HAUNTED TAKEOVER: Hidden History | Robert the Doll

Hi everyone, before today's episode, we want to tell you about What the Fact. It's a new show from Conor Tomlinson, who you know from Netflix's Love on the Spectrum, and Carter Roy from Murder, True Crime Stories. Every week they take three unbelievable true facts from history and tell you the full story behind them. Conor's infectious energy will make you realize history is the most fascinating thing on Earth. Follow What the Fact, wherever you listen, or subscribe on YouTube at What the Fact is. Happy Halloween, Crimes of Reddit listeners. Don't be alarmed, but something has crept into your feed tonight. My name is Dr. Hrini Baugh, and this Halloween, I'm haunting this show with an episode of my show Hidden History. I usually spend my time on Hidden History, digging up the real historical events that still defy explanation. But tonight, I've slipped through the walls to leave you a little treat. This is Crimes of Reddit, so we brought you the kind of story that would hit the top of every creepy thread on the internet, Robert the Doll. For over a century, a 40-inch doll in Q.S. has been blamed for car crashes, divorces, and streaks of bad luck that only end with a written apology. His owner, artist Jean Otto, gave the doll his own name, his own clothes, and eventually his own room. The haunting may be real, but the doll might not be where it lives. So, turn down the lights and stay close. If you like what you hear, you can follow me back to where I came from, Hidden History with Dr. Hrini Baugh. Follow on your favorite podcast app or subscribe on YouTube at Hidden History Baugh. This is Rewind. Every day, letters pour into a museum on the edge of Key West Florida. Most of them are Apologies. Sorry for the photo they took without asking, sorry for the joke they made, sorry for laughing, except the recipient isn't able to read. He's 40 inches tall, he weighs 6 pounds, he's stuffed with wood shavings, and has two black buttons for eyes. And he's been blamed for car crashes, divorces, broken bones, and worse. His name is Robert. People have been afraid of him for a very long time. And today, I'm joined by Bobby Curtis Lee from Bodities on Elm Street to talk all about it. I'm Dr. Hrini Baugh and this is Hidden History, a Rewind original powered by Pave Studios. On this show, we're exploring some of the most mysterious events from history that have yet to be fully explained and examining all the different theories from science to the supernatural and everything in between. From vanish civilizations and doomsday prophecies to paranormal experiences and unexplained phenomena, I'm looking at it all and I want you to join me. Before we begin, I'd love it if you could rate, review, and follow Hidden History. Your support allows our community to grow and for other people to discover over the show. We're also on YouTube with a full video that brings each episode to life, just search @HiddenHistoryPod and subscribe. Today's episode is all about Robert the Doll, a 120-year-old toy sitting in a glass case in Key West Florida that thousands of people believe can curse you. As he has by mystery as servant, like the legend says, "Did a lonely little boy pour something into him that never came back out? Or did we build this monster ourselves, one retelling at a time?" With how creepy the story is, I had to bring on Bobby Curtis Lee from Audities on Elm Street to talk about it. Thank you so much for having me, Hrini, I'm so excited to dive into this. Bobby, you're way braver than me, you explore all these haunted places and you did an incredible video about Robert the Doll and Tik Tok, so today I'll go through the background and historical and scientific aspects first, then Bobby, you'll come back to walk me through the things about Robert, we just can't explain. Okay, let's do it. When you picture Key West, you probably think of sun, sand, and lots of margaritas, but back in 1900, it was far from the tourist hotspot we know today. This was before any bridges were built to the island, so Key West was reachable only by boat, sitting closer to Havana than to Miami. The whole town smelled like tobacco and saltwater and a beer cost a quarter. But there was still money to go around. In a 534 Eden Street, there was a brand new house, a queen and Victorian with a wrap around porch and a three story turret. The auto family moved in during the summer of 1900, and that October a baby boy was born the second floor bedroom at the back of the house, the youngest of four kids. His name was Robert Eugene Auto, but eventually everyone called him Gene, and when I tell you why later on, you won't believe it. His father Thomas Osgood Auto was a physician, but doctors back then treated patients whether or not they could pay. So medicine wasn't the most reliable way to get by. Like a lot of doctors at the time, Thomas made his real money as a drugist. He owned two pharmacies selling medicine, various goods, and crucially for our story, paints, oils, and artist brushes. That's almost certainly where a little gene picked up his first paintbrush. Family journals claim he was painting before he could talk. As for Gene's mother, her name was Mini. She was a white Bahamian whose family came to Key West when she was a little girl. And then there's a grandfather, Dr. Joseph Auto, who's a movie character in his own right. During Colonel's Berg in what was then Prussia, he fled a student revolution by hiding in a wagon load of hay. He landed in Key West in 1862 and practiced medicine through smallpox outbreaks and yellow fever epidemics, becoming one of the most beloved figures on the island. Which brings us to two people, the legend of Robert the Doll, would treat very unfairly. William and Emily Abbott. William Abbott came to Key West from the West Indies sometime before 1880 along with his wife, Emily. Both had Bahamian fruits. He started out as a laborer, she worked as a laundress. Eventually, William became Joseph's personal attendant, driving his buggy, guiding him through the streets, and as Joseph got older, caring