Iconic - Classic

You know the most haunted places. The houses, the castles, the hotels. And you know the most haunted objects. The mirrors, the necklaces, the dolls. In this episode, we take you to the Stanley Hotel and introduce you to Robert the Doll.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Glynn Washington?

  We are often surprised by the shadow, startled by the unseen hand, but some of us can see into the darkness and insist instead on surprising them.

• 0:19Glynn Washington?

  You're listening to Spooked? Stay tuned.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  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 iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:01Glynn Washington?

  There are booklets you can buy that will tell you where certain ghosts reside. Perhaps it will give you a little bit of the backstory that caused them to be left behind. I've never purchased one of these pamphlets. I've never read one of the beautiful ornate cards, never gone on a ghost tour through Orleans, Savannah, or Boston. Never sought out the presence of a shade, but I do understand that some feel compelled, as if drawn, to poke the sleeping bear. Perhaps it's like the kid who has to ride the roller coaster over and over and over again until he no longer screams in terror.

• 1:44Glynn Washington?

  It feels safer to think we can know exactly what it is that's waiting in the dark, even if we know better.

• 1:58Glynn Washington?

  My name is Glynn Washington. Know better. Spook starts now.

• 2:30Glynn Washington?

  Now, you know some of these people. Some of them, all they want to do is go to the haunted places, the scary spots where they know full well that ghosties and ghoulies dwell. I do not understand this, but I'm grateful. They can go into the darkness and bring back stories. Spooked.

• 2:53Speaker 02

  My name is Daniel Noah. I'm a filmmaker. I've always had an incredible fascination with tales of the supernatural since I was a little boy. But I was a real non-believer. I was what you call a hardcore skeptic. I didn't think any of it was real. I'm part of a company that makes horror movies. And as such, we're frequently invited to events that are deliberately staged at places that are alleged to be haunted.

• 3:25Speaker 02

  In 2000, maybe 2014, we were at the Stanley Hotel for a film festival called the Stanley Film Festival. The Stanley Hotel is in Estes, Colorado. It is purported to be the most haunted structure in the world or something like that. The Stanley Hotel is very old. It's very beautiful. It's where Stephen King apparently had some sort of an experience that led him to write The Shining.

• 3:54Speaker 02

  So we were all there for this festival and we were staying up late, just talking and hanging out and got a call from another friend that we were doing a Ouija board up in one of the rooms. And my friends, who love this kind of stuff, wanted to go up and do it. And I thought it was ridiculous. I didn't believe in Ouija boards. I thought they were silly and I didn't really want to do it, but I went along for the ride.

• 4:25Speaker 02

  So we went up to the room. There were maybe 15 people in this fairly large room, hanging out, drinking, listening to music. And then the Ouija board came out. It wasn't the Hasbro Ouija board. It was a Ouija board that had been made by a local artist. The planchette wasn't plastic. It was, uh, it was a, like a wood material and, and, um, you know, everything was handmade. Um, it wasn't manufactured in any way. Uh, the directions were written in cursive, um, you know, on a piece of paper. So a group of

• 5:04Speaker 02

  four people got on it and started saying, "If there is a spirit here, please make yourself known." And I'm sitting in the corner rolling my eyes and nothing happens. And, and thinking it's goofy and wishing that we would stop so that we could just get back to hanging out and catching up and not wasting time on this silly toy. Then someone said, "Let's try a different four people." So a different four people went on. And again, nothing happened. And they said, "Well, let's try a different four." So I came up. Um, it was myself and three other people whom I know very, very well. Uh, almost immediately, the planchette

• 5:46Speaker 02

  started moving. And this is one of these things that is very difficult to explain to someone who wasn't there. I understand how Ouija boards are purported to work, that you're all moving them unconsciously and, um, you know, you don't, or someone's doing it deliberately to have fun with everyone, or you're all doing it without realizing it. This was different. Our fingers were on the planchette, but it was moving with such force and precision that I immediately could not understand what was happening. I, I, I, and I was looking at these three other people going, "Is one of my close friends

• 6:31Speaker 02

  trying to trick everyone? And how? How are they doing this?" Because I'm looking and everyone's fingers are just sort of lightly hovering. No one's got a grip on the thing, but this thing is

• 6:48Speaker 02

  It's moving with incredible force and precision. It felt like being pulled. There's not a doubt in my mind that I was not pushing this thing. I wasn't saying anything because I was uncomfortable. There was someone else who was doing the talking. And I have a photo that, so one of the people in the room wrote, transcribed everything that was communicated on the board. And I have a photo of the stationery from the hotel with all of these notes written on them. So it's an exact record of everything.

