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About Haunted Dolls

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Maleni (Famosa Doll, 1970's) Before And After

Newer readers may not know it, but my main area of expertise as an Artisan is doll restoring and customizing. Over the last 15 years, I have rescued, restored and brought back to life quite a few abandoned dolls; while a small percentage of them have been rehomed to their happy new owners, most of them are part of my personal collection, and will never be for sale.

Along this process, one of the things I have enjoyed most of being a doll customizer has been the tremendous amount of learning that I have been through (and still am). Learning about the history of dolls, about all the techniques needed to identify them, restore them and bring them back to life is the true passion of my life.

Of course, nothing of this has grown outside my Spiritual view – I believe these dolls came to me for a reason (most of them have been just found in the trash bins, or given to me by their previous owners), and many of them held very strong energies, because children have extremely intense levels of energy and a lot of it remained in the dolls, just as part of my own energy stays with every talisman I make.

Not all dolls were happy, that is true – many had absorbed fear, pain and anger (because children do have those feelings too), and many had been abandoned for decades, and the loneliness and sadness could be felt very clearly. In order to be restored and become part of my collection, or of my customers' collection, they required to be cleansed of all remaining energy.

But none – NONE – were nearly what you could call “haunted”, and this is the point of this article. I honestly believe that all the “haunted doll” market is nothing but a complete scam. While I agree an entity can use a doll as a vessel, and many Spiritual paths use dolls as part of their altar tools (actually, I have restored quite a few for this particular use), the idea that a ghost could use and inhabit a doll with the sole intention of scaring people is completely ridiculous, and nothing but the result of people believing that the paranormal is what you see in films, just as it happens with Oui-ja, and sadly too often, with Witches.

 

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Sebastian (BB Jerry Doll, 1970's), Before And After (Work In Progress)

An example of this was on someone's Facebook page last week - I won't give any names as you can imagine because it's not my business to judge other people and the way they make a living, but this person was sharing a link about an alleged haunted doll, and of course I clicked.

Leaving aside the question about the doll being haunted or not, something that I cannot confirm or refute because I cannot assure that until I touch a doll with my hands, the most outraging thing was that the doll was selling as “antique” (and a very long story about the historical owners of the doll was added), when I knew in one glance that said doll was a cheap reproduction from the 80's, made by the millions, and that can be purchased online for around 20$ and less. Actually, I have had two dolls made exactly with the same mould, bought by a friend at a flea market for next to nothing. So, not only this was a paranormal scam, but a doll scam, because the doll didn't even exist at the time the alleged poor-dead-little-girl-who-died-in-the-haunted-house was alive.

 

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The King And I Music Doll Box (Unidentified Date Or Maker), Before And After

Please understand that I am not saying that a doll cannot be a cursed object – I know for a fact that an object can be cursed and bring misfortune to its owner; but that is not what haunted means. Haunted means inhabited by a Spirit (or several, as it happens in some haunted houses and spaces); and believe me, a doll inhabited by a Spirit is not found in a haunted house, but in an altar, and it is very likely that its owner has no intention to sell it on Ebay. I am not even saying that haunted dolls cannot or do not exist – I am only saying that in a lifetime of both being a Witch and studying dolls, I have found none, and if my experience on any of those two areas is of any worth, you should be extremely careful and patient if you want to find one.

So please, if you still want to buy a haunted doll, do your research and consult an expert, unless you want to end up with a doll that has no value at all, neither as a paranormal object or as a doll itself, and that will only fill the pockets of a scammer.

Note – the pics on this post are not of haunted dolls, but of my own dolls. The pics on the left were made as the doll were found, and the pics on the right were taken after the restoring and customizing process. Two of them are in my own collection, and the third belongs to a collector in the US.

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Spiritist and Artisan, follower of Maria Lionza's path. Born and living in Tenerife, one of the beautiful Canary Islands, on the Northwest coast of Africa, her artwork is deeply tied to her African heritage and Latin American Spiritism.

Comments

  • Jamie
    Jamie Friday, 23 August 2013

    The dolls are wonderful, the restorations are obviously a labor of love.

    I agree, 'haunted' things are all the rage now, and there's too much money to be made to NOT claim that some otherwise low-value doll is now a more expensive 'haunted' doll. It wouldn't surprise me if it's possible for dolls to be haunted as advertised, but they should be extremely rare.

    It's kind of like American Civil War memorabilia. People have been faking Confederate States of America stuff since the 1890s. Why? Because so many people with money will pay.

  • Carolina Gonzalez
    Carolina Gonzalez Saturday, 24 August 2013

    Thanks so much for your comment Jamie! The pics are a bit blurry here because they were really big and the blogging system doesn't like them - you can see them better in my website's blog (link on the profile above comments).

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