for him as a sight failed. But in 1885, while Joseph was out on a walk with William, he lost his footing and fell. It was a serious injury, and that June, Joseph died. Afterwards, Jean's father hired William as a clerk at the Family Pharmacy. And when one of the auto-brothers later fell fatally ill at West, it was William the family trusted to bring his body home, which shows you how much he meant to them. But as the story goes, the trust would eventually be twisted into something else entirely, thanks to a doll named Robert. To get there, our story shifts 4,000 miles away to a little town in southern Germany called Gingengen on the Bruns. In 1880, a scene stress, a Margaret Stive starts sewing little fell elephants from a pattern she found in a woman's magazine. They were meant to be pin cushions, but kids kept stealing them to play with. So Margaret leaned in, started designing toy animals, and built a company that in 1902 invented the teddy bear. And around 1904, that same factory produced something much rarer, a doll, a big one, 40 inches tall, the size of an actual child. Under the felt, he had a wire skeleton, about the thickness of a coat hanger, packed with excelsior, the shredded wood shavings they used for stuffing back then. His hair was made from a fiber called mohair. Two black wooden buttons for eyes, painted pink lips, rosy cheeks, and little black eyebrows that tie it all together. And he came into this world dressed as a clown, a harlequin costume in pink and green with pom-poms. For over a hundred years, the story was that Jean's grandfather bought the doll for him while he was on a trip back to Germany, except Joseph died in 1885 and the doll was made around 1904. The real answer was sitting in a shipping record. On September 24th, 1904, a steamship called the Graff Walderze arrived in the United States from Germany. And on the passenger list, returning home from a visit to the auto's family's ancestral country, was Jean's mother, Mini. His fourth birthday was coming up and it seems like the doll was a gift and over the top one. With how big the doll was, he was probably built as a shop window display piece. And he would have been seriously expensive. At least her son seemed to appreciate it, because when he named the doll, he gave it his own first name, Robert. That's when Jean started going by his middle name, and he would for the rest of his life. It wasn't long for Jean and Robert became inseparable. And pretty quickly, things started happening that his parents couldn't explain. Like how two distinct voices would come from the playroom, but when they looked in, Jean was alone playing with the doll. Atop of that, dolls would turn up mangled, furniture got knocked over. And whenever Jean was confronted about it, he'd point at the doll with total conviction and deliver the line that would follow him to the grave. Quote, "I didn't do it. Robert did it." And then, and this is the part that goes towards, never tell you, Jean and Robert separated for 27 years. In 1918, Jean left Key West to study art, with stops in Virginia, Chicago, New York, and in 1924. For Paris, meanwhile, Robert stayed behind a QS packed away in the family home. And Paris is where the story gets another major player. Jean's sister, Ms. Puh, wrote it down in her journal. Her brother woke up one morning to piano music, drifting up from the little salon below his apartment. He leaned over the balcony to listen, and then waited around on the stairs until he got the chance to meet the pianist. Her name was Annette Parker. She was a fellow American from a wealthy Boston family, and by every account, she was talented, magnetic, and completely out of Gene's league. But he went for it anyway. And on May 3rd, 1930, Jean and Ann got married at the American Cathedral in Paris. The newlyweds settled in New York just as the depression hit. Jean made money by selling furniture at Wanda Maker's department store, while Ann pursued a music career, and within a few months landed a spot playing the rainbow room at the top of Rockefeller Center. Together, Jean and Jean wrote and copyrighted more than 30 songs, his lyrics, her music. Things were good for a long time. But in 1945, work came that Jean's mother was a gravely ill. So he and Ann packed up their life in New York and came home to QS. Many died that September in the family home with Jean holding her hand while Ann played the piano downstairs at MiniserQuest. Within weeks, Jean siblings signed their shares of the house over to him and Ann. And one of the first things Jean Otto, 45 years old, and finally master a 534 Eden Street did, was go up to the attic and reunite with his best friend, Robert. Once he had the run of the house, Jean built Robert an entire room, furnished with a little table, a double bench, and a rocking chair, all scaled to a 40-inch body, plus a chest, filled with costumes for the doll. This is when Robert traded his clown suit for one of Jean's own childhood outfits. A white sailor suit from a New York department store, the one he still wears today. I don't know what Ann thought of that, but I'd be extremely concerned. And according to the earliest reporting we have, this is when the stories start leaking out of the house. Neighbors talked, schoolchildren swore they saw the doll move from window to window up in the turret where Jean painted. A plumber working in the attic heard giggling behind him, turned around, and found the doll on the other side of the room, and walked off the job for good. But that was hardly the biggest problem going on in that house. Now there are rumors that Jean was physically violent toward Ann. They appear to be false, but that doesn't mean he was a good partner. Friends were called that when the autos arrived at events, Jean made Ann wait outside for five minutes, so he could make his entrance alone. He refused to let her perform anywhere but inside their home. And he was so exacting about the house that he had photographs made of the shelves, so Ann would know exactly where every copper pot belonged. To cope with all the pressure, Ann kept a bottle