• 7:29Speaker 02

  The first word that came through on the board was dad. The second word was mom. Third word was sorry. And then it started to fall into these repeating patterns. Go, mom, mom, no, swim, mom, mom, swim, swim, swim. And then someone asked her name and she responded, A V E. At no point did she ever say, I'm a girl. We all just knew.

• 8:13Speaker 02

  And then it became gibberish again and eventually came back to the word lake, lake, lake, lake, swim, swim, lake, lake. Someone asked her, did you drown in a lake? And her answer was yes. And someone said, were you drowned in a lake? And the answer was mom. People in the room are becoming alarmed. The other thing that's happening is that as she's devolving into this repetition of the word swim, swim, swim, the planchette. I, I, I know how crazy this sounds.

• 8:57Speaker 02

  The planchette started to spin. It felt like chaos. It felt like this girl was drowning in real time.

• 9:15Speaker 02

  So someone said, is there anything that you want to tell us? And the answer was hide. And the person asked, hide from what? And the answer was him. At that point, about half the people in the room left. Some of them were furious because they thought that we were playing a prank and they didn't appreciate it. What everyone in that room felt that night, even the people that were angry and leaving, was happening on a cellular level.

• 9:58Speaker 02

  And you hear people say, I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand up. It was that kind of a feeling. Something was happening that was absolutely undeniable. Someone said, is there anything that you would like us to do? And her answer was, follow. Follow, follow where? And the answer was, 324. And that was it. She was gone. The plan shot stopped moving. It's like someone turned off some sort of static electricity machine or something. You just, your whole body just relaxes. Okay, it's over.

• 10:42Speaker 02

  And suddenly realized, oh, she wants us to go up to room 324.

• 10:57Speaker 02

  This episode is sponsored by Vinted. Imagine opening my closet, looking for a shirt, and I see that jacket. That jacket, that jacket I got for that party I never went to three years ago. That jacket, it's still there. It's still mocking me. Well, it was still there. Because then I stopped and I reached for my phone because Vinted is a secondhand marketplace app where you can sell clothes that you no longer wear. Listening on Vinted is quick and simple. Once an item sells, Vinted creates the prepaid shipping label for you. And Vinted has no seller fees, meaning you keep every dollar you earn. And I could get a little more room in my closet.

• 11:43Speaker 02

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• 12:08Speaker 02

  So by now, I would say it's maybe three in the morning. And a very, very small, intrepid group of us decided to go to room 324.

• 12:23Speaker 02

  So we circle up the stairs. And as we're ascending to the third floor, there's a couple standing on the landing who are in hysterics. We've never seen them before. They're just guests at the hotel. The woman is sobbing hysterically and the man turns to us as we're coming up the stairs behind them and he says, "Don't come up here." So of course, we immediately went up there. And the woman is like crying and the guy is, you know, he's red faced and wide eyed and pale. And we say, "What happened?" And they say, "We saw something in the hallway." We said, "Well, what did you see?"

• 13:07Speaker 02

  And the woman was incoherent. The man said, "It was a tiny figure." And we said, "Well, what did it look like?" And he said, "Well, I didn't see it with my eyes. I saw it with my mind. But I think it was a little girl." And we said, "Well, where was it?" And he said, "I'm not going down that hallway to show you." At this point, it was just myself and one other friend. We said, "We're gonna walk and you tell us when to stop." So we walked and walked and walked. And he said, "Right there." And sure enough, it was in front of room 324. What will haunt me forever is what would have happened if they hadn't been there?

• 13:52Speaker 02

  Because she was waiting for us. And would we have seen that little figure?

