True Horror Stories: Robert The Doll, The Most Haunted Toy In History
Wikimedia CommonsRobert the Doll behind protective glass at the Fort East Martello Museum.
Robert the Doll was unleashed in 1904 by the Steiff Company. The German toy manufacturer claimed Robert was never intended as a consumer product, but rather as a mannequin for window displays. He quickly became far more than that: a doll that haunted whoever dared to cross him.
Robert somehow ended up in the hands of a boy named Robert Eugene Otto — Gene for short — who linked in the Key West in Florida. Some say a Bahamian maid of Gene’s family imbibed the doll with voodoo magic and gifted it to Gene as retribution for the family’s trespasses. Others believe Gene’s grandfather bought the doll in Germany and gave it to his grandson as a present.
Regardless, the unsettling toy has been described as supernatural by many. It has purportedly giggled, moved to different rooms on its own, and punished people who treated it badly. Gene was overjoyed at his new gift, took it everywhere, and even dressed the black-eyed doll in a sailor suit he wore as a baby.
“What people really remember is what they would probably term as an unhealthy relationship with the doll,” said Robert the Doll expert Cori Convertito, curator of the museum where Robert now dwells. “He brought it everywhere, he talked about it in first person as if he weren’t a doll, he was Robert.”
“As in he is a live entity.”
Otto Family Collection/Florida Keys Public Library/FlickrA young Gene Otto (right) wearing the sailor’s suit that will given to Robert the Doll.
After Gene built Robert a home in the family’s attic, the strangest things began to happen. Household items would move on their own. Gene would insist this was Robert’s doing, and adults would laugh off his suggestion as just a child’s overactive imagination.
Years later, after studying fine arts in Chicago and New York, Gene attended the Sorbonne in Paris and met his wife, Anne. The couple returned to Gene’s home in Key West, where Robert was permanently situated on a chair that faced out of an upstairs window.
A plumber once swore he heard a child’s laugh coming from inside the house, though nobody was home. He then noticed that Robert had moved from one side of the room to the other. He also claimed toys that had been in the doll’s lap somehow ended up on the floor halfway across the room.
After Gene died in 1974, a woman named Myrtle Reuter bought the house — Robert the Doll included. She lived with him for decades and confirmed he’d move around independently with no explanation.
Ultimately, fed up with his haunted-ness, she donated him to the Fort East Martello Museum. Soon after settling into his new home of the museum’s storage room, the place received countless letters begging for Robert’s forgiveness. People came in droves to see the pockmarked toy.
All that attention, even though the museum didn’t make a single announcement about the doll’s whereabouts. The museum reneged on keeping him out of sight, and finally put Robert on display — behind safety glass.
To this day, after more than a century, inexplicable happenings surround the mysterious doll. Many people have tried to take a picture of him — only to find that their cameras suddenly don’t work. The horror story now continues on, more than a century after it began.
