Spooked - Closet Dolls

Episode Date: March 8, 2024

Octavia doesn’t let anyone near her dolls. Sure seems like the dolls want to get near to her, though. Thanks, Octavia, for sharing your story with us here at Spooked! Octavia Sexton is an Appalachian storyteller and teaching artist in Kentucky. Learn more about Octavia at her website. Produced by Anne Ford, original score by Doug Stuart, artwork by Teo Ducot Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The rich folk claim That they care so much They got all they need But you beg not touch Still it real fast Never be last Because we Love the child

With pocket swore I've snatched the gold Listening to spooked Stay at church The pastor tells us that Part of the expression The dance of hope

Of faith Is absolute certainty That if you know Something will happen If you truly trust in the Lord You behave Is if the thing is already done This is why

a sunny afternoon. Summer after fourth grade, I packed my first basement's gloves that my uncle gave me. I packed my hat. I packed my peanut butter, no jelly sandwich. I don't have a ball. I don't have cleats,

but the coach already said I had made the team. And I'm excited. So excited. Never been on a team before. Can't wait to go play with the fellas. Hold down right field. Coach even said,

we were going to get. jerseys if I get there on time. Jerseys we can only wear on game day and got to keep them clean. You can keep mine spotless for all my home run. So I pack my stuff into the trunk, open the door, climb carefree into the back seat as if there is no problem. No problem with a car at all. as if it will just start up and we will drive to the game because taking our car to a mechanic is out of the question as a mechanic will demand payment for his services and this is something we simply cannot do instead. I sit in faith as my mother opens the driver's side door, gets into the car, places her purse on the seat next to her, smiles, absolute holy,

certainty back at me. Adjust the rearview mirror, pushes the key into the ignition, and turns. Turns it again. She turns it once more, and this time, it doesn't even make a sound. No clicks, no anything. We sit in that stillness

for a long while, and I don't even realize I'm holding my breath. Until finally, the mother opens the door of the car and steps out. I'm not just going back in the house. It's not fair. No, there's got to be something.

What's plan B? But when she looks back at me, I see she still wears her face mask on, that look of absolute certainty, absolute faith. And I exhale, just a little bit. There's my mother,

steps in front of our rusty Dodge Caravan, station wagon, places both her hands on the hood of the car, squeezes her eyes shut, bows her head, and prays healing over the car. What? I can faintly hear her if she discusses the situation with her God, and I'm angry with her God. Always telling poor people to have faith when everybody else uses money. I just want to play baseball. She opens her eyes,

walks back to the driver's side door, gets into the car, and for a moment, just for a moment, she gathers herself. She readjusts the mirror, and without turning back at me, it pushes the key into the ignition. And something catches. It's rough, fitful, loud,

but the engine roars to life. My mother, pulls the car out onto the street. There's no wolf. There's no clapping, there's no smile because people of faith do not act surprised, do not celebrate something which they already knew what happened. Still, your face in the mirror shining expectations as Octavia Sexton did. You learn very early that certain factors are just out of your control,

which means there's going to be some things out there that you're just going to have to learn to live with. in the western Kentucky. You either live in a hauler or you live on a ridge. We lived on the ridge. A little two-room house with no running water. We hauled water from a well. We had outside toilets. You had a kitchen and then you just have one little room

for everybody's sleeping. After daddy died, when I was like eight or nine, Mommy got a bigger house. Me and Mommy had our own room and then Herschel, my brother, he had his room. It did have a bathroom in it. You couldn't drink that water, but we could flush the toilet, so we were moving up. The best thing about it was the land. There had been a sawmill there, so the trees all around the place had been removed. And there was a huge sawdust pile that was just great to play on. You could dig big holes. When it snowed,

you could ride over it with a sled. the only toys that I had were dolls. When I was nine, I got up a store-bought baby doll for Christmas, and my aunt gave me a baby doll that her daughter had grown out of. And then I had my Barbie doll and Kind doll, but the walking doll was the most prized because nobody else had one. My daddy found it at a thrift store. She had blonde curly hair, and she had blue eyes, and she had fair skin, and had her dress on.

They made them in the 50s. They were like 34 inches tall. You could hold their hands, and then you walk, and they'd walk with you like a little girl. Her expression was just still, serene, still face. I'd get all my dolls together. and talk to them, give them baths. They were special. When my cousins came over,

they weren't allowed to play with my dolls. They might drop them. I'd be like, don't touch them. They don't like to be bothered. One night, the moon was full. I remember it shining through the window. Mommy was asleep. But I wasn't.

