Real lives
He’d terrified people for decades, but my ventriloquist’s dummy had a sad secret.
As I paused my scrolling online, a pair of big brown eyes caught mine.
I clicked on the eBay listing and read all about a 90-year-old ventriloquist’s doll being offered up for sale.
This haunted dummy came to me through a family member, the seller had written. But I refuse to sell him to anybody here in California. You must be at least a state away.
Sitting thousands of miles away in my home office in Scotland, my interest was piqued.
I’d been collecting haunted items for years and was a member of the investigation group Scottish Paranormal.
Just why was this seller so keen for this doll to be far, far away?
Curious, I sent him a quick message.
He explained that the doll had been bought by a woman for her nephew back in the 1930s.
The young boy had been touring America as an up-and-coming ventriloquist. But tragically, he’d died in an accident before ever getting the chance to use the dummy.
Not wanting to get rid of the item due to its connection to her late nephew, the woman had put it in a cupboard — and told her family and friends to ignore the incessant banging and knocking coming from inside for decades.
She’d grown old, and when she’d passed away, the dummy was given to the current seller, who was her distant relative.
I moved it from the house to my garage but I’m hearing footsteps and banging. I want it gone, he messaged me.
I haggled him down from £150 to around £75, and the doll was posted across the Atlantic.
‘Just make sure it stays away from me,’ my wife Gillian told me.
We had a rule in our house. All my haunted items had to be either kept in my home office with the door closed, or taken to the Scottish Paranormal offices.
Gillian wanted nothing to do with them.
When the box arrived, I took it to my office.
Opening it up, I was full of anticipation. The dummy stared back at me.
I gently handled him, waiting for something to happen. A sense of foreboding, maybe. But nothing.
‘Maybe you need to rest,’ I decided, placing the dummy in a sealed case.
It had travelled a long way, after all.
A week went by, then two, with nothing much happening.
That is until I looked at the doll one day, and realised its mouth was hanging open. Strange, I puzzled.
The seller had told me the mechanism on the dummy’s mouth was broken. It couldn’t be opened and closed manually, and I certainly hadn’t touched it.
That’s when I remembered what else the seller had said. He’d claimed the mouth did open and close at will and that he believed it was a