• 14:03Speaker 02

  The next day was our last day before we were leaving. I went down to the basement of the hotel to the archive. Because when you check in, they very excitedly say, "The hotel is very haunted, and if you happen to experience anything, go down and report it to the archive." Which I thought was silly when I checked in. But I went, "I'm gonna go report this to the archive." So I went down and I said, "Can you pull the folder for room 324, please?" And she said, "No problem." She pulled it out, and it was report after report about two children, a boy and a girl, who were very sweet, who would pull the covers off the bed, or turn the lights on and off,

• 14:45Speaker 02

  or play, run around giggling. I didn't know any of that. None of us knew any of this going into this experience. A couple of weeks later, someone who had been in the room, he had found a tiny little news story about a child drowning in a lake not that far from the hotel. The name didn't quite match up. It was, it started with A, I don't remember what it was, but it was, it was close enough that we thought, "Could this be Ava? Could Ava have been her nickname?" And it was, it was a lake that no longer existed, that had once been sort of adjacent

• 15:28Speaker 02

  to the property. The events of that night were so undeniable, I won't deny that it was exciting. Because of course, it's very exciting to think that there's more out there, that ghosts exist. The significance of that event has sunk in with me, insofar as it was the beginning of what seems to be a new chapter of my life, in which the denial is gone, the skepticism is obliterated, and I now consider myself what they call a sensitive.

• 16:14Glynn Washington?

  Thank you, Daniel Noah, for talking back to Ava. I would not have done it. I wouldn't. Now, here's a little PSA for you listeners. Don't, whatever you do, please, just leave those Ouija boards alone, damn it. Leave them alone. Just a safety tip from your boy Glenn. And here's another PSA. Daniel and his best friend, Mr. Elijah Wood, they make horror movies together. And now they have a podcast called Visitations about all things scary and wacky and wonderful. Check out our website, spookpodcast.org, for information on their amazing show. The original score for that story was by Davy Kim.

• 16:55Glynn Washington?

  It was produced by Eliza Smith. Now, our next story takes us to Key West, one of the most beautiful spots in the Lower 48, an island off the southern tip of Florida, known for sunsets and warm surf for being the birthplace of key lime pie. An unlikely setting for a ghost story? Perhaps. Or maybe if you're a spirit, there's no better place to be. Spooked.

• 17:36Speaker 03

  I've never been to Key West.

• 17:42Speaker 04

  It's an amazing island. There's some people think that the reason that it's such a haunted city is because when people die, they're still not ready to leave.

• 17:54Speaker 03

  David Sloan is a writer, and when he moved to Key West, he heard about this one house he really had to see.

• 18:03Speaker 04

  The Artist's House is one of the most photographed houses in Key West. It's beautiful. It was built in the late 1800s. And it has this turret, or copula, towards the front. It's two stories. It's known for its beautiful purple shutters. And it's just an amazing house. It's very grand when you go in. Multiple rooms, a beautiful staircase going up.

• 18:26Speaker 03

  There are many legends about the Artist's House. David heard it was haunted by a woman named Anne. So when he went there, he asked the owner if they had a ghost.

• 18:38Speaker 04

  And he said, "Oh, you want to hear about Robert?" I said, "No, I want to hear about Anne. Who's Robert?" And he started telling me this crazy story about a haunted doll. And he said, "Do you want to see the room where he used to live?" And I said, "Yeah, I do."

• 18:54Speaker 04

  They've got this very narrow staircase, and it leads up to the attic. And there's this hatch that you open up to go into the attic. And when we got in there,

• 19:06Speaker 04

  there was little furniture, little chairs, little tables. It looked like somebody was setting up for a party for children, a little tea party. And this negative heat energy filled the room. And it wasn't like, when you walk into an attic, it wasn't a hot attic like that. It was definitely a more involved, more powerful feeling.

• 19:26Speaker 03

  David learned that Robert, the doll that had lived in that attic, had been donated to a local museum years ago.

• 19:34Speaker 04

  They kept him locked in a back room. I called the museum and I said, "Hey, can I come see Robert?" And the person who answered the phone said, "You can, but not when I'm working."

• 19:44Speaker 03

  Eventually, the curator of the museum agreed to let David see the doll.

