Are You Afraid of Dolls?
How to live with someone who is
My closet has no skeletons, but it might as well, if you ask my husband, who knows my dolls are stored there. Were they on display, he’d be scared they were making mischief and trying to scare him. It’s not like these dolls resemble the homicidal Talky Tina from the “Living Doll” episode of Twilight Zone, a spirit sent to get rid of a man who doesn’t deserve his loving stepfamily. Their faces are cute! But if you recall how Woody in “Toy Story” reacted in horror to the baby doll head that vicious Sid severed from its body, that’s what my husband feels when he encounters a doll.
Dolls’ eyes opening and closing, scratching sounds coming from a room where dolls are housed, all have a way of unnerving him. He believes that dolls are inhabited by calculating spirits.
I have some difficulty understanding my husband’s fear of dolls that are actually cute, but I have humored him by keeping them out of sight.
I will grant him there are dolls with scary faces. A batch of dolls I won through an online auction included one so creepy I donated it to Goodwill as fast as I could. Meant to be a collectible old-fashioned doll, it was impossibly pale with a protruding molded curl on its forehead and a bright red mouth.
A shoebox of Amish souvenir dolls purchased at a neighborhood yard sale provoked not only him but my friends on Facebook when I posted a photo. My husband swore he saw their eyes opening and closing as we transported them in a wagon back to the house. Friends remarked they looked dead in that shoebox “coffin.”
When we stay in the guest bedroom of a friend, her vintage Chatty Cathy doll has to be moved from the dresser. My husband can’t sleep if he can see the doll.
His discomfort with dolls likely originated with his mother, who comes from a long line of pranksters dedicated to good natured teasing. She created a faceless doll the family called the Boo Baby and would sneak into each other’s homes. Its purpose was to startle an unsuspecting family member encountering it behind a door or in a closet.
The Boo Baby changes hands over and over, and its precise location is to be kept a secret at all times.
The Boo Baby took on a mystique of its own, as though it could move at will without human assistance.
When my husband last had possession of the Boo Baby, he decided to “build a relationship” with it by facing his fears. Unlike the Twilight Zone ogre that engaged his stepdaughter’s doll in a murderous battle of wills, my husband made peace with the Boo Baby by propping him in the chair next to him, putting glasses on him, and watching TV together in his man cave.
Having come to an understanding with his mother’s incarnation, he was ready to give it back to his daughter for safekeeping. He told her he was no longer afraid of it, thereby warding off any future attempts to prank him.
Well-meaning friends who know he pranks me from time to time have suggested I retaliate by slipping a doll into our bed at night, or shining a flashlight on a doll’s face in the dark. But I can’t do that to him. In our house, there are no “living dolls” in sight. In the closet they will stay.
