Hello, dolly

You may have heard that a 54-year-old paranormal investigator named Dan Rivera died a few days ago while on tour with a supposedly possessed Raggedy Ann doll named "Annabelle."  I know I have, because about two dozen loyal readers of Skeptophilia have sent me links about the story.

Positively DO NOT.  Whatever you were thinking about doing, just DON'T.

According to the most recent news releases, police found no signs of foul play or anything suspicious about Rivera's death, although more information may come out once an autopsy is performed.

Annabelle has a long history.  Her reputation for supernatural hijinks goes back to the 1970s, when her owner reported odd and scary behavior (moving on her own, leaving scrawled and threatening notes, knocking stuff over in the middle of the night) to none other than Ed and Lorraine Warren.  Ed Warren was a "self-taught demonologist," which is pretty much the only kind there is at the moment, given that Cotton Mather, Tomás de Torquemada, and Girolamo Savonarola are no longer in charge of designing university curricula.  Lorraine was a "light-trance medium" who assisted her husband on his demon-hunting expeditions.  If you've heard of them, it's probably because of their involvement in the famous Amityville Horror case, which was the subject of much hype and a movie featuring one (1) puking nun.  (Interesting fact: my wife, who grew up on Long Island, worked in a record store in Amityville during the height of the craze.  She and her coworkers were constantly being asked "Where's the Horror House?"  Their stock answer was "Take the first left, go about a mile to the third stoplight, then turn right.  Three blocks down, on the right."  In point of fact, none of them knew nor cared where the Horror House was, because they rightly believed that the entire story was bullshit.)

In any case, Annabelle was given to the Warrens, who locked her up in a cabinet in the museum of the occult they ran, but they said they still periodically found her running loose when they got there in the morning, and more than once they heard eerie laughter when no one was there.  This drew the attention of various people, all of whom regretted getting involved.  These allegedly included a skeptic who was given "psychic slashes" that drew blood; a priest who insulted Annabelle and forthwith ran his car into a tree; and a homicide detective who was stabbed by the doll, "receiving injuries that forced him into an early retirement."

The museum closed after Lorraine's death at age 92 in 2019, and the New England Society for Psychic Research took charge of Annabelle, sending her out earlier this year on a "Devils On the Run" tour that showcased items from the Warrens' collection.

You have to wonder why they did this.  I would think the members of the New England Society for Psychic Research would, by and large, believe that all this possessed-doll stuff is completely reasonable.  So wouldn't they go, "Hell no, we gotta keep Annabelle locked up, she's too dangerous, someone could get hurt"?  Nope, they sent her right out on tour, suggesting that either they (1) believe Annabelle's powers are real but don't give a damn if she does injure someone, (2) believe in some psychic stuff but figure Annabelle is nonsense, or (3) don't believe any of it but saw a good opportunity to cash in on the fact that lots of other people do.

You also have to wonder what they think now that one of her handlers has died.

Of course, the great likelihood is that Rivera died of natural causes.  I get that 54 is a pretty young age to drop dead; it'd be surprising, given that I am a 64-year-old person, if that thought didn't cross my mind.  But I'm going to follow my Prime Directive of eliminating all the normal and natural explanations before jumping to a paranormal or supernatural one, and I think once we learn what the autopsy finds, it'll turn out Rivera had a heart attack or stroke.

So it's sad -- from the tributes written by his friends, he sounds like he was a good guy -- but unlikely to be due to the evil machinations of "Annabelle."

One of the people who sent me a link added the message, "Be careful what you write about her, though!  She'll get even with you if you make fun!"  My response to that is:

Ha ha ha ha ha, Annabelle, you are ugly and your mom dresses you funny.  You've got a blank expression, a goofy smile, and what is that triangle-thing in the middle of your face supposed to be?  You call that a nose?  Oh, and you don't like my saying all that?  What're you gonna do about it?  Go ahead, girl, gimme your best shot.  I dare you.

Okay, that should do it.  I'm not sure what the priest said who ended up wrecking his car, but maybe this will be enough for some psychic retribution.

I'll report here if I have any sudden attacks of gout or bursitis or brain aneurysms or whatnot.  Myself, I think I'll probably be okay, but we'll see.  Gordon vs. Annabelle 2025 -- who are you rooting for?

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Hello Dolly

Despite my tendency to fall into the "dubious" column with respect to most paranormal claims, I'm always appreciative of anyone who is more of a believer who nevertheless wants to see any evidence analyzed the right way.

That's my impression of The Anomalist, a website I check regularly for news of the weird.  It acts as a sort of clearinghouse for recent stories of odd or unexplained phenomena, but is really good about presenting all sides of the story -- and for calling out bogus claims as such.

Take, for example, some stories that appeared there having to do with the alleged phenomenon of "haunted dolls."

