Robert the Doll
A cloth doll in a sailor suit standing behind glass at Fort East Martello in Key West. It was given to the painter Robert Eugene Otto in the early twentieth century, and by family account he talked to it and blamed it for things broken and overturned in the house. The museum now asks visitors to request the doll's permission before photographing it, and the walls around the case are covered with letters from people who did not ask and connect their subsequent misfortunes to that. The doll is real, the museum is real, and there is an admission charge.
Mercy Brown, the Exeter vampire
In 1892 the Brown family of Exeter, Rhode Island, was losing one member after another to tuberculosis. Neighbours convinced the father that one of the dead was feeding on the living, and in March the bodies were exhumed. Two had decomposed; nineteen-year-old Mercy, who had spent the winter in a cold crypt, had not. Her heart was burned, the ashes mixed with water and given to her dying brother to drink. He died two months later. The case is the last and best-documented episode of the New England vampire panic — an attempt to explain an epidemic for which people had no other language.
Comments
No comments yet. Be the first.