in the refrigerator that she told Jean was water. It was actually vodka, for after he went to sleep. To make this even more tragic, a neighbor later recalled Ann confiding that whenever Jean did something mean or hateful, he had an explanation ready. It was the same one he'd been using since he was four years old, Robert did it. Meanwhile, Jean's painting took off and he became one of Key West's most celebrated artists. He even helped design the gallery at Fort East Martello Museum. His dream was that the Eaton Street House would one day become its own museum devoted to his life's work. But by the early 1970s, Jean's hell took a nose dive. As his body failed, he stopped coming downstairs, he spent nearly all of his time in one place. The Attic Room, talking to Robert. Did you know penicillin, the drug that has saved more lives than any other in history, was discovered because a scientist forgot to clean a petri dish before going on vacation? I'm Connor Tomlinson and history is my thing, has been my whole life. And I'm Carter Roy, and this is what the fact. The history lesson you actually wished you had in high school, with everything they cut for being too interesting, put back in. Every week we take the wildest true things that ever happened and tell you the whole story behind them. I bring the history, I bring the facts, the tangents, and the occasional British accent. The wildest stuff is real, and the real stuff is wilder than you think. New episodes every Wednesday. So what the fact on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or subscribe on YouTube at what the fact part? Why have so many crop circles appeared around Britain? How did thousands of people demonstrate powers of telepathy? Can the dead suck the life from the living? Join me, Tim Harford, for a trip into the paranormal, throughout Halloween month on cautionary tales. Listen to cautionary tales on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Jean Otto died on June 24, 1974, in a Miami hospital after a long battle with Parkinson's disease. The obituary in the Kiwa Citizen the next day was glowing. The artist, the architect, the devoted, native son. He didn't mention the doll once, and his cruelty to his wife carried on after his death, because Jean had written and out of his will. Everything went to his sister, including the European antiques that would have kept and comfortable for the rest of her life. Anne had to drive to Miami to beg the family, to at least let her keep the house. They did, and she sold it almost immediately to a friend named William Geiser. She was refused everything else, right down to the one painting Jean had ever made of her, which she'd hoped to leave to her niece. She did get one piece of revenge though, to finish her husband's gravesite, and ordered it covered in plain concrete instead of brick. She said that was good enough for him. And before she left the island forever, she handed the house keys and Robert to William Geiser along with a parting line, quote, "That doll was Jean's best friend, of course he never had any other friends." After that, Anne moved to Massachusetts to live with her sister, where she died of pancreatic cancer a few years later, and January 9, 1979. She isn't buried in the auto-family plot in Key West, although, and I truly cannot make this up, three of Jean's dogs and a key deer are. Instead, Anne lies in a cemetery in Connecticut, where the location of her grave was a mystery for more than 30 years until a researcher writing a book about the doll finally went looking for her and found her headstone under a thick layer of grass, quite possibly the first person to visit it since she died. As for Robert, William Geiser, who says to this day he wishes he'd simply burn the thing, left him in a chest for the house's next owners, William and Mertel Reuter. All in the house reported constant noises from the attic, and a doll never quite in the position they'd left him, had turned, arms propped up, once even with his legs crossed. To prove this wasn't made up, the Reuters invited a local reporter Malcolm Ross to see for himself. He came away shaken, describing a doll whose expression seemed to shift with the conversation, turning to disdain when someone mocked old Jean Otto. He put it in words that would follow Robert forever, quote, "The doll was listening to us." Mertel herself wasn't scared of Robert, though at least not at first. In fact, she was almost sweet with him. On Christmas Eve, she dressed the doll in pajamas and set him beside the tree, and when the Reuters sold the house in 1980, she didn't leave Robert behind. She took him to her new place and sat him on the porch, but then something changed. On August morning in 1994, Mertel Reuter walked into the Fort East Martella Museum, the one Jean had helped design. She was carrying the doll in her arms and set him down in front of the assistant director, a man named Joe Pice. She told him the doll had belonged to the Otto family, that it moved around her house on his own, that it was haunted, and that she couldn't stand having it in her home for one more day. Pice could see that the doll was quite the antique and could be worth a lot. So instead of taking it right away, he asked Mertel if maybe she wanted to keep it or sell it. She refused to take a single dollar. She filled out the donation paperwork and couldn't get out of there fast enough. She was dead within three months. And once Robert settled into the museum, he got to work creeping out the staff. Joe Pice sat the doll in an antique chair across from his desk and made a mark on the lead to check whether Robert was moving. For the record, the mark never caught him. But Pice's worth the doll always looked like he just slipped back into place, like a kid diving back into bed. He got so bad the museum's director refused to be in the office with the doll at night, The rubber went into. artifact storage. For two years, you could only see him by appointment, and employees developed a habit of scheduling those appointments on their days off. Then came 1996, a brand new ghost tour, one of