Maybe it goes all the way back to voodoo and burning your enemies in effigy, but humanity has always had a very strange relationship with dolls. They're both cuddly and creepy, calling forth a weird mixture of maternal tenderness and hair-raising shock. We don't expect them to talk, and most especially they weren't supposed to talk in Edison's time, which is what made this doll so - unique. The fact that the mechanism inside them (which was actually a teeny-tiny phonograph that played a miniature disc) broke after one or two uses meant that their popularity soon faded. Most of the dolls were returned. A few must have survived more or less intact. It was decades later that Chatty Cathy took over as the most "possessed" doll (meaning, of course, that more little girls owned them) in history.
I had no interest whatsoever in dolls when I was a child. I was more interested in frogs, toads, newts, snakes, polliwogs, mud puppies, millipedes, salamanders, and anything else that crawled (or barked or whinnied or meowed). I have no idea what has happened to me in the past few years, but my doll collection (if you count the trolls) has boomed, so much so that I don't know how many I have now, and don't want to count.
I can't account for this, except to say that the reborn doll craze has given rise to dolls that are much more realistic and less creepy (some would say MORE creepy due to the uncanny valley effect) than the staring-eyed, round-headed, stiff-limbed hunks of plastic we used to play with. I've knitted clothes for my dolls, made tons of videos about them, bought more and more of them - and, of course, during the pandemic, have relied on them as a source of comfort. They say we return to the enthusiasms of childhood as old age approaches - but in this case, I seem to have aged backwards, and am catching up on what never appealed to me in childhood.
I still like crawly things, and LOVE birds, which have become a serious interest in the past few years. Sometimes the only thing that pulls my spirits out of a bog of sludge is feeding the red-winged blackbirds at Burnaby Lake. The glossy, sassy males tilt their heads this way and that, their brilliant red and yellow wing patches flaming in the sun. The females, much more practical and industrious, are no-nonsense creatures who get right down to the business of eating, without any flirtation needed.
I can't see ahead right now - can anyone? Are we out of this woods yet? It seems to me it grows darker with every step. Each day HAS to be sufficient unto itself, because I can't plan. We try to focus on how much better our situation is than someone else's - but don't I also bleed for them, my fellow suffering humans?
For some reason - this is terribly disjointed, sorry - a song jumps back into my head, one that gave me great comfort during another time when I couldn't see ahead. I'd be walking through the woods with this song playing in my ear and try to find some sense in what was happening to me. Mostly I was just trying to stay out of the hospital, and when I was unable to find the light, I had to try to develop a taste for the dark. I don't know how I survived that time, why those soul-destroying times kept returning, and why I am not in that state now when I suppose I have every reason to be. Maybe the message was finally delivered.
I hated dolls as a kid and never went near them, though my mother bought me something called a Debbie doll - she was brunette, with a large head, much larger than Barbie's. I think my mother was afraid I would be a lesbian if she didn't do something pretty quickly. Obviously I wasn't a proper little girl at all. Now I am dragged as if by hypnotic persuasion to the idea of dolls. I watch "reborn" videos obsessively, even though I think the dolls are insanely creepy and most of the women who own them borderline-unhinged. Some of these dolls actually pee (I've seen footage), some cry and coo, move, and have a heartbeat and an internal heating system. All this is to reproduce, as closely as possible, a Real Live Baby. Reborn videos commonly show the baby being "sick" so the "mother" has to hover over it and pretend to take it to the doctor, or going on shopping trips where "Mom" takes them out in public expressly to shock people and weird them out. (The video of the woman "giving birth" to a reborn has, unfortunately, been deleted.) I don't know if this is just a nasty prank, or a form of casual sadism. The true glory of the reborn, as with all dolls, is that it never changes. The agony of watching your child grow away from you never needs to happen. That little vinyl blob in your arms is forever in your thrall. In fact, it is under your complete and total control at all times. Think of the power. Women actually weep when they lift seven pounds of quivering silicone out of the cardboard box from eBay. They sob and gasp and whisper to the "baby" for the whole 15-minute video.