For a lot of us, dolls are right up there with clowns in the "oh, hell no" department.  Their blank, unresponsive faces and fixed expressions land right in the middle of the uncanny valley -- we tend to perceive a face that is human-like, but not quite human enough, as being more frightening or repellant than a face that has fewer distinctly human features.  (Think of a doll's face as compared to a teddy bear's, for example.)  So we're already in scary territory for a good many folks.

Add to that the possibility of the doll being possessed, and you're looking at "scream like a little child and run away."

It's no wonder that the recent creepy Doctor Who episode, "The Giggle," featured a doll called Stooky Bill.  Stooky Bill was real enough -- he was a ventriloquist's dummy that was used by Scottish electronics pioneer John Logie Baird as a subject for the first-ever image transmitted over a television signal -- but in the episode, Stooky Bill (and his wife and "babbies") are brought to life by an evil alien called the Toymaker (played to perfection by Neil Patrick Harris).  The scariest scene in the entire episode was when the wife and children dolls first talk to, then attack, companion Donna Noble in an empty room as she and the Doctor are trying to escape the labyrinth where the Toymaker has trapped them.

Something about their still, expressionless faces, that even so are moving and speaking, is absolutely terrifying.

A while back The Anomalist looked at a couple of examples of the haunted doll phenomenon.  The first is a World War II-era ventriloquist's dummy head called "Mr. Fritz" kept in a glass cabinet by its owner.  The owner started getting suspicious when he'd get up in the morning to find the cabinet door open, so he set up a camera to film it when he wasn't around.

The result, even if you're suspicious it's a fake, is pretty fucking creepy.  The glass door swings open, Mr. Fritz's eyes pop open -- and then his mouth moves.

After this, the owner apparently took the doll head out of the case and put it in a cabinet "secured by heavy chains."  Why this was necessary, given all that happens is the door opens and the face moves, I don't know.  It's not like it had arms and legs and was walking about unassisted, or anything.

Still, I understand the apprehension.  Skeptic though I am, I don't think I'd want to sleep in the same room as that thing, heavy chains or no.

Then we have a British doll named Scarlet, who has been recorded using an "Electronic Voice Phenomena" (EVP) recorder -- and what she supposedly says indicates she should have her prim little porcelain mouth washed out with soap.

In a video of the doll, we get to hear playback of the alleged EVP.  Not only does she supposedly say her owner's name (Linzi), she says such things as "fuck off," "you're fucked," "shut the fuck up," and "fuck this."

So apparently Scarlet is even more fond of the f-word than I am, and that's saying something.

Anyhow, I listened to the recording several times -- and I'm just not hearing it.  I could barely make out "Linzi," but all of the alleged obscenities sounded like white noise to me.  And that's the problem; as is pointed out in The Anomalist, there's a good explanation for a great many alleged EVP claims, and that's apophenia.  The human mind is a pattern-finding machine, which means that sometimes we'll see patterns when there's nothing there but chaos. (You can think of our tendency to see faces -- pareidolia -- as a special case of apophenia.)

With Scarlet, people are already primed to hear something meaningful, so the static pops, clicks, and hums the EVP recorder plays back are interpreted with this bias.  Especially when we already know what the doll allegedly said -- it's all listed right there in the article.

Put simply, you can't miss it when I tell you what's there.

The Anomalist provides a link to an article in The Skeptical Inquirer about this very tendency -- looking at particular cases of EVP claims and analyzing why they're probably nothing more than our tendency to impose order on chaos.

So unlike a lot of sensationalized sites about alleged paranormal phenomena, I can hold up The Anomalist as a place that has the exact right approach.  I'm probably still a bit more dubious than the site owners are, but by and large, we both have the same touchstone for accepting a claim -- logic and evidence.

And a bit of healthy skepticism about humanity's capacity both for getting things wrong... and for engaging in fakery.

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Duplicating the crone

A pretty common belief in many different cultures is that inanimate objects can have, or can be imbued with, supernatural powers.

It's not like I haven't dealt with this topic before, here at Skeptophilia.  We've had posts about do-it-yourself voodoo dolls, a haunted wine cabinet, a cellphone that received texts from Satan, and a child's doll named "Robert" which shifts positions by itself, not to mention "giggling maniacally."

And that's just scratching the surface.  If you start asking people you'll find everything from the common and fairly innocuous belief in good luck charms (or in items that bring bad luck), all the way up to belief that there are objects that are cursed and/or inhabited by evil spirits capable of serious damage.

So far, nothing too unusual, although still examples of magical thinking that it'd be nice for the human race to jettison.  But just recently, there's been a technological twist added to all of this medieval superstition.

What if someone used a 3-D printer to make a perfect replica of a cursed object?

Of course, it opens up the question of "why would you want to?", but as we've seen over and over, asking that is not sufficient to dissuade people from doing something.

