Plush gingerbread baker doll, modern make (Hobby Lobby tag)
From the private ledger of an estate collection
Thornevale release, Ledger No. E-0445
Every other file in this collection is in the Collector's hand. This one is not. When a young woman sold the Collector her collection before leaving for college, this doll came with something none of the others had: a recording the girl had made of the man who owned him first, and her own transcript of it. The Collector, who paraphrased everyone, copied this one into the file word for word. It is set out here exactly as she filed it.
"That son of a bitch was standing on his own, right up on the kitchen counter, knocking over cups, smashing them on the floor! You think I'm making that up? Girl, I lived it.
I'm an old man, about to die, but I'll tell you this before I go, and you can keep it on that tape of yours: there are demons, and they love these little dolls laying around. They get in 'em. They move them around like little bodies. That's the God's truth of it.
I got this goddamn gingerbread man from my granddaughter one Christmas, to decorate my trailer, that's all it was ever supposed to be, a decoration. Then they moved out of state, all of 'em, and it stayed with me. Well, my dog got to it, Fancy, my yorkie, she tore at it some, chewed it up a bit, and I threw some hot glue on it to patch it up best I could. At the time I wanted to keep the damn thing for my granddaughter's sake, you understand? Something of hers in the house. I didn't know. I didn't realize it would get demonized.
The thing is alive. You write that down. It started with the nights. I'd get woke up by Fancy barking up a storm in the middle of the goddamn night, every night, right when I finally got to sleep. I'd get up thinking somebody was trying to break in on me, check the doors, check the windows, nothing. Nothing but this feeling, like being watched in my own trailer. A whole week of that, every damn night.
Then one night I sit up in bed and look down the hall, and I swear to God, there's that little bastard standing in the middle of my kitchen in the dark. Standing there. I could see him by the streetlight coming in through the shades, this round-headed little thing, and I yelled out, 'What the Jesus!?' and sprung up out of that bed, and if that son of a bitch didn't take off running! Sprinting, girl, such a clatter in that kitchen, and I get in there and flip the light on and he's up there knocking things over, two glasses thrown down on the floor, and I froze. I just froze where I stood. I ain't never seen anything demonized act up in front of me like that.
So I go to my room and grab my .45, Fancy still in the kitchen going crazy, and I come back and he's gone. Gone. I threw open every cabinet in that kitchen with the gun ready, looked in every corner, and that little bastard was nowhere. Just gone, like he'd never been standing there at all. I didn't sleep a wink that night. I sat up in a chair with the lights on, holding my gun in one hand and a Bible in the other, like some kind of fool, and you know what, I'd do it again.
About a year goes by, quiet, and then I find the damn thing sitting on the very top of one of my shelves. Top shelf, where I never put it. So I threw the damn thing out, and I started going back to church, which I hadn't done in I don't know how long. Lot of good it did me. It come back. But not in the house. Outside. Roaming around out there. I'd see its round little head peeking in my windows at night. I'd hear it banging around in the trash. Knocking. On the door, on the windows, knocking, like it wanted back in. This went on a month. A month of that.
Till one morning I found it under the trailer, and I lost it right there in the yard. Cussing it out, and I threw it as far as I could throw, out into the brush. You saw that. You stood right there and watched me do it, and you asked me what in the world was going on, and I told you every bit of it, same as I'm telling you now with that recorder running. And what did you do? You went out in that brush and you picked it up and you took it home with you, saying you weren't afraid of it. Well. You're young.
Now you've got it on your tape, and you can play it back all you want. I'll say it plain: it's demonized. There's something that got in it, and I don't know how, but it's Satan's thing. And now he's yours, girl. You take care he don't run your house like he run mine."
The girl kept him on a shelf in her own collection, and by her account he was nearly quiet with her. She recorded one encounter only: he disappeared off the shelf, and she found him outside. She laughed about it, the Collector noted, in the way people laugh when they are deciding whether to be frightened. When she left for college her parents required her to part with the collection, and she sold it to the Collector whole.
She installed him in the kitchen, on a high shelf, which she wrote seemed both proper and prudent. One entry only, beneath the transcript: December, found on the counter in the morning beside two cups, both unbroken, where she did not keep him and did not leave him. Her note under it, in full: The glasses, at least, are an improvement. The helper maintains nobody touched him. The helper also maintains this about every doll in the house, and it has never once been true of all of them.
She wrote that a yorkie can carry a plush doll a very long way, that trailer parks have children in them, that sleep goes strange in a man who lives alone and is unwell, and that a thrown-away thing has many ways back into a house. She also wrote that dogs cannot knock on a door from outside, and she kept the transcript word for word, which she did for no other doll. Her whole file is set out here, and keepers may make of it what she made of it.
He is a modern plush gingerbread baker: shaggy tan plush, a round head, small black bead eyes set slightly uneven, a red pom nose and a faint stitched smile. He wears a tall white chef's hat on a red and white striped band, a red bow at his neck, and a white apron with wooden buttons, a red felt heart, and lace trim, over red and white plaid shorts and striped socks. His feet are very large and finished with white rickrack. His maker's tag, reading Hobby Lobby, is intact on the shorts and photographed above; the photos are part of the description. Approximately 20 inches from the top of his hat to the soles of his feet, legs included.
He comes exactly as he left the estate, uncleaned and unrestored, and the evidence is on him: tears in the plush repaired with hot glue by the original owner, the glue visible in the fur and photographed closely; further small glue spots in the pile; his chef's hat loose on its band; his fur shaggy, matted in places, and dusty with keeping. Nothing about him has been tidied, and the standing instruction for this file is that nothing should be.
Do not throw him away. On the evidence of this file it does not work, and it appears to annoy him. Keep him where you can see him; the kitchen suits him, a high shelf in company suits him better, and if cups are ever found on the floor beneath him, the file's only request is the usual one: write down the date before you tidy them up.
Packed protected, hat and apron secured. He is plush and travels easily. Please support him by the body when moving him; his hat is loose and his legs are long.
Per eBay policy, this item is sold strictly as a tangible, physical collectible. The experiences described above are the personal accounts of the previous collector, shared here as her backstory. Paranormal activity cannot be guaranteed and varies by keeper. He is sold as-is as a collectible for haunted-object enthusiasts; all sales are final. By purchasing, the buyer assumes responsibility for their own experiences.