I don't get it. Except that I do, or I want to. I'm collecting trolls again, enjoying it hugely - trolls, to me, weren't really dolls, they were a little too weird and subversive. My mother wasn't pleased and did not consider them real dolls, and still wanted me to play with my Debbie doll. My Debbie doll sucked rocks, as far as I was concerned. I played trolls with two friends, both people who "got" me, and I don't need to explain to you what that means. I don't think it has ever happened to me again. I was ten, and that was my golden year, though I didn't know it at the time. It was my year of the Beatles and having a horse of my own, and being in the special advanced class in which I did not learn a royal rip because I did not have to. We all "learned at our own pace", which means we learned doodlysquat. It was total anarchy, and we literally gave our poor greenhorn teacher a nervous breakdown. He had so been looking forward to teaching this avant-garde, even prestigious class.
I was ten, and there were trolls, and now when I go back to trolls I see they are different, and yet the same. They have come and gone in waves, disappearing for 20 years after that first crest in the '60s, surging again in the '80s, then disappearing, until that Godawful movie came out. But never mind. I ramble. I was going to talk about the Edison talking doll, but there isn't much to say, is there? It was a hideous thing. Edison was an arrogant asshole and thought he could make fools of the public just by putting out something with his name on it. It didn't happen. The dolls had a tiny version of his new-fangled gramophone embedded in its hard tin carapace. The tinny distorted recordings of nursery rhymes that issued forth when you turned the crank were nothing less than demonic. Curdled dulcet tones waver and shriek, making you wonder just who was paid to spew this stuff, and how long they've been dead by now.
The dolls worked for about five minutes, which must have broken a lot of little girls' hearts, and most customers angrily demanded refunds. They stayed on the market for less than a year. Edison was known to refer to this project as "spilled milk", another way of saying "writeoff". And yet, and yet. A few must have remained in working order, or we wouldn't still have these blood-chilling horror-movie sounds. I even wondered if the sound had been recreated artificially, like that wretched so-called recording of Au Clair de la Lune where some electron microscope scanned a very old piece of black paper, fed the random scratches into a computer and came up with The Very First Recorded Sound. It's a known fact that we hear what we expect to hear. I could write a whole piece about that, but I won't. A few years ago my granddaughter had a baby doll that talked, and one of the things it said was, "Allah is great!". Of course, what it really said was "gagamamamblllllgagmmmm", but once the rumor got around, EVERYONE heard the doll say"Allah is great". The dolls were soon pulled off the market. Allah, as everyone knows, is the embodiment of evil.
This video has the largest collection of talking doll horrors I've heard. I won't tell you to enjoy it. Just prepare yourself.
I am not sure how it happened, but one night, those two reborn dolls I bought began to move. I should have seen it coming. I began to regret my purchase the moment I unswathed the too-realistic infants from their layers and layers of bubblewrap. I should have known, when little Alex's eyes began to follow me around the room. I was taken aback to discover Alyssa and Alex floating around the room in a state of total weightlessness. I wish I could tell you that then, I woke up.
I am not sure how I created this - I feel a bit like Dr. Frankenstein - but it's a "blank" doll, a form for any sort of character you want to make (in this case, a Scottish piper in full regalia). But here he is not in full anything, just a little mutant floating around, a thing with no face.
There is something about the flat, faceless disk that strikes terror in the human heart. Nowhere Doll. The unliving. Little girls have a tendency to rip off all their Barbies' clothes which end up in a grimy heap in the corner of the closet. Almost all Barbies end up naked, their hair filthy and snarled. Is this a kind of primitive reversion to the Ur-doll, the hank of hair and piece of bone that started it all?