• 19:52Speaker 04

  She brings Robert out into the room, and he's sitting in this little chair. And Robert is, he's about three feet tall. He looks like a small child. I mean, he's stuffed with straw, covered with fabric, dressed as a sailor. Robert wears a four-piece sailor suit, consisting of pants, vest, jacket, and hat. He had shoe-button eyes painted black. When you look closely at his face, you can see a little bit of color in his cheeks, and you can see some accents around his eyes. And over the years, he had termite damage. So he has little holes in his face that make him look like a burn victim. He definitely has a creep factor to him.

• 20:32Speaker 03

  The curator set Robert down on a table and started talking to him.

• 20:37Speaker 04

  Robert, this is David. He wants to take some photographs of you. And she set him down on the table and then she left. So it was me and the doll alone in the room. I snapped a couple of pictures of him. And then I wanted to remove his hat so I could get a picture of him without it. And as I went to grab for the brim of his hat, he didn't move, but he came alive. His eyes took on a gleam and like boom, there was something in him. He changed. He wasn't just this inanimate object. There was a definite energy to him. And I thought, oh my God, I've got to get a picture of this. So I grabbed the camera. I tried to take a shot. It wouldn't fire. I go to take another shot, nothing. Three shots, absolutely nothing happens. I set the camera down on the table to look at it. Boom, boom, boom. It takes the three pictures, not looking at the doll.

• 21:20Speaker 04

  I go back to try to shoot the doll again. It wouldn't happen. And then the life went out of him and he went back to looking just like a plain old doll.

• 21:27Speaker 03

  David had made a mistake. Visitors who come to the museum to see Robert the doll, and many do, must ask his permission before they take a photograph. Because if they don't, strange things tend to happen.

• 21:46Speaker 05

  Dear Robert, I'm writing to apologize to you for taking so many pictures without asking your permission.

• 21:53Speaker 04

  I've read hundreds of letters that people have sent to Robert asking him to remove a curse or to forgive them.

• 21:59Speaker 06

  Since our visit to the museum, we've been under a dark cloud.

• 22:03Speaker 04

  There's weird stories about deer.

• 22:05Speaker 07

  When driving back from the Keys, a deer ran out in front of our car. We almost hit a tree.

• 22:10Speaker 04

  Hearing giggling from somebody holding the doorknob when nobody's in the house.

• 22:14Speaker 05

  Last night, I was home all alone. I heard a voice coming from the basement.

• 22:21Speaker 03

  It was Robert. At first, all David knew about Robert were the rumors he'd heard around town. That the doll had belonged to the original owners of the artist's house, the Otto's.

• 22:34Speaker 04

  One of the early stories that I heard about Robert was that he was created by a servant of the family who had been mistreated. And that there was some kind of voodoo involved.

• 23:07Speaker 04

  Somebody started saying that he was the inspiration for Chucky. I am Chucky, the killer doll, and I dig it! He was not the inspiration for Chucky. You know, I wanted people to know the facts about the doll, because I did want to dispel a lot of these legends.

• 23:24Speaker 03

  David decided to set the record straight on Robert the Doll. He started doing research.

• 23:30Speaker 04

  There were six boxes of Otto family archives. So I just uncovered this treasure trove.

• 23:39Speaker 03

  Gene Otto was born in 1900 in Key West. His father was a doctor. When he was five years old, Gene received the doll as a gift.

• 23:49Speaker 04

  Gene's real name was Robert Eugene Otto. When he got the doll, he gave it his own name. The sailor suit that he wears was a suit that Gene Otto had as a child. So Gene actually ended up dressing the doll in his own clothes. There was this bizarre attraction that he had with the doll. They were inseparable.

• 24:13Speaker 03

  It was clear even then that Robert was no ordinary doll.

• 24:19Speaker 04

  His parents would leave him playing with the doll, and they'd hear two distinct voices coming from the room. And whenever something happened, you know, something was broken, if something that kids would get in trouble for, Gene would say, "I didn't do it. Robert did it."

• 24:41Speaker 03

  But eventually, Gene grew up and left childish things behind. He became a painter and moved to Paris, joining a group of expatriates like Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein.

• 24:57Speaker 04

  There are some great pictures of him in France, where he was wearing a beret and he just looked like he had the world at his hands.

• 25:04Speaker 03

  In France, Jean met another young American. Her name was Annette. She also went by Anne. She was a concert pianist.

