So here’s the thing. I collect creepy dolls.
In fact, I’m kind of obsessed with them.
It’s weird. I know. People always ask me why I buy them, when there’s a danger that the dolls are haunted or have negative energy attached to them. But those same people refuse to buy any antiques at all because they’re so afraid of what residual energy might come with them. And that, I think, is even weirder.
In all honesty, I just feel sorry for those dolls. I see them and I feel sad that people are looking at them like they’re ugly and scary, so I adopt them and give them a loving place to live. Well, at least I love them. Charlotte is absolutely creeped out by them.
Recently, I picked one up in an antiques store. It was a 1920s bed doll—a specific type of large doll made for adults, to sit on beds and decorate them, usually made with human hair on their heads. I didn’t know anything about the doll other than that it was old and weird, so it was for me. I brought it up to the counter and the cashier said, “Oh, that’s the doll we keep finding on the floor every morning.”
So yeah, of course it was haunted. I can’t help it. I just gravitate toward these things.
The doll hasn’t displayed any activity at my house. I think she just wanted a good home. But like I said, people still worry a lot about me bringing residual energy into my house. One of the most common questions people ask me is how I protect myself from bringing anything home, or from having spirits attach themselves to me. The answer is: I don’t. Or, more accurately, I just don’t worry about it very much.
People who haven’t spent as much time around ghosts as I have tend to focus on the danger and fear they associate with the paranormal. That totally makes sense. So much of the representation of the supernatural in pop culture is created to scare you, and make you feel like you could be exposed to something that will attach itself to you and cause terrible things to happen.
Scary movies are one thing. You can avoid them if you want to. But those ideas are everywhere, even at Walt Disney World. “There’s a little matter I forgot to mention,” the Ghost Host narrator says at the end of the Haunted Mansion ride. “Beware of hitchhiking ghosts!”
In the storyline of the ride, there are “999 happy haunts” in the mansion, but there’s room for one more—and at the end, you find out that the ghosts have chosen you as lucky one thousand. “They’ll haunt you until you return,” he says. “Now I will raise the safety bar, and a ghost will follow you home!”
As you’ve seen on Kindred Spirits and other paranormal investigation shows, haunted houses in real life aren’t the same as the ones you see on TV. There’s a lot fewer red glowing eyes and a lot more sitting in the dark waiting for a noise from the other room. In the vast majority of cases, not only can real life ghosts not hurt you, they aren’t even trying to.
So, when a ghost has followed me home—you knew that was coming, right?—I haven’t been that concerned about it.
I was in Charleston, South Carolina, for an episode of Ghost Hunters. Jason Hawes and I were investigating the Old City Jail together. We were in this strange room that wasn’t quite a cell, when at the same time, Jay got a scratch on his neck and I felt something warm around my legs, almost like someone was hugging them. That was really the only activity we got.
After we were done with the investigation, I was doing a recap of my impressions of the night. A producer was asking me questions and recording my responses. It turns out I had been in one of the rooms where wives and children, if they had nowhere else to go, would have to live while their husbands and fathers were incarcerated. The conditions in a place like that, in 1802 when that jail was built, would have been intolerable. Pregnant women gave birth there, with no one to help them. Kids starved to death in those rooms.
I didn’t know where we had been. So when the producer asked me how I felt, having been in a room where so many innocent people suffered, I lost it. I was sixteen weeks pregnant with Charlotte and very emotional, and I could not take the idea of being in that kind of space without knowing it. I started crying. “Stop filming,” I said. “I don’t even want to talk about this. This is awful.” All of a sudden, the producer got scratched—and she continued to get scratched for the rest of the time we were in the jail. It was almost like whoever was there was angry that she had upset me, and was being protective.
When I got home, everything seemed fine—until I was upstairs in my bathroom, and I saw this little shadow run down the hallway from my bedroom to what was going to be Charlotte’s room. My house was definitely not haunted, so it got my attention right away. But I didn’t see it again, and I flew back to Charleston to finish up the episode.
While I was gone, a friend was in my house, helping me out with a few things. She sent me a text: “Amy, I just saw a little shadow run down your upstairs hallway.” And later, she saw something fly across my bedroom. I hadn’t talked to her at all, and she was reporting the exact same thing I had experienced—so I knew something weird was happening. A spirit had followed me home from that jail.
When I put that little shadow together with whatever had hugged me around my legs, as a kid would, it seemed like it was a child trying to get attention. When I got home, I had a talk with that little boy or girl. “You can stay as long as you want,” I said, “as long as you’re not scaring anyone or disrupting anything. I’m about to be a mom myself.” I saw the shadow a few more times, but eventually, it was gone.
See? You can have a ghost in your house and have it totally not be scary.
Investigators all have their own ways of mentally or physically preparing to work on a case. Before they go into a haunted place, a lot of people pray, or do some intention-based energy work to feel as though they’re layering on protections. Some people use crystals or some kind of amulet as a token of protection. It’s all about what you need to do to feel ready to enter the space.
Personally, I don’t do any of those things. The way I protect myself is by knowing that I am too strong to let that happen. When I go into a space, I go in knowing that I am enough. If I’m relying on some kind of religious medal, or prayer, or crystal, it leaves me open to vulnerability. If I lose that item, or forget to say what I usually say, I will feel weaker. I don’t ever want to put myself in that position.
The other factor is that I know that if something like that does happen, and a ghost follows me home, I am fully capable of handling the situation. A ghost is not going to permanently attach itself to me and cause negative things to happen in my life, which is a fear people often express on cases we’re investigating (like Sharon feared was happening at her home in Connecticut from the previous chapter) and in my personal life (like how people criticize me for buying antiques).