Sometimes I create something that scares me, and I feel a bit like a mad scientist. It was only an innocent doll! I swear it. But it came out looking so - disturbing. It reminded me a bit of my juju doll experiment, in which the object of my wrath actually died. Had nothing to do with me, of course, and I am sure he died with a smile on his face. But he died, nonetheless. There is more to this story, but I am afraid to tell it. Suffice it to say, I came out the other side of it realizing that a doll can be a way to concentrate loves, hates, and wishes, and not all of them are benevolent. This doll will not bring about the death of any known human being. Unknown ones are another matter.
I had a reborn doll phase that lasted a couple of months, if that. It mostly consisted of watching videos of women pretending that elaborately-shaped blobs of silicone were real babies. It was so bizarre that I became transfixed, watching little Tamsyn get "sick" (some of these dolls actually heat up and probably vomit), and Kendrick going on a shopping trip to buy a tiny pair of Skechers. Reborn addicts love to dress up their "babies" and put them in full public view, waiting for that "Oh my God I thought it was - " reaction. Some even leave them locked in hot cars. I can't help but see this as very disturbed behaviour.
But it was fascinating. I wanted the experience without spending the money, so I bought these two, Alyssa and Alex, for about $20 each on eBay. I knitted clothing for them and everything, then very soon I chucked them into a plastic box. Once in a while I would see them on the closet shelf and a wave of shivering dread would go through me. These are uncanny valley dolls, for sure, as are all the reborns.
My dolls aren't life-size and don't have the soft, squishy bodies of the true "unliving" doll. But they are definitely influenced by them, as they are deliberately more creepily real in their detail: fuzzy newborn-like hair, big glassy eyes, eyelashes and a rosebud mouth.
I'm unlikely to play with these much, and I certainly won't treat them like babies. The women in the videos really do seem to believe they're real, and I wonder sometimes how their actual relationships might suffer from their obsession. There's lots and lots of justification going on, assuring everyone that it's a harmless hobby that only brings joy to your life. No mention of the tens of thousands of dollars the high-end version of these things cost.
But is it joyful to dash to the baby's room in the middle of the night to take her temperature, when the "baby" is a chunk of vinyl with a gizmo inside it that makes the sound of a heartbeat? Are these women open with other women, normies I mean, about their "hobby"? My guess is that they're secretive, which is why the "reborn community" on YouTube means so much to them.
An obsession I return to over and over again is the creepiness of dolls, rivalled only by the creepiness of clowns. Both are meant to bring joy and pleasure to small children (or rather "children of all ages!", as they say at the circus). Come to that, circuses are pretty creepy too, or at least the circuses I saw as a kid: tawdry is a better word, with sad elephants, bad smells and clowns who had probably seen better days and likely fuelled themselves from a flask. This is the first video I've found with a complete set of Edison Talking Doll recordings. Or, at least, I fervently pray it is a complete set and I won't find any more. God only knows where they got them, as I would've thought the wax cylinders would have melted down by now.
The dolls had a most un-cuddly steel body with holes in it to concentrate the "audio". I think either the crank or the cylinder broke down almost immediately. Did this freak out kids? It might have filled them with wonder. Even some of the stranger dolls from the 1960s were seen as completely charming, like the one who had different facial expressions when you wrenched her arm around (and what was her name, anyway?), or the one who said creepy things like, "I can see in the dark" and "I wish we were twins".
"Doll" has taken on a whole new meaning. When I first heard about "reborns", they were dolls with realistic-looking arms and legs and head, and a cloth body like a conventional vinyl doll. And they were vinyl. Originally, you just took a vinyl doll and mucked around with it until it looked more-or-less real.
Soon the dollmakers upped the ante, placing beating hearts in these things, heaters, voice recordings so they'd cry and coo, and even the capacity to wet and (I think) poop. Jesus, you might as well just have yourself a real kid!
But soon that wasn't enough, either. I began to see dolls molded out of silicone, one-piecers I mean, their limbs jiggling like a rubber frog's. These were so "lifelike" they scared the hell out of me. One of these might run as high as $10,000.00, though I just found this one on eBay: 5h left (Today 5:06PM) From China Soft Brown Hair Full Silicone Vinyl Reborn Baby Dolls Lifelike Newborn Baby Doll $1.99 0 bids Though it's described here as "full silicone", I have a feeling it's the kind of doll you might find at a dollar store: "Mo-o-o-o-o-m, can I have that doll?" "Oh, okay. It's only worth a couple of bucks."