Brent Swancer, over at Mysterious Universe, tells us about some people who decided to copy a cursed object that's been nicknamed "the Crone of the Catskills." Here's how Swancer describes the object:

[The Crone is] a strange hand-carved statue supposedly found by some hikers stashed away and abandoned, quite possibly hidden, in a dim cave somewhere in the Catskill Mountains of New York.  The doll is creepy to say the least, with a length of filthy cord wrapped around its neck and rusty nails driven into its eyes, and it seems like the sort of thing most people would cringe at and leave lying where it was, but in this case the hikers took it home with them.

According to Swancer, the unnamed hikers lived to regret bringing it back with them, as immediately bad stuff began to happen, like bumps, thuds, and bangs, a feeling of being watched, and worst of all, "odd smells such as that of stagnant water or decay."

If you're thinking "what kind of idiot would find something like that and then bring it home?" it bears mention that I did something kind of similar a few years back.  My wife and I were hiking in the Finger Lakes National Forest not too far away from our home, and were a good ways off the beaten path, when I stepped over a log, and noticed that on the end of the log was...

... a Mardi Gras mask.

It was in perfect condition, and in fact looked like it had been placed there only moments before.  It was in October, the weather was cool, and we hadn't seen anyone else in the woods during our entire hike, so it's not like this was exactly a well-traveled part of the National Forest. So it was pretty bizarre, to put it mildly.

I said, "Hey, Carol, come take a look at this."

I picked up the mask, and put it over my face.  She regarded me with a raised eyebrow and said, "You do realize that if you were a character in one of your own novels, you'd be about to die right now?"

Undaunted, I brought it home, and hung it on the wall in my office. I did have a bit of a turn the next morning, when I walked into the room and found the mask in the middle of the floor.

Turned out the elastic loop had come loose.  So I reconnected it, and it's remained there quietly ever since.  No bumps, thuds, or bangs, and the only bad smells are when my dog decides to roll in Eau de Dead Squirrel and then comes to take a nap in my office.

Anyhow, all of this is just to say that if I'd found the Crone of the Catskills, I'd probably have taken it home, too.  The hikers who found her donated the Crone to the Traveling Museum of the Paranormal and Occult, and even afterwards it continued to do spooky stuff.  The Museum's owners, Dana Matthews and Greg Newkirk, report that after the Crone was obtained, furniture was found knocked over, there was the "smell of fetid pond water," and more than once they opened the place up in the morning to find small muddy footprints on the floor leading to and from the case the Crone occupied.

The Crone of the Catskills

So far, so good.  But the next thing that happened I have to admit I find a little baffling.  A pair of paranormal researchers, Karl Pfeiffer and Connor Randal, decided that it'd be a good idea to use a 3-D printer to make a replica of the Crone.

Havoc ensued.  The printer malfunctioned and a part of it "melted."  Other equipment broke down, or went missing entirely.  People in the room with the replica reported "a sense of dread" coming from the thing, and a "burning sensation" from touching it.

So apparently, the 3-D printer hadn't just copied the Crone's appearance, it had also copied its ghostly hanger-on.

Now, as a diehard skeptic, it's to be expected that I think this sounds a little silly.  But allow me to ask any true believers in the studio audience: how exactly could this work?

I mean, even if you accept that an object can be imbued with a "force" (whatever that means), isn't the usually accepted explanation that it's tied to the object itself?  If you made a copy of the object, you wouldn't expect a piece of the "force" to get knocked loose and attach itself to the replica.  Or at least, I wouldn't.  I didn't think that 3-D printers could make copies of ghosts, you know?

Which, honestly, is a good thing.  Just think of what would happen if you put a 3-D printer in a haunted house, and the ghosts got a hold of it and started duplicating themselves.  In short order, you'd have what paranormal researchers call "a shitload of ghosts."  It'd be a catastrophe, much like what happened in the Lost in Space episode "The Space Destructors," wherein Dr. Smith created an android who then began to create more androids, which was especially awful because the machine was programmed to make them look like Dr. Smith, or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof.

So it'd be unfortunate if the 3-D printer did make a copy of the evil spirit haunting the Crone of the Catskills.  That being said, if Pfeiffer and Randal have any extra copies of the Crone hanging around, I'd love to have one.  I've got a nice space on the shelf in my office where she could reside.  Also, if all she does is push furniture around and leave muddy footprints on the floor, my dog pretty much has that covered already.

I might even see if I can make a replica of my mysterious Mardi Gras mask, and we can do a swap.  I have to warn you, though, that the mask's antics are even less impressive than the Crone's.  "Falling on the floor once in four years" is really not that much of a superpower.

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Hello Dolly

Despite my tendency to fall into the "dubious" column with respect to most paranormal claims, I'm always appreciative of anyone who is more of a believer who nevertheless wants to see any evidence analyzed the right way.

