Speaker 1: Munster House Presents. Back in twenty sixteen, Karen and I
recorded an interview with doctor Corey Comvertito, curator of the
collections at the Fort East Martella Museum in Key West,
a museum probably best known for its stuffed resident, Robert
the Doll. In December of twenty nineteen, I was working
for Apex Process Consultants, an it consulting company out of Michigan,
and we worked hard, and we traveled a lot, but
we always ended the year with epic Christmas parties. In
that year, we traveled to Key West, and while most
of my team was out focused on enjoying the tropical
weather and laid back culture of our southernmost American city,
I just had to go see the subject of doctor
Convertito's interview, Robert the Doll. Robert is a century old
doll in a sailor outfit stored at the music in
Key West. He was the property of third generation Key
West resident Robert Eugene Otto, a local artist in socialite.
The doll was named after Gene and is the focal
point of decades of stories about mysterious behaviors and curses.
The museum gets letters every day from people around the
world who think they've been cursed by bad luck from
this little stuffed character. Of course, I was skeptical of
the alleged curse, and I didn't bother asking Robert's permission
for a photo. And not only that, but when we
were buying our huge bundle of Robert the Doll merchandise,
my wife saw a stack of what she thought were
business cards and took a bunch of them, and we
were halfway home when she realized that they were actually
promotional stickers and were decidedly not free. Well, what could
possibly go wrong? China has identified the cause of the
mysterious new virus, coronavirus. Coronavirus theraphy is a rapidly spreading
virus has reached Australia.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is a rapidly emerging situation.
Speaker 1: The first US case has been detected. There's confirmation the
coronavirus has reached Australia. China is urging its citizens not
to travel abroad. I have today declared that the coronavirus
presents a public health emergency in the United States. So
flash forward to the present day. My wife and I
got the opportunity to participate in a cruise with the
Skeptoid Podcast, which we use as a way to celebrate
our twenty fifth wedding anniversary one of our ports of call,
Key West, and we still had those stickers, so I
gave a skeptical curated introduction to Robert the Dall to
quite a few of the attendees, and at the end
of my talk, I returned those stickers to the museum
gift shop and concluded by telling the group and having
returned the stickers to Robert, I find that the pandemic
has ended. How can science explain this? Well, this is
Monster Talk, the science Show about Monsters. I'm all joking aside,
explaining stuff like Robert is what we do here. This week,
I'm going to follow up on that twenty sixteen interview
with a deeper look at curses, folklore and more. It's
actually quite unlike anything we've ever seen before. A giant,
hairy creature park Ape part Mat in Luckness, a twenty
four mile long bottomless lake in the Highlands of Scotland.
Speaker 2: It's a creature known as the Luckness Monster.
Speaker 1: Monster tal Welcome to Monster Talk, the Science Show about Monsters.
I'm Blake Smith and I'm Karen Stolsner. Hey, they're Monster Talkers.
Karen's not here this week with me for some sad
reasons and some happy reasons. She's dealing with the very
recent passing of her mother and at the same time
also doing some promotional travel for her newest book, Bitch,
The Journey of a Word. She must surely be on
an emotional roller coaster right now, and I'm sorry she's
having to deal with such troughs and peaks in the
same timeframe. But I know she'll be back soon, and
hopefully we'll both be in happier situations, though I myself
will almost certainly be dealing with similar loss this year
as my mom's health continues to decline. When Brian Dunning
of The Skeptoid podcast asked me to talk about Robert Thedal,
I thought it would be an easy assignment, but going
back to our episode from twenty sixteen, I realized we
had been very careful to not grill our guests too
hard about whether or not there was anything substantive to
the Robert legends, and there was a reason for the
kid gloves, and those reasons are still the same today.
Museums and parks around the United States a struggling for funding,
and it turns out that a deep interest in historical
fact is not a strong cultural value in this country,
and a desperate need for reliable revenue streams, many such
institutions are leaning hard into the paranormal, the supernatural, and
the Gothic of acab in order to get funding. Take
the Gettysburg Battlefield. There are certainly lots of people interested
in the American Civil War, the original one, not the
online one we're having right now, but there simply aren't
enough wool uniformed LARPers to sustain our national battlefield parks.