I was laying there. I don't know what I was thinking. but I looked up right above the bed. There had been a square opening cut so that you could get up there. There's nothing up there, just the raptors. It was just a square plank of wood that covered that opening. Trapped door.

It began to slide open. It slowly slid open just a little bit. and I couldn't see anything. I was staring up into complete darkness. But I thought somebody was up there. I felt that something was looking down. If I laid very still, maybe it wouldn't see me. I was afraid, but I knew never to scream and yell, that would be more dangerous.

They would have been honest. So I turned over And I whispered really, really low I had my mouth right to her ear And mommy, there's somebody in the loft She turned over and she looked And it was halfway open I did not want whoever it was

In the loft to know that I saw them So I said, Mommy, you leave the water on in the kitchen and she said, I don't know, did I? We both just got up very calmly, and we walked out of the bedroom. As soon as we got in the other room, she said, we got to call Amos. That was her brother.

And we got my brother, and we got out of the house. She came out with the phone on the front porch, and she called him, and we stood there. Uncle Amos pulls up in the car, He's got a gun. He's got his flashlight. He says, okay, you all stay out here. He went into the house.

We could see him through the window. And he got up there with a light. He came back, and he said, I didn't see anybody. There's nobody up there. Let's search the house. There's nobody there. But here's the thing. We had coal and wood stoves, so your ceiling,

was always black in soot. And Uncle Amos, he said, I can tell from the finger marks that somebody was up there. You could see marks in the soot. That's when the real fear set in. Things that go bump in the night, you hear them or you might see a shadow,

but you don't see imprints of its hands. It's like, I don't want to live here anymore, but you can't move. Where are you going to go? Nobody talked about it. It gets scarier if you talk about it. You wouldn't want to go to bed. You couldn't sleep at night.

I didn't really know what to do. You could pray. Pray that it won't happen again. That's what we did. One night, sometime later, Mommy and my brother were gone. They were not going to be back to really late. I had went to bed.

I was dozing. I wasn't all the way of sleep. And the quilt began to slide down. I pulled it back up to my chin, but I still had my fingers on it, and it tugged. Tugged, tugging down, tugging down. Pulled it back again. It started to slide down. This time it came down a little bit farther.

and I pulled the cover up to my chin and it jerked out of my fingers. I can remember one of my fingernails breaking. And it went up in the air and then it went to the foot of the bed. And I jumped up. The light was a bulb on the ceiling and it had a chain hanging from it. And I jerked the chain and the light came on. And I saw the quilt on the floor at the foot of the bed as if somebody was under it and it was moving.

The adrenaline had kicked in. We had a gun, a Colt 45. We kept the gun beside the bed, loaded. I grabbed the gun and I pointed it. And I said, I am going to kill you. And it was like air going out of a balloon. It just deflated. And it lay flat on the floor.

I ran out of the bedroom into what was our living room. For one reason, I don't know why. I jumped with my feet. I stood on the couch. I was standing there. And I was overcome with fear. I thought, there's a presence, an evil, dark presence. And it wanted to be known.

It wanted attention. Who would believe that? Where do you go for help with something like that? I stayed on the couch. I didn't go back to sleep. Mommy came home, what are you doing on the couch? And I said, I heard something. I didn't tell her.

It scared me more to talk about it than to ignore it. One day, I was getting ready for school. The dolls were piled there. I had them on a, like, a chest. and our bed was right next to the chest. They were face down. I didn't play with them anymore. They hadn't been touched in a long time.

I got my clothes on. I had my back to the pile. I had to turn around toward the dolls to go back out the door. Every one of them, their faces were turned toward me. I didn't remember moving the dolls. I thought that maybe Mommy had moved on, or had cleaned or something. Then after that, one morning, the light was coming in through the window.

I was laying on my side. I opened my eyes. And there she stood. My walking doll was standing there, right beside the bed looking at me. Those blue eyes staring right at me. They weren't nice anymore. My baby doll was laying in this weird position. It's like in a back bend and its head was turned.

It was just really creepy. Darkness had got inside the dolls. They weren't my baby dolls like I had loved. They had become something else. I told mommy, the doll's standing here, it's looking at me. Oh, you probably left it there. there. It made me angry, angry at her for not believing me. There was no explanation to it.

Nobody could have done this. My brother, he could not get into that room without coming across our bed because it was a small room. I said then, tonight you sleep on that side of the bed. I ain't sleeping there no more. A couple of nights later, I was sleeping next to the wall. And I heard mommy say, there's that doll. I raised up and there it was looking at her, literally staring. They had all moved, and they were all looking toward the bed. She knew this was something wrong. I was glad that it, she's seen it, that it scared her.