That's my impression of The Anomalist, a website I check regularly for news of the weird.  It acts as a sort of clearinghouse for recent stories of odd or unexplained phenomena, but is really good about presenting all sides of the story -- and for calling out bogus claims as such.

Take, for example, some recent stories that appeared there, having to do with the alleged phenomenon of "haunted dolls."

For a lot of us, dolls are right up there with clowns in the "oh, hell no" department.  Their still, unresponsive faces and fixed expressions land right in the middle of the uncanny valley -- we tend to perceive a face that is human-like, but not quite human enough, as being more frightening or repellant than a face that has fewer distinctly human features.  (Think of a doll's face as compared to a teddy bear's.)  So we're already in scary territory for a good many folks.

Add to that the possibility of the doll being possessed, and you're looking at "scream like a little child and run away."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Eric Skiff from New York City, Creepy kid with a piano (194351881), CC BY-SA 2.0]

The first example is a World War II-era ventriloquist's dummy head called "Mr. Fritz" kept in a glass cabinet by its owner.  The owner started getting suspicious when he'd get up in the morning to find the cabinet door open, so he set up a camera to film it when he wasn't around.

The result, even if you're suspicious it's a fake, is pretty fucking creepy.  The glass door swings open, and then Mr. Fritz's eyes pop open -- and then his mouth moves.

After this, the owner apparently took the doll head out of the case and put it in a cabinet "secured by heavy chains." Why this was necessary, given all that happens is the door opens and the face moves, I don't know.  It's not like it had arms and legs and was walking about unassisted, or anything.

Still, I understand the apprehension.  Skeptic though I am, I don't think I'd want to sleep in the same room as that thing, heavy chains or no.

Then we have a British doll named Scarlet, who has been recorded using an "Electronic Voice Phenomena" (EVP) recorder -- and what she supposedly says indicates she should have her prim little porcelain mouth washed out with soap.

In a video of the doll, we get to hear playback of the alleged EVP.  Not only does she say her owner's name (Linzi), she says such things as "fuck off," "you're fucked," "shut the fuck up," and "fuck this."

So apparently Scarlet is even more fond of the f-word than I am, and that's saying something.

Anyhow, I listened to the recording several times -- and I'm just not hearing it.  I could barely make out "Linzi," but all of the alleged obscenities just sounded like white noise to me.  And that's the problem; as is pointed out in The Anomalist, there's a good explanation for a great many alleged EVP claims, and that's apophenia.  The human mind is a pattern-finding machine, which means that sometimes we'll see patterns when there's nothing there but chaos.  (You can think of our tendency to see faces -- pareidolia -- as a special case of apophenia.)

With Scarlet, people are already primed to hear something meaningful, so the static pops, clicks, and hums the EVP recorder plays back are interpreted with this bias.  Especially when we already know what the doll allegedly said -- all of which are listed right there in the article.

Put simply, you can't miss it when I tell you what's there.

The Anomalist provides a link to an article in The Skeptical Inquirer about this very tendency -- looking at particular cases of EVP claims and analyzing why they're probably nothing more than our tendency to impose order on chaos.

So unlike a lot of sensationalized sites about alleged paranormal phenomena, I can hold up The Anomalist as a place that has the exact right approach.  I'm probably still a bit more dubious than the site owners are, but by and large, we both have the same touchstone for accepting a claim -- logic and evidence.

And a bit of healthy skepticism about humanity's capacity both for getting things wrong... and for engaging in fakery.

**************************************

In keeping with Monday's post, this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is about one of the most enigmatic figures in mathematics; the Indian prodigy Srinivasa Ramanujan.  Ramanujan was remarkable not only for his adeptness in handling numbers, but for his insight; one of his most famous moments was the discovery of "taxicab numbers" (I'll leave you to read the book to find out why they're called that), which are numbers that are expressible as the sum of two cubes, two different ways.

For example, 1,729 is the sum of 1 cubed and 12 cubed; it's also the sum of 9 cubed and 10 cubed.

What's fascinating about Ramanujan is that when he discovered this, it just leapt out at him.  He looked at 1,729 and immediately recognized that it had this odd property.  When he shared it with a friend, he was kind of amazed that the friend didn't jump to the same realization.

"How did you know that?" the friend asked.

Ramanujan shrugged.  "It was obvious."

The Man Who Knew Infinity by Robert Kanigel is the story of Ramanujan, whose life ended from tuberculosis at the young age of 32.  It's a brilliant, intriguing, and deeply perplexing book, looking at the mind of a savant -- someone who is so much better than most of us at a particular subject that it's hard even to conceive.  But Kanigel doesn't just hold up Ramanujan as some kind of odd specimen; he looks at the human side of a man whose phenomenal abilities put him in a class by himself.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]