There are, however, a huge and growing percentage of our
citizens who want to visit these sites to break out
their ghost hunting gear to find proof of the paranormal,
the parapsychological, are the supernatural. I don't think there's any
real science behind that search. I think people are just
looking to confirm their pre existing beliefs, are looking for
a little emotional jolt of something numinous. So for financially
struggling institutions, even if they don't want to endorse such beliefs,
it would be bad business to turn away revenue just
because the source of that money is a search for
things not real, are factual, are scientific. No matter how
one feels about cashing in on wu wu and mystery mongering,
the economics are difficult to resist, but also difficult to measure.
Visiting Robert the Dahal only makes sense in the context
of his outsized folkloric footprint. As a piece of history,
he's very niche. His owner, Robert Eugenotto, was a competent painter,
but not internationally famous. Yet the folklore of him as
a cursed object, or perhaps as a sentient or possessed object,
has led to visitors from around the world. There is
an emerging body of academic research around this kind of
tourism and its impact on the economics of parking museum funding,
but so far I haven't found any really succinct or
definitive indicators as to whether such trends are ultimately positive
or damaging to the institutions that embrace or engage with
those revenue streams. But short term economic needs often lead
to compromises, and this is as true for institutions as
it is for individuals. I'm sure we'll look at this
topic more in the future. It's the subject of research
from guests of the show and students and colleagues, And
I just got a call for papers from Joe Laycock
and Natasha Michaels of Texas State University. They're doing a
second iteration of their of God's in Monsters conference, which
I was lucky enough to participate in back in twenty nineteen.
The theme this year is communities and their Monsters, and
I would be shocked if someone doesn't propose some work
around this topic of the interplay of economics and narrative
in the monster space. Maybe that work will come from you.
Check the show notes for a link to that call
for papers. But back to Robert the Doll. As I say,
I was doing research to refresh my memory of the
legends around the Doll. In case you haven't listened to
that episode or have not heard of this doll before
in its legend curse, let's review the story elements as
their are usually told, and we'll get into more of
the fact finding stuff after that. Keep in mind that
the chronology here is from folklore. Figuring out what's historically
documented versus what's been glommed on through the accretion of
legend is part of the investigative process. But here we go.
Robert the Doll's legend begins in nineteen oh four, when
little gene Otto was gifted a handmade doll from Germany,
child sized sailor, suited and allegedly filled with straw and spiked.
Almost immediately, weirdness ensued. Jen blamed mishaps on the doll,
claiming Robert did it, while the family and staff reported
hearing giggles, footsteps, and even witnessed the doll moving. One
great aunt, sensing the doll was a bad influence, banished
Robert to the attic, only to die suddenly the next day,
prompting his return as an adult. Gene kept the doll,
reportedly giving it a seat at the dinner table and
in the bedroom, much to his wife's horror. After their deaths,
Robert passed to a new owner, who also endured two
decades of haunted hijiinks before donating the doll in nineteen
ninety four to the East Martella Museum in Key West. There,
Robert became a full time spooky celebrity, allegedly cursing visitors
who failed to show proper respect, spawning tales of car crashes, divorces,
and desperate apology letters sent from around the world. And additionally,
there's still this pervasive legend that Robert inspired the character
Chucky from the movie series Child's Play that simply isn't true,
and given the dates on which the Robert legend really
kicked off, it makes no chronological sense. But since some
of the legends of Robert involved him moving, perhaps killing,
and being tied to voodoo, it's not a stretch for
uninformed people to make this connection. And besides that, anybody
who saw Child's Play back when it was released would
absolutely know that Chucky has a satirical take on the
ubiquitous nineteen eighties my buddy.
Speaker 2: My body, my body, money, Wherever I go, go my body,
my boy, I'll feature, you know, my buddy.
Speaker 1: Like the part of between him. Before we look at
the histerosity of the Robert legend, we should talk about
curses in general. And hey, I'm incredibly sympathetic to people
who think they've been cursed. If I were not a
hardcore skeptic and rationalist, I'd say I've got plenty of
reason to think I'm cursed this year. The amount of
a crude misfortune that my family's seen in twenty twenty
five feels like someone's writing my life as a cheap
knockoff of the Biblical Book of Job. But most alleged
curses are really the results of trying to find meaning
for a collection of severe or numerically significant unfortunate events.
A string of such bad events is usually intermingled with
positive events, But when one is in a cursed mindset,
the victim starts to keep a mental tally and put
them under the headings in their head. You don't need
the supernatural to explain this when perfectly normal biases of
the human mind can account for it. But take my
year for example. I hate to go through this, but
so far in twenty twenty five, I lost my dog Smoky,
I lost my mentor Joe Nickel. I'm almost certainly going
to lose my mother. My dad has serious health issues.