• 25:14Speaker 04

  Annette was strikingly beautiful. She stole the scene in any room that she walked into. She was glamorous, she was funny, she was smart. She had everything going for her.

• 25:25Speaker 03

  Anne and Jean fell head over heels in love. They moved to New York. He painted, she played piano. They even wrote songs together. But then, Jean's mother became ill. He returned to Key West to take care of her, in the same house he grew up in, the same house where he played with Robert the Doll. Anne went with him.

• 25:48Speaker 04

  When they came to Key West, she gave up her piano career to be the artist's wife.

• 25:54Speaker 03

  The couple made a big splash in the Key West society pages. Anne, for her warm hospitality and delicious key lime pies. Jean, for his landscapes.

• 26:06Speaker 04

  He'd paint the street scenes, he'd paint old conch houses. He was known for his amazing ability to capture the harsh sunlight of the Florida Keys like nobody else could.

• 26:19Speaker 03

  But as they both grew older...

• 26:21Speaker 04

  That's when the weird things started happening again.

• 26:24Speaker 03

  In his later years, Jean's health deteriorated.

• 26:28Speaker 04

  He was sick. And I think with everything that was going on, he might not have known what he was doing. He struck up his relationship with Robert again.

• 26:38Speaker 03

  Jean started to spend more and more time with the doll.

• 26:43Speaker 04

  Jean used to paint up in the turret room because there was good light up there. People who grew up in town then say that they'd see Robert sitting up in the window. Kids would go by and they'd see Robert move from one side of the window to the other.

• 26:59Speaker 03

  Anne couldn't stand the doll. Things got bad between her and Jean.

• 27:06Speaker 04

  He was cruel to her later in life. People say that he used to lock her in a closet. And then when confronted with the abuse, he'd say, "I didn't do it, Robert did it."

• 27:19Speaker 03

  Gene died in a Miami hospital in 1974. After his death, Ann learned that, after everything she'd given up for him, Gene had written her out of his will and left everything to his sister.

• 27:34Speaker 04

  Gene had done one portrait in his life, and it was a portrait of Ann. And the sister wouldn't let her have it. What he did left her with nothing. And she was very bitter about that.

• 27:47Speaker 03

  Ann moved to Boston, where she lived out the last years of her life.

• 27:52Speaker 04

  It's a terrible ending. Didn't have to be that way.

• 27:56Speaker 03

  She refused to be buried next to her husband. The artist's house was eventually sold to new owners, and Robert the Doll remained in the attic, though he didn't stay quiet about it.

• 28:11Speaker 04

  A plumber was doing some work in the attic. He saw the doll, and the doll was sitting there. He started to go to work. And he heard giggling coming from behind him. And he turned around. Robert had moved from one side of the room to the other. He was so freaked out, he left his tools. He never even went back to the house.

• 28:34Speaker 03

  One day, the owner of the artist's house showed up at the museum with Robert.

• 28:40Speaker 04

  She brought him in and said, "This is Gene Otto's doll. It's haunted. I don't want it anymore." And she said, "It locked me in my room. I do not want this doll anymore."

• 28:56Speaker 03

  After doing all this research about the history of Robert the Doll, David decided to write a book.

• 29:01Speaker 04

  I think a lot of people appreciate that it is a true biography of the doll. I show where the legends came from and present the real information about Robert.

• 29:12Speaker 03

  David's work revealed that Robert the Doll's true origin wasn't an angry servant with voodoo powers. In fact, the doll was made by the same company that invented the teddy bear, in Germany.

• 29:26Speaker 04

  I discovered records showing Gene's mother traveling to Germany right before his birthday.

• 29:33Speaker 03

  But the legend about the servant does have a kernel of truth to it. David learned about a man named William Abbott and his wife.

• 29:42Speaker 04

  William Abbott was a manservant for Gene's grandfather. And he had a wife, and her name was Emmeline or Emmeline. The interesting thing about her, in the 1900 census, she shows zero children living, zero children deceased. In the 1910 census, she shows zero children living, one child deceased. We don't know how old the child was. We don't know a lot of things, but we know that she had a child. When her child got sick, or when her child was injured, where is she going to take that child? She's going to go to the doctor's house.

