Robert the Doll.

The Legend of Robert the Doll

When it comes to haunted dolls, Robert is arguably America’s most famous. The Key West doll is a fixture on local ghost tours and even served as an inspiration for Chucky inChild’s Play.

Robert belonged to Key West painter and author Robert Eugene Otto. In 1906, a Bahamian maid reportedly gave the doll to Robert and then cursed the toy after Robert’s parents displeased her. Soon after the maid’s departure, strange events began plaguing the Otto household.

Young Robert enjoyed talking to his namesake, and servants insisted the doll talked back. They also claimed the plaything could change expressions at will and move about the house on his own. Neighbors reportedly saw the doll move from window to window when the family was away, and members of the Otto household heard maniacal giggles emanating from the toy.

Robert the Doll spooked plenty of folks during the day, but at night he focused on young Robert Otto. The boy would wake in the middle of the night, screaming in fear, as the heavy furniture in his room crashed to the floor. When his parents demanded to know what happened, Otto’s response was always the same: “Robert did it! It was Robert.”

Robert Otto died in 1974, and his notorious doll now sits on display at the Fort East Martello Museum in Key West. Legend has it the doll will curse anyone who takes a photo without permission, which Robert grants by slightly tilting his head. Visitors who forget can always beg for forgiveness which is what cameramen from the Travel Channel did after their HD camera mysteriously stopped working.

The Cursed Iceman

The Cursed Iceman

 
Oetzi, or the Iceman as he is known, was discovered in the Alps between Austria and Italy back in 1991. In the 13 years that followed, seven people associated with his discovery died. In some cases, the deaths seem like your standard, run-of-the-mill demises, but four of them are creepily violent or odd enough to make the other three seem like maybe the 5,300 year old leather hunter may have a bone to pick with the people who unearthed him and then played Operation with his remains.

Oetzi: made of evil. And Beef Jerky.

 

The first death occurred in 1992 when Rainer Henn, the forensic pathologist who put Oetzi in a body bag with his bare hands, was killed in a car crash on his way to a world conference to discuss the Iceman. Next, Kurt Fritz, the mountain guide who lead Henn to Oetzi, and subsequently uncovered Oetzi's face, died in an avalanche. Guy number three, the man who filmed the recovery of Oetzi, died of a brain tumor.

These gentlemen are presumably boned as well

 
The list gets creepier: Helmut Simon, who with his wife was the person who actually found the Iceman in the first place, went missing for 8 days in 2004. When his body was found he was laying face down in a stream, where he had landed after falling off a 300 foot cliff. Dieter Warnecke, the head of the rescue team that found Helmut, dropped dead of a heart attack an hour after Helmut's funeral.
Dead guy number six, Konrad Spindler, bit the dust from complications arising from having Multiple Sclerosis six months after he was quoted as saying "I think it's a load of rubbish. It is all a media hype. The next thing you will be saying I will be next."

While he may not believe in curses, Konrad would probably agree that irony is a scientific fact.

The seventh and final death (so far) was in 2005: Tom Loy, a scientist who discovered human blood on Oetzi's clothes and weapons, died of a hereditary blood disease. This would normally be considered nothing more than a natural death if it weren't for the fact that his condition was diagnosed in 1992, the year he started working with the Iceman. By all accounts you may be endangering yourself just by reading this article.
Evidence shows that the Iceman met with a violent end himself, having been shot with an arrow before having his head bashed in. So basically Oetzi was an ancient murder victim left in the mountains to mummify in an unmarked grave. We're pretty sure that if curses are real, that's the kind of shit that causes them.



Article via Cracked.com

The Clown Statue

(One of my favourite Urban Legends, Also known as: The Killer Clown; It the Clown; The Clown Serial Killer)

As told by Tamra S., Dec. 22, 2004:

So-and-so's friend, a girl in her teens, is babysitting for a family in Newport Beach, Ca. The family is wealthy and has a very large house — you know the sort, with a ridiculous amount of rooms. Anyways, the parents are going out for a late dinner/movie. The father tells the babysitter that once the children are in bed she should go into this specific room (he doesn't really want her wandering around the house) and watch TV there.