the first in Key West, starts sending curious visitors to the museum asking for the doll, demand grew until they put Robert on permanent display, and visitors quickly learned there's an etiquette to meeting him. Okay Bobby, pretend I'm visiting Robert tomorrow, walk me through the rules so I don't accidentally get cursed. According to whoever you ask, you first have to introduce yourself, and then if you want to take a picture of him, you must ask Robert for permission. How exactly does a doll give you permission? Supposedly, you watch his head and his expression. According to the legend, if his head appears to tilt or you just get the feeling that something is wrong, then the answer is no. And if he says no, but I take the picture anyway, you have to apologize immediately. Got it. Immediately as in while I'm standing there, are we setting him a formal letter? I personally wouldn't wait for the mail. Okay, got it. What else should I never do? Don't mock him, laugh at him, insult gene, or challenge Robert to prove himself. Okay, so no saying, if you're really haunted, move something. Absolutely not. Okay, Bobby, would you personally follow all these rules? I think it'd be hard not to, after hearing the stories that have come from the visitors. Fair enough. And even when Robert supposedly gives permission, the pictures don't always come out the way they're supposed to. Exactly. Fresh batteries have died in front of his case before coming back to life in the parking lot. Rules of film have come back with every frame intact except the ones of Robert which developed as blanks. One visitor claimed the opposite. He got back 24 pictures of Robert in different positions and nothing else on the role turned out. And then came the letters, the apologies from the top of this episode. People write to the museum begging Robert's forgiveness for the photo they took without asking or the joke they made at his expense, and blaming him for everything that happened after they left. The car wreck on the drive home, the broken ankle, the layoff, the divorce, the streak of bad luck that wouldn't end until they said they were sorry. Those letters still arrive almost every day. And Robert the doll became a star. Okay Bobby, before we start pulling the story apart, I want you to rank the evidence against Robert. Okay, let's do it. We have five major claims. One, Jean's family reportedly heard two different voices coming from his playroom when he was alone with Robert. Two, neighbors and later homeowners claimed they saw Robert move or change positions. Three, cameras and batteries allegedly malfunction around him. Four, people report accidents, injuries, breakups, and job losses after disrespecting him. At five, Merle Reuter cared for Robert for years, dressed him in pajamas at Christmas, and then suddenly gave him away for free because she couldn't stand having him in her home anymore. Bobby, start with the claim you find easiest to explain away. I think maybe the first one, I think that it can be a little bit easier to explain away if Jean is behind a closed door playing with Robert and Jean himself is the one creating a voice for Robert. Totally, I was thinking of the same thing. Okay, so in your mind, what comes next after that? I think number three with the cameras and the batteries malfunctioning, that I guess could be chalked up to just a coincidence. In which piece of evidence is the hardest for you to dismiss? I think maybe number two, the neighbors and homeowners claiming that they saw him move or change positions. Just because if you have so many different people all saying the same thing, it becomes a little bit easier to believe. Totally. That one honestly creates me out the most and I'm trying not to think about it, but I guess we'll get into it. Merle is the one I keep coming back to. She wasn't a tourist looking for a scare experience. She lived with Robert for years and apparently wasn't afraid of him at first. Yeah, the only thing I can think of is that Merle knew she was at the end of her life and wanted somebody else to take responsibility for Robert. The only thing I can't get over is why she wouldn't have accepted payment for him. Yeah, exactly. And what would you need to see before you could confidently say an object like Robert was genuinely haunted? Oh gosh, I'm not sure I want to find out, but I think I would have to have my own story of seeing him move around. Oh yeah, so based only on the story we've heard so far, how convinced are you that something paranormal is happening, like from zero to 100? Oh, that's a good question. I want to say maybe 65%. Okay, let's lock that number in because now we're going to examine how much of the story is actually true. So we just went over the history, that's the history, but it's not the story you'll hear if you take a ghost tour past 534 Eaton Street tonight. That version goes something like this. Once a wealthy auto family employed a young servant girl from the islands, Bahamian and some tellings, Haitian and others, and they treated her badly. Before she left that house for good, she gave their little boy a gift, a doll, sewn in his exact image, dressed in his own sailor suit, and cursed with a foodoo. The doll was alive. It giggled in the dark. It moved from window to window. It knocked over furniture and turned the boy's strange. And whenever terrible things happened in that house, everyone knew who really did them. It tormented the man until the day he died, and then it started on everyone else, locking a tenant in the attic, sitting on a sleeping girl's chest, and striking down anyone who dared to suspect it. Almost none of that is true, but we're about to find out where every piece of it came from. So what's going on here? Is it the island? Is it the doll? Or is it us? The scientific case says everything reported about robber, every giggle, every move chair, every shifting expression can be fully explained. Start with Jean Otto's final months. Parkinson's is famous as a movement disorder, but what's less known is that it profoundly affects the mind. In one landmark study, almost