
what you think about what we've touched on here. And
if you believe that you have found a genuinely haunted
object or you have witnessed one, of course we want
(01:02:40):
to hear about it. We try to make it easy
to find us online.
Speaker 2 (01:02:43):
That's right. You can find us on Facebook, on Twitter,
where we're Conspiracy Stuff. We're Conspiracy Stuff Show on Instagram.
You can also join our Facebook group, Here's Where It
Gets Crazy. Just navigate over to Facebook, type in Here's
Where It Gets Crazy, and answer a couple of super
basic questions that any listener of the show should be
able to answer, and you're in. Lots of fun memery
and discussion to be had. And hey, while you're on
(01:03:03):
the internet, why don't you go over to Apple Podcasts
and write us a review for the show? That really
helps people discover the show and helps us get ranked
on that old Apple Podcasts chart.
Speaker 3 (01:03:12):
That's right. Also, don't forget to go to youtube.com slash
conspiracy stuff. That's where you can see videos of these
conversations and episodes. And you can also subscribe, tell your friends,
make sure you click the buttons that alert you when
new episodes come out. I don't know which ones those are,
but you'll figure it out. If you don't want to
do that stuff, you can always give us a call.
Speaker 1 (01:03:32):
That's correct. If you feel like you're more of an
oral storyteller, then why not dial us up at 1-833-STD-WYTK.
You have three minutes. Those three minutes are yours. Tell
us who you are. Tell us what you want us
to call you and if it's okay to do so
on air. Let us know what's on your mind. And
(01:03:54):
if you have a message that you would prefer to
just keep between us and the Stuff They Want You
To Know team and let us know at the end,
most importantly, don't censor yourself. If you have something that
deserves more than three minutes, then by all means, please
write out the full account. We read every email we get.
We're grateful for all of them. You can send us
(01:04:16):
yourself a good old-fashioned email where we are.
Speaker 2 (01:04:19):
Conspiracy at iHeartRadio.com.
Speaker 3 (01:04:40):
Stuff They Don't Want You To Know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
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