I have weird feelings about these dolls. I honestly do. After watching a number of "Kaylee's Morning Routine" videos, which made me gasp, I began to wonder what it would be like to own a doll so real-looking that cops broke the glass in hot car windows to rescue them. (Doll owners are not above such pranks and love freaking people out while shopping at Walmart, sometimes casually abandoning them in the ladies' room.) I even. . . no, I didn't, but yes, I DID look at some of them, decided they weren't worth my while and that you needed to pay five grand to get a really good one.
Now I wonder what I was thinking of. Getting a cat seemed to rescue me from such thoughts. I didn't realize I was at such a low point. At least the cat is real. If you watch their YouTube videos, the collectors cannot understand why anyone would find their obsession creepy. "Full-body silicone" seems to be the Cadillac of these never-born, never-dead things, quickly replacing those clunky old cloth-bodies that can't even be bathed. This rarefied cult strikes me as stereotyped and largely misunderstood. Wikipedia says reborns are owned almost exclusively by elderly women who at some point suffered the loss of a child, but that's simply not true. Nearly all the videos I've seen are of women in their 20s and 30s, and quite a few of them are teenagers. I can only assume that they just like having them around to feed, dress, bathe and take on "outings", and collect them obsessively. Elaborate, thrill-packed box-opening ceremonies abound on YouTube, each one packed with as much fun and excitement as a baby shower. These are actually entertaining to watch: though the disaster openings ("ohhhhh noooooo, his head is warped. . .") are even more fun.
I keep thinking of a chant we had in school: "Rubber baby-buggy bumpers". You had to say it ten times fast, or something, though I am not sure why.
POSTSCRIPT (there's always one of those!): I found this weird little entry in Wikipedia, which gets just about everything wrong about reborn dolls:
A reborn doll is a manufactured skin doll that has been transformed to resemble a human infant with as much realism as possible. The process of creating a reborn doll is referred to as reborning and the doll artists are referred to as reborners. Reborn dolls are also known as Bodo dolls or unliving dolls.
I've scoured the internet and found NO reference to "Bodo dolls", though I did find "Bobo dolls". These are the roly-poly clown things that bounce back up when you push them over. For some reason, all sorts of scientific experiments have been done on these that don't interest me at all. "Unliving" isn't easy to find either, except on really creepy sites that have nothing to do with these dolls.
And then there's this:
Social issues and reactions
The overwhelming majority of reborn customers are older women. Many women collect reborns as they would a non-reborn doll, whilst others purchase them to fill a void of a lost child and may treat reborns as living babies. Media features and public receptions have used such adjectives as "creepy" to describe the reborns. This can be explained by the uncanny valley hypothesis. This states that as objects become more lifelike they gain an increasing empathetic response, until a certain point at which the response changes to repulsion. Department stores have refused to stock the dolls because of this reaction, claiming they are too lifelike.
I don't know if I have seen any "older women" on the YouTube videos, if older means 60s or 70s. Many of them are less than half my age. Wikipedia makes no reference at all to the "full-body silicone" doll which is all the rage now. This information is at least ten years out of date. Wiki is mostly put together by guys in their 20s, the ones that live in Mom's basement and really don't get out much, or do much of anything except steal each other's research.
As for department stores not selling them because they are "too lifelike", it's more likely they don't sell them because of the price factor. Really good ones cost hundreds or even many thousands of dollars. Unless they bolted them to the shelves (hmmmmm. . . ), they could stand to lose a lot through shoplifting. Picture it: reborn kidnappers wearing maternity coats sneaking into the toy department and smuggling the little blighters out past the store alarms.