four in ten Parkinson's patients had experienced some kind of hallucination in just the previous three months. And the most common type was an adromatic, full-blown vision. It was something subtler. The neurologist called the presence hallucination. The vivid, unshakable feeling that someone is there in the room with you. Now picture it. A man with advanced Parkinson's, isolated in an attic, in daily conversation with a companion he's had since he was four, which sounds a lot less like a haunting and a lot more like a sick, lonely person, and an illness known to play tricks on people's minds. Then there's a phase that seems to show emotion. When museum staff formerly examined robber in 2012, they documented traces of pink pigment on his lips, and nostrils, and faint black brows. Nearly all of it faded away by a century of sunlight, which means robber's expression is actually less defined than it used to be, which brings us to a concept from robotics called the uncanny valley. In 1970, the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori proposed that our affection for human-like figures rises as they get more realistic, until, just short of fully human, it crashes into revulsion. Later researchers found the strongest creepiness comes from faces who signals don't agree, a smiling mouth under eyes that say something else. A faded ambiguous face is essentially a projection screen that you can map emotions onto. Filmmakers have known this for a century. It's the idea behind something called the Coolershop Effect, named for the Russian director Lev Coolershop. Around 1918, he cut the same close-up of an actor's neutral face together with a bowl of soup, a coffin, and a woman. And by his account, audiences swore they saw hunger, grief, and desire on a face that never changed. So in Malcolm Ross' watch robber's expression, turned to disdain at a joke about Jean, the uncanny valley had imprimed to be uncomfortable. And the Coolershop Effect tells us the emotion he saw on that unchanging face was the one he was ready to see. Then there are the apology letters, and I have to say, I love this part. In a series of famous experiments, psychologists Paul Rosen and Carol Nemeroff showed that educated modern adults refuse to wear a sweater they're told once belonged to Hitler, even if it's been freshly washed. They called it the Law of Contagion. Once in contact, always in contact, which means that deep down we behave as if objects absorb the essence of the people who touch them. So if we're told that this doll carries something evil, we act like it does. And if we've disrespected it, we feel we owe it an apology. As for the misfortunes he supposedly causes, those could be explained by sheer numbers. A ton of people follow past that case every year. year. In any group that size, some percentage is due for an awful month, a fender bender, a break up, a layoff, for the people who do come away from robber unscathed, they're just the ones who stayed lucky. And the famously cursed cameras, the museum isn't a brick civil war fort in the Florida Keys. Heat and humidity have been murdering batteries and electronics forever. Now all of that explains the modern hauntings pretty well, but it doesn't account for the origins. And for that, we have to take a deep dive into Robert's backstory. The historical case makes a boulder claim. The curse of Robert the doll was authored. First by a family that needed an explanation for a difficult man, then by newspapers that needed a story. Finally, by an island that discovered the story was worth money. Here's the thing about that ghost tour legend, the mistreated servant, the voodoo revenge. It has a publication date. The earliest known version in print appears in 1985. So 11 years after Jean died, an 81 years after Robert arrived in a South Florida newspaper story, reporting the doll was a childhood gift from quote, "A black girl his parents had held race." End quote. By 1996, a Miami paper had it as a Haitian or a Bahamian girl. Later tellings add the mistreatment, the anger, and the curse. The documented version isn't as exciting, boring, and solid. A rich family bought an expensive toy on a trip abroad. That's it. And I think that's exactly why the true version is what gets buried. It has no villain. So where did Bahamian come from? Remember that Jean's own mother was from the Bahamas. Somewhere across 80 years of retellings, a white Bahamian mother became a black Bahamian servant, which brings us back to William and Emeline Abbott. The real people of the legend fed on. Everything the archives actually show is how close the Abbott's and the autos were. To the point that William and Emeline are buried in the auto family plot. In segregated turn of the century Florida, a shared black and white burial plot was rare. Whatever bound these two families together, it was the opposite of a curse. And while we're correcting the record, let's fix the vocabulary too. The folk tradition of the Bahamas is called Obia. It's a practice of charms and healing, which British colonial authorities criminalized largely because it was a source of power for enslaved people. Meanwhile, Voodoo is a religion from Haiti. And the tradition you'd actually find in Key West is Santaria, born in Cuba where Uruba traditions blended with Catholicism into a religion of its own. Voodoo is the word Hollywood Slabs on all three. And hearing it in the Robert Legend is a dead giveaway that the story was written by outsiders. But once the story started gaining steam, none of that mattered. And once a legend like this exists, something fascinating happens. It starts generating its own evidence. Folklor's Linda Digg and Andrew Vajone called this "Ustension." People living out a story they've already heard and reinterpreting ordinary events through it. The Robert Files are full of it. Take that 1985 newspaper story. The one that first put the curse servant origin into print. It reported that the man who bought the house from Jean's widow died of carbon monoxide poisoning in his car. Spooky, right? Except he didn't. Her friend William Geyser bought