No stranger to high strangeness himself, Catholic Answers head apologist Jimmy Akin shares a spooky occurrence that his college friends experienced.
From the archives of Jimmy Akin’s Mystgerious World, please enjoy “The Curse of the Vietnam Doll”.
… [D]olls exist in the uncanny valley. As people will be aware, the uncanny valley is a phenomenon that has been noted where as things get closer and closer to looking human, they get cuter. Thus puppies are cuter than adult dogs because they have the same big eyes compared to their head size that human babies have, so there’s a little bit more cuteness there. And anthropomorphic animals like in children’s storybooks or Disney movies can be cuter yet.
But then when it gets really close to being human and not quite there, it triggers a different response in us. It’s like something is wrong here; this is maybe diseased, it’s maybe a threat, and its cuteness drops off, and it becomes alarming. And that point at which that happens is the beginning of what’s called the uncanny valley, where it’s so human but not quite there, and that’s why clowns are frequently perceived as being creepy.
And it’s also why you would find haunted dolls just from natural human psychology. Dolls are almost human but not quite, and that makes them puts them in the uncanny
valley. And thus you have Chucky and things like that. And that’s gonna just for natural causes produce reports of haunted dolls.Incidentally, I have a story from my own past that’s related to this. I had a group of friends in high school and early college in Arkansas, and they would go camping sometimes. And one time they were camping—I wasn’t there for this event—but they had … a baby doll. It belonged to one of the families that was in the group, and it was not in great shape. It kind of—I don’t know if you’ve ever seen Rugrats … Angelica’s doll Cynthia that has like half the hair plucked out. And my my friends had a doll that was kind of in that condition. And they, being … young males, were, you know, a little bit destructive of things. And they ended up decapitating the doll.
And then … mythicizing the doll, they started referring to it as, for some reason, as the Vietnam doll head. And and they then decided to dispose of the Vietnam doll head by putting it like in a cook stove that they had there where they were camping. And then they opened up the door to the cook stove—I’m not sure why—and saw the head in there staring back at them with an ember in its eye, peeking through its eye. And that totally freaked them out, and they became semi-seriously convinced that the Vietnam doll head was a supernatural entity of some kind.
That’s quite the campfire tale. Hear Jimmy tell it on his show:
A battered doll head staring back at its abusers from an oven with an ember glowing in its eye is the kind of subtle spook you don’t get in over-the-top creepypastas these days.
What do you think? Did Jimmy’s friends fall prey to the curse of the Vietnam doll? Or did they just look too long into the uncanny valley?
Share your opinion, as well as any spooky doll stories of your own, in the comments.
Get get regular first looks at my exciting new projects! Join my elite neopatrons to read The Burned Book as I write it!
Join on Patreon or SubscribeStar now.