BTW, I'd be interested to see if there is any feuding between "old-school" cloth-bodied reborners and the newer, full-body-silicone crowd. I have never seen a video of a conventional reborn which could be bent and twisted and slung around like this. Nor do they have realistic genitals, a detail which squicks out even some of the most die-hard collectors. That hunk of quivering pink silicone looks EXACTLY like a real baby, folks, and that is exactly what makes it so creepy.
Bodo, anyone?
Damn, I thought I was finished! But I just had a horrible thought. These dolls are molded, right? HOW DO THEY MAKE THE MOLDS? The only method I can think of is to make a plaster cast of a baby. How else could they make it that realistic, down to those last minute bumps of scarlet prickly heat?
Dear God. This is worse than the squawky, distorted, Night of the Living Dead Edison doll recordings! I found some instructions for making a silicone, baby, but I find them kind of hard to believe. Nevertheless, in the interests of science, I will share them with you:
There is one way to do a full mold for a full silicone baby, and I have been researching this, but haven’t done it yet.
You start off by drawing a line through the center of the baby, around its head, fingers, toes.
Then you take some white clay and put it on the bottom of the mold, and pack it into the center lines all around the baby.
You take a flat brush and dampen it and go around the edges making sure the clay is sealed.
Cut off excess on sides to not be wasteful with product.
Take the end of a sharpie with the lid on it, and make holes around the baby, which will be the center holes that hold the mold together. You can even put the round nuts around it if you want to.
Close the mold, and mix the dragon skin, or silicone you are using for the mold, and add flocking for the color you want the mold to be.
Pour the product into the mold covering the baby half that you can see.
Let it cure.
Cut the mold open and remove the clay and any loose silicone that is dangling.
Clean all of the clay off.
Turn the baby over and roll up a clay hole maker to put into the center for the pour hole.
Cover the remainder of the baby.
Let cure.
Remove. It comes apart, but you can pour the baby into the pour hole.
Make sure to Tap tap tap to get all of the air bubbles out, because you don’t want those. It will waste your silicone product. Also turn to cover every nook and cranny.
They are demonic. And none more than Saucy, a pert-looking thing dressed in pink. Wrench her arm around, and all sorts of things will happen.
Since no video can do this justice, I sat there and made an endless series of gifs of her twisting, wrenching, macabre facial expressions. Since this was 1965, long before the advent of sophisticated robotics, there must have been some kind of grinding metallic mechanism under the vinyl face that made her expression change like that: and wouldn't THAT make a great YouTube video, if someone peeled back Saucy's skin to reveal the Borg-like structure within?
There's a certain amount of overlap here because my Makeagif program cuts off a second or so at the beginning and end of the time you set up for your gif. So I've had to compensate. We don't want to miss one second of the fun!
So enjoy these - or don't enjoy them: be creeped out by them. I know I am.
Oh, and! Each gif is approximately 20 seconds long, unlike the jerky two- or three-second things you normally see. So you have to spend a bit of time with them. Oh come on, do it anyway.
Here is Baby See n' Say, a doll who can see through things. Yes, it's true.
This is a one-doll post, because one short gif kind of gives you the idea of this doll's repertoire of facial expressions: jibbering lips and huge, rolling eyes. It's what she SAYS that's horrifying. Her statements start off innocently enough, but grow more and more disturbing, hinting at some sort of creepy supernatural ability - including the capacity to see through things (including you). Would you want to give this thing to a little girl? Unless she was Wednesday Addams, I don't think so.
Baby See n’ Say: what she says
You’re my best friend in the whole world!
You know what? Your eyes are pretty!
I have beautiful eyes ‘cause I eat carrots!
Can you make your eyes go ‘round and ‘round like this?
If I look down like this, I can see my nose!
Wouldn’t it be fun if you were a doll like me?
I can see in the dark. Can you?
If I look way up high, I can see the Man in the Moon!
It's getting late, I'm feeling sick, but had to share this with my Beloved Readers. I have been doing a serious study of the squickfest that is the Reborn Doll, but this all-silicone version, quivery, rubbery and virtually transparent, takes the freaking cake. It's called the Full Body Silicone Baby Doll, and it's unlike anything you will ever want to see again.