the house first. And he was alive and well decades later. Another beloved chapter of the legend stars a ten-year-old girl who woke to find Robert trying to smother her. But researchers have never found any evidence that a ten-year-old girl ever lived in that house. And yet, both stories are still told on the island. And yes, follow the money. Ghost Tourers since 1996, a book branded ROM after dark VIP encounters. None of that makes the legend false, but it absolutely shapes which version survives. Though in fairness, I have to point out the twist. The single most commercially invested person in Robert's legend, the ghost tour founder who wrote his biography is also the researcher who dug up the passenger manifest and dismantled the servant story. So the historical verdict, nobody cursed the doll, we cursed it, collectively, gradually, and profitably. But if that's true, then explain this for me. Why did Murdle Reuter, 20 years into caring for a doll she dressed in Christmas pajamas, suddenly carry him across town, refuse all payment, and run? Ghosts aren't real. At least, that's what journalist Tristan Redman always believed. Sure, odd things happen in his childhood bedroom, but ultimately he shrugged them off. Until he discovered that he wasn't alone, that everyone who lived there after him also had bizarre experiences they couldn't explain. And it gets even weirder. It just so happens that his wife's great-grandmother was murdered in the house next door. Is this ghost somehow connected to her murder? He decides to go or no son-in-law should. Digging up a cold case and asking questions that nobody wants answered. Like, could his wife's great-grandfather have gotten away with the perfect crime? This is a podcast about family secrets, overwhelming coincidence, and the things that come back to haunt us. For the Best Bingeable series, like Ghost Story, listen to the audible true crime podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Audible subscribers can get all episodes early and ad-free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts. Science says the haunting is in our heads. History says it's in the marketing. And yet, neither one can quite explain the people who knew Robert Longest. The ones with nothing to sell who still couldn't get away from him fast enough. So let's take the third possibility as seriously as they did. What if something really is in there? And as promised, Bobby Curtisley is here to talk all about it. Bobby, before we dive in, what creeps you out about the story the most? I think just the sheer scope of it. Jean's family noticed that something was very wrong with the doll when he was a kid. And then despite Jean already passing away, Robert continued to creep out the house's new residence. And now of course, visitors who come to see him today still claim to be haunted by him. So much so that they actually take the time to mail in letters to a doll. Then there's the identity element of it, how Jean literally gave Robert his name and then his clothes. There just seems to be something about this doll that consumes people. Definitely groove all that. I think it's super creepy that he gave the doll his name and dressed him up in his clothes. I've covered some strange stuff on the show, but Robert the doll definitely takes the cake for me. And I don't know about you, but the biggest question I'm left with is why. So let's say there really is something supernatural about Robert. What kind of force could be driving that? That's a good question. Could it be Jean himself? According to everything that we know about Robert's story, Jean did spend an awful lot of time with this doll, but was it already haunted by someone or something else in Jean's childhood? The answer to that question I think is what will determine who or what Robert really is. And here's what's interesting to me, the people who know Robert best don't actually subscribe to the vengeful servant story that's associated with him. After almost two decades of research, the doll's own biographer, David Sloan, yes, Robert the doll has a biographer. He landed on three possibilities. And if you ask me, they're stranger and sadder than a curse. The first one is the one Sloan himself finds most compelling. Census records show that Emily Abbott, the wife of the auto's trusted attendant, gave birth to a child sometime between 1900 and 1910 and lost that child young. Sloan pieced together a few other fragments. Many auto's journals hinting at women who envied her marriage. A lawsuit Emily attempted against the auto's after Jean's father died. And many's own puzzling choice to be buried outside the family plot. The same plot where the Abbott's relate to rest. So David Sloan's suggestion is that maybe there was an affair. It could be that the child Emily lost was Jean's half brother, half sister. And maybe a grieving mother who was first in the old island practices bound her child spirit to the beautiful doll in the big house. But not out of revenge, just to keep her baby close. To back it all up, Sloan notes that about half a dozen people over the years, several of them self-described psychics have described the presence around Robert the same way as a small light-skinned child. This story does something I love. It takes the ugliest version of the ghost to a legend, the mystery is servant and her revenge curse and turns it on its head, not hatred, grief. Now the second possibility is even more out there. It asks what if Robert is Jean? Yeah, I mean think about the sheer amount of emotional energy he put into that doll. His name, his clothes, his confessions whispered in an attic at the end of his life. If any object on earth were saturated enough with one human being to hold a piece of him, wouldn't it be this one? And if Jean spirit went anywhere, wouldn't it be into his oldest friend, who is now seated in the very museum gallery that Jean himself designed. Sloan puts it hauntingly. Maybe the legend of Robert the Doll was Jean Otto's greatest work of art. It honestly kind of gives me the crease but also it makes sense. I mean I didn't even make