The parents take off and soon she gets the kids into bed and goes to the room to watch TV. She tries watching TV, but she is disturbed by a clown statue in the corner of the room. She tries to ignore it for as long as possible, but it starts freaking her out so much that she can't handle it.

She resorts to calling the father and asks, "Hey, the kids are in bed, but is it okay if I switch rooms? This clown statue is really creeping me out."

The father says seriously, "Get the kids, go next door and call 911."

She asks, "What's going on?"

He responds, "Just go next door and once you call the police, call me back."

She gets the kids, goes next door, and calls the police. When the police are on the way, she calls the father back and asks, "So, really, what's going on?"

He responds, "We don't HAVE a clown statue." He then further explains that the children have been complaining about a clown watching them as they sleep. He and his wife had just blown it off, assuming that they were having nightmares.

The police arrive and apprehend the "clown," who turns out to be a midget. A midget clown! I guess he was some homeless person dressed as a clown, who somehow got into the house and had been living there for several weeks. He would come into the kids' rooms at nights and watch them while they slept. As the house was so large, he was able to avoid detection, surviving off their food, etc. He had been in the TV room right before the babysitter right came in there. When she entered he didn't have enough time to hide, so he just froze in place and pretended to be a statue.

Analysis: Like "The Babysitter and the Man Upstairs," this urban legend pits a lone, teenage babysitter against a male intruder who has surreptitiously entered the house.

The tale is disturbing on many levels, not the least of which is the hint of pedophilia in the revelation that the "midget disguised as a clown" has been spying on, playing with, or, in some variants, actually touching the children in the house prior to his presence being discovered. In some versions, e.g. this one submitted by a reader in 2006, it's explicitly stated that the intruder is a "sex offender" with designs on the babysitter herself:

A girl is babysitting a sleeping infant. She goes up regularly to check on the baby and the third time notices a lifesize clown standing in the corner/sitting in the crib. A few minutes later the parents call and the babysitter mentions the clown and how unnerving it is. The parents relate that they've never bought a clown and the police are called. The "clown" is discovered to be a local sex offender waiting for babysitter to go to sleep before attacking her.

The chain-letter version

A variant circulating in the form of an email chain letter ("...if you don't repost to 10 peeps within 5 minutes the clown will be standing next 2 your bed at 3:00am with a knife in his hand") makes the "midget clown" out to be a murderer who escaped from prison:

Subject: Fw: clown
this creepy or what?
:: a few years ago a mother and a father decided they needed a break, so they wanted to head out for a night on the town. So they called their most trusted babysitter. When the babysitter arrived the two children were already fast asleep in bed. So the babysitter just got to sit around and make sure everything was okay with the children.
Later in the night, the babysitter got bored and so she wanted to watch tv but she couldnt watch it downstairs because they didnt have cable downstairs (the parents didnt want their children watching too much garbage) so she called them and asked them if she could watch cable tv in the parents room. Of course the parents said it was ok, but the babysitter had one final request. She asked if she could cover up the large clown statue in their bedroom with a blanket or cloth, because it made her nervous. The phone line was silent for a moment, and the father (who was talking to the babysitter at the time) said..... take the children and get out of the house..... we'll call the police... we dont have a clown statue..... the children and the babysitter got murdered by the clown. it turned out 2 be that the clown was a killer that escaped from jail.
if you dont repost to 10 peeps within 5 minutes the clown will be standing next 2 your bed at 3:00am with a knife in his hand....

Real-life killer clowns

Though urban legends are sometimes inspired by real-life events, I've found no clear precedents for "The Clown Statue" in news reporting of the past 20 years — no stories in which a miscreant poses as a clown doll inside people's homes, at any rate.

In 1990, a West Palm Beach, Florida woman was shot and killed on her doorstep by a clown sporting a bright orange wig (a crime which remains unsolved, so far as I know). Then there's John Wayne Gacy, of course, who, during the mid-1970s, murdered 33 young men and buried their bodies under his Chicago home. The media christened him the "Killer Clown" because he was known for hosting neighborhood parties at which he dressed up as a clown.