Don’t forget: Ghosts have free will, just like we do. If one of them chooses to come home with me, I can’t exactly stop that. Some of these spirits have an intense need to get a message out there. If you’re the first hope they’ve had in a long time, they might just follow you.
“If they’re intelligent and they can go where they want,” Adam said, “what’s to say they can’t come with you?”
Maybe that person isn’t done talking, or maybe you’re the first person to listen to that spirit in decades. You might decide the conversation is over, but that ghost might be like, Wait a minute, I wasn’t done. There’s a chance they might want to continue that exchange. That’s what I always tell aspiring investigators they need to be prepared for. If you’re going into a haunted place, you can’t necessarily dictate what you’re going to find, or how those spirits are going to act.
To address that, you just have to set a boundary. As Adam and I were leaving an investigation at Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in Weston, West Virginia, we both had a very strong sense that something was with us. We stopped and looked at each other. I asked, “Are you feeling that?” And he said, “Yeah, there’s something behind us.” So we both turned around, and said firmly, “You have to stay here. You cannot come with us.” Whatever it was listened to us, and stayed behind.
That said, my attitude when I walk into a haunted place has everything to do with the outcome.
I strongly believe that your intention controls your experience in a place. It all boils down to your perspective, your vibe, and your energy. I walk in with the mindset that I have a job to do, and when I leave, I don’t take my work home with me. Someone who walks in afraid, insecure in their own abilities, might attract a different kind of interaction.
But though you can control your intention, you can’t control the people around you, whether they’re alive or dead. Just like living people, there are times when ghosts act inappropriately in any number of ways. Whatever was attached to that haunted trunk in the May-Stringer House in Florida was kind of a jerk. He would pull the tour guide’s hair, and touch her constantly, though he knew she was afraid and it bothered her. It pinched me and Adam several times, in sharp, deliberate grabs. One of the ways a ghost could have a differing opinion on appropriate behavior is thinking it’s okay to follow you home. I think people automatically assume that’s an attachment when it happens. In reality, though, I have seen very few actual spirit attachments to people.
Attachments, more often than not, will happen with objects. That trunk in Florida definitely had an attachment, and that’s why the activity was strongly concentrated around it. But a spirit can have an affinity for an item and be inspired to communicate when they see it, but not be tied to it. “I believe there’s a scale of attachment when it comes to an object,” Adam said. “You moved that trunk, it went with the trunk. But then you have objects that are just recognizable, like jewelry or a love letter, something that’s sentimental—ghosts can react to those objects but not be physically bound to them.”
People tend to hold on to items like their family rosary beads, he believes, because of the energy and intention their owners infused in them. “They are constantly putting energy into that piece of jewelry: wishing for things, praying for things, focusing on things. They hold a lot of energy, and when they are passed down to generations, that’s why people keep them.”
“My granny’s Bible,” Adam said. “I know she spent time and energy reading it, writing in it, and holding it. If you could go and pick that Bible up and sit long enough, I believe that you could feel it. They’re there with you.”
Greg and Dana Newkirk believe that a lot of the haunted objects in their collection have become haunted because of some kind of negative experience associated with the owner. “There’s an element with most of the stuff that’s given to us where I think people have manifested some sort of fear or trauma in them, and psychically or psychologically stored it in this item,” Greg said. “There’s something about this item that they’ve used it as a carrier for their trauma.” That’s why, he believes, the majority of their collection doesn’t display any kind of disruptive negative energy and coexists peacefully in their house. “Ninety-five percent of stuff people give us doesn’t ever do anything strange for us.”
“On one level, it’s a psychological coping mechanism,” Dana said. “But there’s also something going on on a paranormal level, where whatever the process of releasing that psychically imbues it into an object.”
They hold on to those inert items because they were likely meaningful to someone in a significant way. “We have shelves full of stuff that has never so much as fallen down funny,” Greg said. “But the other 5 percent can be very, very interesting.”
The Mystery of the Burning Doll
I bought my first-ever creepy doll when I was twelve or thirteen years old, living in Petaluma, California. There was an antiques store just up the street from us, and I would go in there and shop all the time.
I fell in love with a bed doll in the store that was so expensive, way beyond any amount of money I had as an adolescent. I think it was like a hundred dollars. The shop owner let me put it on layaway, and I would go every week and give her my allowance money.
When I had finally paid it off, I brought the doll home, and put it on a shelf in my bedroom.
And that’s when it started trying to burn down my house.
One day, I came home to smell burning in my room. That’s weird, I thought, and looked around for the source. On the shelf above the doll, there was a scorch mark.
A few days later, I smelled burning in my room again. This time, when I picked it up, I saw smoke coming from the doll. Her dress was smoldering, almost like paper slowly burning.
So of course, I put it in my closet and called my Auntie Roxi.
She decided that we should have a séance over the doll to try to figure out what was going on. We did a ritual—I can’t really remember what we did—and she tried to tune in to the doll psychically. According to her psychic reading, the woman who previously owned the doll had been very sick, basically dying. There had been a fire burning in the fireplace in her house, and the last thing this woman saw when she was passing away, according to my aunt, was that an ember had gotten very close to the doll, and she was worried about the doll catching on fire. Somehow, the doll had been infused with some kind of fire association as her owner died.
I have no way to verify any of it. But that experience definitely triggered my interest in haunted objects. I ended up collecting dozens of those dolls. Eventually, I sold them because I ran out of space.
That original doll? Well, my cat took an intense dislike to it, and ruined it in a very specific way that only cats can. Maybe he was trying to put out the fires. I don’t know. But that poor doll ended up—of all places—in the trash burn pile.