This thread is giving me the same vibe as Jezebel’s annual scary story contest and I am here for it.
When I was a kid, my mother inherited a porcelain-faced doll of a little old lady in a wire rocking chair. She got it after an elderly neighbor died, and my father and I found the neighbor during a regular wellness check. Basically anytime someone hadn’t heard her in a while on the “party line” shared phone connection that serviced a half dozen farms on our road, dad or my uncles and I would walk down the road and look in. That day we found her dead. The doll was dressed in a manner unsettlingly like Anthony Perkins’ mother from Psycho and it creeped me out. My mother liked it because it sort of looked like the neighbor and we’d unofficially adopted her as an aunt, since she had no family of her own left. The doll was bound to her chair by a sash around her waist and I’d periodically find it untied and the doll slumped out of the chair for reasons that scared the hell out of me as a child. I was convinced “Aunt Edith” was haunting the doll and was suddenly malevolent, despite her being very sweet in life. I had very vivid nightmares of that doll all through my childhood and still do on occasion.