See there? You didn't blame me, did you? She said, we're going to fix this. They're going in the closet. I'm like, finally, yes, we're doing something. We hauled them into the closet and shut the door. We took a chain and nailed it on one side of the frame and pulled the chain over and put a lock there

to where you could put a padlock and lock the doll's in the closet. It didn't even get nighttime. We were in the kitchen, just talking. She was at the sink, and we hear that in the closet, in the corner of the closet where the dolls had been put, scratching around, moving around. I'm looking at Mommy, and she turned around, and she looked at me. Well, they're back. What else are we going to do? Couldn't just throw, and even where would I throw them?

Because we didn't have a garbage dump. So where would I throw them? in the woods, that'd be even scarier. They'd come after me in the woods. The way we grew up, it's just like you had nothing. And so even if you outgrew some clothes, you didn't just throw them away. Everything is passed down. Again, she got Uncle Amos to come out, and we opened up the closet door,

and the dolls had moved around. They weren't where we left them. And so we locked the closet door back. And then whenever you could hear them, we'd be like, oh, that's just a rat. I got married when I was 18, and me and my husband moved out. We didn't have much of anything. Mommy was giving me a few things. I thought about the dolls.

I don't think I really wanted to take the dolls. I wanted to see if they were still in there. After all that time, maybe they were different. I mean, they could still be worth something. I opened the closet where they were supposed to be, and there were not any dolls. If anybody was going to get rid of the dolls, it should have been me. They were mine. And my brother, I asked him, I said, did you get the dolls?

He said, I burned them. He had gathered up the dolls, took them over the hill, and burned them all up. I said, why? He just looked at me and he said, they're no good. So he ever said, I went down to see if there was anything left, but they were just gone. Time passed. We grew old.

Mommy passed. The house fell in. There's nothing left of my childhood on that land except my memories. and my stories, but my son bought a trailer and he moved it on to that property. And recently, he moved in his family and he's got a stepdaughter who was 11 years old. The other day they stopped by to see me and she had her baby doll. And I said, oh, what a pretty baby doll. She just kind of threw it down on the table.

and she said, I don't like it. I said, why? She looked straight at me, and she said, because it looked at me, and it's evil. Octavia Sexton, she's an Appalachian storyteller and teaching artists in Kentucky. You can find out more at her website, Octavia sexton.com. The original score for that piece was by Doug Stewart. It was produced little children as the epitome of innocence because they are Innocent, when you see a supposed bad child, you don't blame the child.

You'd immediately wonder, where's that kid coming from? How's that kid being raised? But I've got a question for you. What if a youngster with loving parents, with supportive siblings, a thriving community, despite it all, channels evil, and it's not naughtiness, but evil. We've heard whispers of such a thing of youngsters inhabiting a much older soul and I wonder

Spooksters if you yourself have an intimate experience with this phenomena do you know someone born evil? If so, I'd love to hear about it. Spooked at snapjudgment.org I promise not to tell anyone except the amazing community of spooksters

walking the shadow path holler at me spooked at snapjudgment.org and speaking of this shadow road it takes each one to teach one and as a favor to me share this episode with someone you love

with love put it in your social media it's the only way spook happens spoke just brought to you by the team that has learned through difficult experience that food can be hard to come by. So they savor every bite from their dinner plate, except, of course, for Mark Ristich.

He just slams his food to the floor and scream for the servants to come pick it up. Thankfully, there's Davey Kim, Zoe Frickno, Ann Ford, Eric Yonyers, Taylor DeCott, Marissa Dodge, Miles Lassie, Doug Stewart, Paulina Creeky, Elizabeth Z. Pardue, Diffu Mutu Matu and Lulu Jemima.

The spook theme song is by Pat Macede Miller. My name is in Washington. Several traditions teach that it is easier for a camel to enter the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter into salvation. I don't know from salvation. The shadow is subtle. Fertive, secret that if you don't pay attention, then you might miss the important thing.

and wealth gives us places to run away to hide from ourselves from our lives it provides the opportunity to be blinded by the things that are least important

is horrible and as crushing and despairing as it is and understand the poverty demands you attend to the here and to the now an empty belly insist that you pay

very close attention to things that wealth would sweep away I never want to return to me ever again. Still, I know without a grounding, without a reminder of what is real and what is not, I will forget that this is a dream. So I make a small compact,

a promise, a reminder that just because I don't see something doesn't mean it's not there. So I never, ever, never, ever, Ever, ever, never.