The House of Little Fears

Ready for some real life nightmare fuel? The island of Xochimilco in Mexico is a massive testament to the notion that truth is stranger, and scarier, than fiction.

Once up a time, three little girls were playing on the island when one of them drowned. The girl’s body was discovered by a reclusive man named Julián Santana Barrera who tended one of the chinampas (floating gardens). Believing that the girl’s spirit, angered by her death, would haunt the island, the man began collecting lost and abandoned dolls that washed up in the canals or were found in the trash and hanging them from the trees around the island. Santana Barrera believed these dolls were still alive, though they had been forgotten by their families. In addition to appeasing the dead girl’s spirit, he believed the dolls came to life at night to kill predatory animals and helped the crops in his chinampa grow.

Santana Berrara passed away in 2001. One story goes the man drowned himself, having been driven mad by the island. Another goes that he was killed by the dolls. Who’s to say which is true.

The dolls are still on display, and visitors travel by boat to see them. For obvious reasons, guests are not allowed to visit at night.

While this place exists in our world, I can easily imagine this island appearing, in some form, inside Closetland. Perhaps these dolls are alive, as Santana Barrera believed, inhabited by spirits either human in origin or born from our own fears. Perhaps they are totems, hand-me-downs infused by the man’s own Belief? Many possibilities exist on the island of dolls.

Thomas Edison is known for many things: inventing the phonograph, championing direct current, perfecting the incandescent light bulb, slandering George Westinghouse, killing an elephant as a spectacle (warning: video link). But did you know he also invented some really creepy dolls?

Released in 1890, Edison produced 2500 of these dolls, foreseeing them as must-have items for children. Unfortunately for him, only 500 of them were sold. And many were returned by customers unhappy with their purchase.

You see, unlike the other dolls available then, these dolls talked. A tinfoil phonograph, actuated by a wooden crank that played a fragile wax record, projected a high-pitched nursery rhyme. You had to crank the handle at the speed you wanted the doll to talk, but those phonograph machines were hard to turn so mostly the dolls sounded like possessed creatures screaming in terror.

You can see for yourself in the video below.

Only a dozen or so of these dolls are still in existence. The one above, about as bare bones as you can get, netted close to four grand. I can only imagine what a doll with mechanism, record, and full outfit would catch on the market.

I imagine some grandparents of Little Fears characters may have one of these stowed away in their attic, passed down to them from their mother who got it from their mother who got it from their mother. I wonder what would happen if one of those characters tried to use the doll today.