the connection that the doll ends up being in the gallery that he built which is sort of like this bizarre full circle moment and yeah if you really want to take it to that level I mean energy can either be created or nor destroyed so where does it go like I do think there is some level where people do believe this is not first first of all this is not the first example of a haunted object and definitely not the first haunted doll so it's possible there could be something there but the idea that someone could put so much of themselves into an object that it takes on their essence again honestly not the craziest thing I've heard and now for the third possibility which might be the strangest and that's saying something the theory is this Robert is haunted by us yeah I mean a spirit doesn't have to move in from the outside it can be built slowly out of the attention and the emotion and belief that thousands of people keep pouring into this one object year after year and the evidence is in the mail room really alongside the apologies people send Robert candy cash birthday cards over a thousand letters he has now and plenty of them are just checking in on him a curator answers his mail and runs his social media accounts in his voice no way myrtle dressed him in pajamas for Christmas added all up and what's happening between Robert and the world looks less like a haunting and more like a relationship right so if there is a spirit robber this theory says we're the ones building it one letter at a time so lots of possibilities here and I can see how they all make sense okay Bobby where do you land on all of this you know I really love stories like this one because I feel like it shows us more about who we are as humans we love to make sense of things that maybe we aren't meant to understand and in doing that we assign meaning to moments or objects that otherwise might have none but I do feel that there has to be some truth behind the stories told about Robert even if today it's been blown out of proportion somewhere along the way people were so scared of this doll that they told enough stories of him to make it all the way to us here sitting in this call right where we are today over a hundred years later true where now people are so scared of him that they are writing apology letters to escape his presence unscathed pretty much so maybe the scary stories came out of the bizarre relationship that gene continued to have with Robert even as an adult or maybe all of the hauntings are real but with these cases it's never really cold cut undeniable fact it's something more instinctual than that and it varies with every person that comes in contact with his story this is exactly why I was so excited to have you on I love thinking about things from a different angle and to understand Robert the doll you definitely have to do that okay so here's where I land on it I agree with you Bobby I think it's more of a legend that we created ourselves it's like Jack the Ripper I mean we know that a journalist actually gave the name Jack the Ripper then it became like this whole mythology and legend that we still talk about to this day and I think something similar has happened with Robert the doll I also agree that you can't really deny that there's so many people who were craved out by Robert the doll so there's clearly something going on maybe it's beyond the metaphysical if we can't understand it and some things aren't meant for us to understand even though we we desperately try but I think that's where I I sort of land on this whole situation what about you Bobby I actually agree with you I think that I don't know we we have all of these stories from people so like you say it's it's something that obviously all of these people can't be making these things up and there has to be some truth behind you know this figure that Robert the doll has become but at some point too we also have to look into as a collective like what we're trying to achieve by writing letters to a doll you know like having all of these stories be told about him and kind of just like paying into that lore behind him and so you have to kind of ask yourself is this something that we've created or is it something that we've created based on experiences that actually happened to real people that came in contact with Robert the doll yeah and maybe it's a little bit of both who knows yeah before you sign off Bobby I have to ask you something I have heard that you actually live in a very historical house possibly haunted can you give us a little bit of backstory and context to this is this actually the case yeah I am the fifth generation that lives in the home that I'm at right now I moved back around 2020 and started kind of documenting my journey online as the fifth generation moving in here the home was built in 1800s and a lot of the previous residents that lived here before my family came along just kind of left all of their stuff in the basement and it's never really been gone through and so I really took an interest to under you know kind of piecing together the history of my house and my family and how all of that correlates we have definitely found some really spooky things like wiki boards and drywall wow and go head dagger in the dirt floor of the basement that's just really crazy to me so do you know the history of your house is there a reason why did other members of your family or generations back feel like this house was haunted or that they need protection against it we have so many stories like within our family just this crazy family lore and like one of the biggest ones was that we had like a crazy ant who was locked in this room in the basement and was like chained to a wall but that room when you open the door it has a cement wall built right in front of the doorways you can't actually get into the room you can climb over the wall so we did one day and when you climb over the wall you can see very clearly that that room used to be connected to the one next to it but it has been cemented over so just very strange things like that and I've been searching for answers