One might almost be convinced this is a real baby, until she starts bending his arms backwards at a 90-degree angle.
Let's diaper the sweet little son-of-a-gun, so his teeny rubber wee-wee won't keep quivering like that.
Quick! Call Child Protection Services! Silicone baby in trouble!
Hey, lady, listen to me. That baby ain't breathin'.
Rubber baby buggy bumpers.
Bonus link! More pictures of full-body silicone baby dolls. Warning! Don't go alone.
Post-blog thoughts. Like the Grinch, I just had an awful idea. There could only be one way these babies could be manufactured with such eerie, even grotesque realism. Are you thinking what I'm thinking? A cast? A mold? And how would a cast be made? Let's not consider the possibilities. We look at Victorian post-mortem photography with repugnance, and yet it looks like someone is taking a dead baby and making a cast from it, then squirting in a bunch of pink silicone. Often these dolls are "recommended" to bereaved parents as a substitute, but then the possibilities grow even more macabre. Cloning pets is a new industry that is booming, but is that much more extreme than casting babies? The next step will leap across the gap: cloning a dead baby so that the parents receive an exact duplicate of the one that has died.
This idea is much creepier than those tired old stories about dolls coming to life. Even this quivering little homunculus doesn't come anywhere near the horror of a cloned baby.
I feel a short story coming on.
Post-post-blog thoughts: The internet is both great for me and awful for me, for it takes only seconds to find a treasure trove of pictures of my latest obsession. There are people who make a fat living from creating these things. Often it's carefully rationalized: well, men get obsessed with model trains, don't they? Yes, but model trains don't look so lifelike they seem to be ready to cry at any minute.
Come to think of it, there are distinct advantages over a real human being. You have complete control here. This baby does what you want. Period. It never changes. It can become a focal point for all your expectations, all your love. I have already read about marriages breaking up over this, when love for an inanimate mold of silicone supercedes love of a messy, ageing, cranky, needy, "real" human being. Though reborns seem needy, they are not. They can be put aside for years if you want, or taken into the bath with you.
And they never die. This is a real bonus for women who have lost babies. They never die because they were never born, in spite of their weird-sounding name.
I won't get into the weird "extras" some of these have. And I don't want to think about why they are there.
I gif too much. I'm just too much of a giffer in every sense. And now this new conflict comes into my life (as if I needed one): I'm finding out I pronounce the name of my beloved mini-vids wrong, or at least wrong by the reckoning of the geniuses who invented them.
I'm spozed to say "jiff", like the peanut butter. "Giff" like I've been saying it doesn't make it cuz it isn't correct. Even worse is the way I used to pronounce it, spelled-out-like: gee eye eff.
Why NOT gee eye eff? We say "pee en gee", don't we, not "ping" or "pinge"? The arguments about this on the internet are endless and truly heated. I'm going to have to come up with my own bloody name, but until then. . .
Creepiness delights me, always has, and even more as I get older and closer to my own inevitable creepage. When I found troves of Victorian automatons on YouTube, by yar, I was off to the races.
This is Nancy the life-size automaton, and she can knit and tap her foot and stuff, but who cares about all that when you have a face like this? Those shifty eyes are something to behold. Worse than human.
Was this supposed to be pleasant at one time, do you suppose? Or did people enjoy a bit of after-dinner queasiness now and again?
They don't know how to make dolls like this any more. It would be banned immediately.
This is a rabbit violinist, mighty ratty by today's standards. I wish he'd stop looking at me like that.
I call this one Hellhound.
Saving the best 'til last, this one was featured in my Dead Monk in the Middle of the Road post of a while back. I apologize for the teeny size and graininess, but it was all I could find. This astonishing artifact came from 1560 and represents a monk who looks diseased, if not demented. He seems to speak across the centuries.
But what is he saying? If we could hear his utterances from deep in the mists of antiquity, what would they be?