The Story of Millie-Christine, The Two-Headed Nightingale.

Millie and Christine McKay were born into slavery on July 11, 1851 in the town of Welches Creek, North Carolina. The girls were joined at the spine and their owner, a blacksmith named Jabez McKay, was not sure what to do with the girls. Their parents, Monimia and Jacob, had previously sired seven children but clearly the twins would be of little use to McKay due to their bizarre appearance and sickly constitution. Eventually McKay opted to sell the eight-month-old girls and their mother to Carolinian showman John Pervis for $1000.

Pervis began exhibiting Millie and Christine immediately but within four years the girls were sold to showmen Joseph Pearson Smith and Brower and then kidnapped. The kidnappers exhibited the twins privately, mostly to members of the medical community, for over three years while Smith and Brower frantically searched for their investment.

They eventually located Millie and Christine while they were on exhibit in Birmingham, England. The law became involved in the situation and, as slavery was illegal in England, the girls were released into the custody of their mother. She, however, had no idea how to proceed with the girls in a foreign country and as a result she gave custody and ‘ownership’ back to Smith.


While Smith continued to exhibit Mille and Christine, he found the public was not very interested. At the time, the anatomical novelty of conjoined twins simply was not enough to capture public attention. Smith decided to develop Millie and Christine as a performing act. Furthermore, he endeavoured to make the girls as extraordinary in skill as they were in appearance. To that end, he and his wife tutored the girls in music and languages. Millie and Christine were taught etiquette, social graces and were given music lessons. It came to pass that the girls developed impressive singing abilities and their singing prowess soon became the focal point of their careers.

As ‘The Two-Headed Nightingale’ the conjoined girls started to gain a remarkable reputation. While Millie was a contralto and Christine a soprano, the girls were able to blend and harmonize their voices in incredibly appealing ways. By 1860, Millie and Christine were on the cusp of stardom.
In 1862 Smith died. The girls were willed to his son Joseph Jr. and it was Joseph who catapulted the girls to stardom by using a clever bit of showmanship.
Throughout much of their life, Millie and Christine were often considered one person. Due to their shared body, it was often unclear if the girls were legally and physically a single being or individuals. The girls themselves often referred to themselves in the singular, using ‘I’ in the place of ‘we’. Joseph Jr. saw opportunity in this confusion and opted to advertise the girls from a new perspective.

The girls became Millie-Christine, a girl with two heads, four arms and four legs.

“Although we speak of ourselves in the plural, we feel as but one person.” They were quoted as saying. "We have two perfectly distinct minds and think entirely independently, but we are ... perfectly harmonious.

We have [never] had the least difference of any subject, and never quarrel."1The concept of such an incredible phenomenon drew immediate crowds and Millie-Christine enjoyed immediate and world-wide popularity. Furthermore, it was the singing of ‘The Two-Headed Nightingale’ that quickly gained predominance over appearance and Millie-Christine eventually performed for European royalty, including the Prince of Wales and Queen Victoria.

Mille-Christine became renowned for singing, playing the guitar and piano in unison and dancing the waltz in front of thousands of people in the greatest halls and venues of the world.

Soon, the Emancipation Proclamation came into effect and Millie-Christine was free. During the course of her career, Millie-Christine earned more than $250,000.

Millie-Christine preformed until the age of fifty-eight. Once retired, Millie-Christine became Millie and Christine once again. The sisters built a home in Columbus, North Carolina where they lived quietly until their passing on October 8, 1912. Millie went first, succumbing to tuberculosis, and her sister followed seventeen hours later.

They were sixty-one, the oldest conjoined twins on record

To learn more about Millie-Christine purchase Millie-Christine : Fearfully And Wonderfully Made by Joanne Martell.

 

 

 

 

Information from www.thehumanmarvels.com

1. Indiana Weekly Messenger; Indiana, Pennsylvania; Wednesday, January 16, 1884.