for a while trying to figure out more about the history here but I think that a lot of the antique items we have in the basement piecing them together kind of gives us a little bit of a glimpse into the history behind the house and so that's it's been interesting it's been a journey I am such a scary cat because I believe in this stuff but I'm so terrified of ghosts and being possessed or haunted or something like that I think it comes from like growing up in my family like they definitely believe in spirits and ghosts and things like that and superstitions so I feel like if you grow up in a family that's like that sounds like it's something similar to yourself you start to believe in those things too whether there's any logic behind or not but funnily enough I've never had anything well two things I the house my family home that I grew up in before it was turned into homes apparently it was supposed to be a church or a cemetery and they decided to call it off for some reason I only found that out way later I don't know if there's any weird things but my brother he's 10 years older than me he would say that there were some weird occurrences that would happen specifically in our two rooms I don't know if he was just trying to scare me as an older brother but I have had some of my close friends come over to my house and they kind of get creeped out by the upstairs for some reason I personally have never felt that thankfully I think it would be really hard for me to go home I would say the only real ghostly encounter actually comes from my husband he has like a genuinely genuine ghost story which I will not get into the full story today but maybe we can do this on a different episode it's a very good one but he actually had a ghost come sit in between him and his sister in a car oh wow on the way home like they picked up a ghost or picked up a lady on the way home and she sat in between my husband and her his sister and they didn't realize she was dead until later there's like a whole story and lore behind it my parents think my husband's just lying to me and just pulling my leg but I don't think so I fully believe it and that freaks me out so I think I've had adjacent supernatural experiences but yeah I am a believer and I hope I never encounter anything and keep it that way yeah okay usually this is where I imagine how the story would play out in the modern world but with Robert I don't have to imagine because it's happening right now and it is fascinating Robert has a hashtag seriously hashtag sorry Robert where people post their apologies publicly instead of mailing them he has social media accounts written in his own voice by museum curator with a PhD he's flown across the country to appear on television people line up after dark to test the curse for themselves and that's for a doll whose story had built up over decades modern legends need just a fraction of that consider a slender man invented openly on an internet forum in 2009 everyone knew he was fiction and within a few years people were of manufacturing evidence for him anyway folks florist call it reverse ostension. The story comes first and the proof gets built afterward. Robert needed 80 years to acquire his curse. A Robert Cree today would have a complete mythology, a fandom, and a merch line by the end of the week, and one more thing would arrive quickly. Remember those roles of film that came back blank? For decades, that was the scariest evidence anyone could produce. Today, the first AI-generated clip of Robert turning his head would rack up 50 million views by lunchtime, and it would settle nothing, because real footage and fake footage now look exactly the same. But strictly the hashtags and the deep fakes and the horror underneath hasn't changed at all. We need something with a face we can't read, we hand it a personality, and then we start apologizing to it. Nobody ever needed a curse for that. We've been doing it since 1985, and 1904, and probably since the first human car to face onto a stick, it felt deep in their chest that it was watching them back. Thanks so much for joining me for this episode of Hidden History. I'm Dr. Huni Bot. Join me next time as we explore another unbelievable story from the past. Thanks again, Bobby, for joining us on Hidden History, and before you go, please let us know what you're working on currently, and any of the socials so our listeners can start following you. Yeah, so I'm actually, I have my own podcast. It's called Audities on Elm Street. I do have two different kind of platforms. One is Audities on Elm Street on TikTok and YouTube and Instagram, where I share the history of my house, and then my other content is storytelling content on Bobby Curtis Lee, and that is also TikTok Instagram. I am also currently working on writing a book, so that is a whole new venture I've been taking on, and as for our podcast, it is me and my best friend from high school. We get together every week and tell spooky stories from our listeners, and we just have a lot of fun with it. That sounds so fun. Thanks so much, Bobby, and I hope to have you on again for another spooky episode. I would love to. Thank you so much. Be sure to subscribe on YouTube and TikTok. Her content is perfect for spooky season. But what did you think of Robert the Doll? Any theories of your own, and be honest, would you ask Robert's permission before taking his photo, or are you brave enough to find out? Let me know in the comments, and I might talk about it in a future episode. And be sure to subscribe on YouTube or rate your view and follow if you're listening on audio, so we can keep building this community together. Thanks for joining us, and we'll see you at your next episode. That's all for today's haunting. Thanks for letting me take over your show. If you want more mysteries like this one, follow Hidden History with Dr. Hooney Bot on your favorite podcast app, or subscribe on YouTube at Hidden History Pop. And now I'll slip back to my show and return the speed to Alexis and Sabrina. Happy Halloween! 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