• 30:22Speaker 03

  Remember, Gene's father was a doctor.

• 30:24Speaker 04

  So I believe that she took her child to the artist's house. And I believe her child died in the house. And I think that's the spirit that entered Robert the doll.

• 30:39Speaker 03

  What do you think the child wants?

• 30:44Speaker 04

  I think he wants what any child wants, you know? He wants to be loved. He wants people to be OK. There was an autistic boy who went to see Robert. He was very drawn to the doll.

• 30:57Speaker 03

  The boy's mother took a photo of her son with Robert.

• 31:00Speaker 04

  If you look in it, you can see a little boy, the silhouette of a little boy, standing in the back. It looked like he was just holding his hand there. There's energy placed on things. Some people love Robert, and they see him for this innocent little doll.

• 31:16Speaker 06

  If you weren't a doll, I think we could be friends.

• 31:19Speaker 04

  Then there's other people who talk about the horrible things that happened with Robert.

• 31:23Speaker 05

  It started with my kitten suddenly dying, my bank account being fraudulently used.

• 31:30Speaker 07

  When we arrived home, our dog, who is very friendly, began to attack.

• 31:35Speaker 06

  Robert, we both know the truth.

• 31:37Speaker 04

  Both of those are a result of the energy that is placed on the doll.

• 31:41Speaker 05

  Please forgive me.

• 31:42Speaker 07

  Please reverse this curse.

• 31:44Speaker 06

  Did I mention how sorry I am and how cool you are?

• 31:50Speaker 03

  After solving the mystery of Robert the doll, David moved on with his life. Now, he runs an annual key lime pie festival in Key West, which is the birthplace of key lime pie. We have a new ship! Ah!

• 32:04Speaker 04

  We do the World Key Lime Pie Eating Championships. Record time for eating a 9-inch key lime pie is 55 seconds. We do the key lime pie drop, where we drop key lime pies from the top of the lighthouse and try not to have them break on the way down.

• 32:20Speaker 03

  And this is what brought him back to the artist's house. Because he managed to track down Ann Otto's key lime pie recipe. And he got an idea.

• 32:29Speaker 04

  Wouldn't it be so cool to make Ann Otto's key lime pie in the kitchen where she used to make it?

• 32:35Speaker 03

  So he got permission, and he baked the pie.

• 32:38Speaker 04

  And then when I was leaving the house, I was walking down through the main hallway, and I heard the creak on the floor behind me, and I heard somebody coming up. And I turned around, and nobody was there. But I felt this whoosh go through me, and I could smell the sweetest perfume. It was almost like a lavender. There was no tree blooming around. Nobody was there. And I'd like to think that that was Ann, very pleased that somebody was actually talking about her, instead of talking about that damn doll.

• 33:17Glynn Washington?

  Thank you, David Sloan, for sharing your story with us. Now, I feel like I have to keep saying this over and over again, but I'm gonna say it one more time. Don't mess with haunted stuff. Not with the Ouija boards, and never, never with a haunted doll. I do not understand, but I'm grateful, all the same, for David coming on our show and telling us all about Robert. And thank you, Robert, for letting him do it. The original score for that story was by Renzo Goryo. It was produced by John Vassil.

• 34:06Glynn Washington?

  Remember, the story never ends. The story, the story is eternal. But they won't know that unless you tell them. Tell them about Spook. Don't travel this dark path alone. If you like real stories without the ghosts and goblins, check out our sister podcast, Snap Judgment. Amazing stories, real people, killer beats. It's cinema of soul. What is not to like? SnapJudgment.org. Spook was brought to you by the team that always dresses appropriately for the season. Mr. Top Hat himself, Mark Ristich. And the Sussman, our chief spooksters, Eliza Smith, John Facile, Renzo Goryo, Leon Morimoto,

• 34:50Glynn Washington?

  Tiffany Delisa, Anne Forre. Eric Aguiar, Son of Khan. Original score by Lauren Newsom. Marissa Dodge is there. The Spook theme song, though, is by Pat Macidi Miller. My name is Glynn Washington. So whatever it is you do, wherever it is you travel, always remember to never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, ever, never, ever, never, turn out the lights.