My employer is going through significant layoffs that might affect me.
My wife's job evaporated right before our trip. My car
had a very expensive breakdown. I'm having my own health
issues requiring expensive tests. Am I cursed? I joked about
that when we did our Robert tour. But no, I
don't think I'm cursed. I think at my age, it's
a sad fact that loved ones are going to pass
at a higher rate, and bad things happen all the time,
but good things also happen, and curses derived from that
mental habit of attributing cause to what might better be
described as category. If you're a longtime listener, you may
recall me saying, for example, that hauntings aren't a misty
their solution. Once you decided you're haunted, every anomaly becomes
evidence for your conclusion. So also with curses. Still, even
this old hardened skeptic can see the lure of a
curse to explain all the bad news. There is a
concept in religious studies called theodyssey, and if your brain
tells you that that word means trying to explain why
bad things happen in a world with the divine good
watching over us, well, ha, you've hit a theodyssey, Homer. Yeah,
I'm actually pretty sorry that Karen's not here to grow
and roll arize at that one. But moving on, curses
make a lot of sense, even though I believe most
of the time they disappear into puff of statistics and
psychological biases when placed under close examination. Humans just love
causal explanations for streaks of order in otherwise stochastic outcomes.
And I'm not aware of any of the alleged curstories
around Robert that don't fit this explanation, if they happen
at all, which is a different question and one quite
relevant to the larger story of Robert the Dall. Some
people have tried to explain Robert's legend by saying he's
a product of voodoo. Some have said he's possessed by
the ghost of Gene Auto Demonic possessions been proposed, voodoo
spirits and black magic. Sure, the ghost of a deceased
secret love child. Yeah, why not? But this is monster Talk,
the science show about monsters, and I wanted to tackle
Robert as though I were doing my own cold investigation
and not just rehashing the focal or from dozens of sources,
which demands that we have to start with Ray Hyman's
categorical imperative, which could be summarized as don't try to
explain something until you're sure there's something to actually explain.
And for me, this meant trying to get back to
the root sources for the many legends that I'd heard
on various podcasts and websites and YouTube videos. I also
had the paperback book by Key West author and Ghost
Tour host David Sloane, and of course I had my
newspapers dot Com account thanks to our beloved patrons, which
lets me hit many of the historical newspapers that can
provide insight into the facts behind this kind of story.
So my first question was the most basic, what primary
evidence do we have that Robert the Doll's allegedly weird
lifelong relationship with Gene Autto was real or documented during
Jane's lifetime. Now, it is hard to prove. A negative
absence of evidence does not mean something didn't happen, but
I was unable to find any documentation from when gene
Otto was alive of anyone mentioning that he had this
four foot tall doll or an unhealthy relationship with it
at all. This doesn't mean Jane didn't own Robert, and
it doesn't mean he didn't have a peculiar relationship. But
Geene and his wife were socialites, and if the stories
about his relationship with Robert were true during his lifetime,
it does seem like somebody would have mentioned it, or
that there would be at least one photo of Gene
and Robert together, just one, just anything, And it seems
peculiar given how the stories play up the intense and
unnatural friendship that was said to exist. For example, to
hear the story of the popular podcast Lore, you'd assume
Robert was president virtually every moment of Jane's life, But
so far as I've been able to see, there is
no such documentation. And what about this voodoo curse creation
of Robert, Well, this is the first and most glaring
discrepancy between folklore. In fact, there are variations of the
doll being a kind of Trojan horse stuffed with magical
revenge instead of Greeks, but the doll's origins are well
attested by the museum's curators and even the book by
David Sloane, And as an aside, I don't usually recommend
pro supernatural books, but Sloane's book has a really interesting
mix of legends, hearsay, anecdotes, and many primary historical documents
that you probably won't find anywhere else. If you're curious
about Robert the Doll, you'll find lots of details and
facts here and nowhere else, so it is worth grabbing
for that content alone. Well, it turns out, as we
revealed in our twenty sixteen episode, that Robert was made
by the Steife Toy Company in Germany, and yes, this
is the same company that invented the Teddy Bear, and
Sloan's book shares research by the museum staff detailing that
the doll was originally a harlequin doll and likely a
window display, never intended as a child's toy. The book
includes images of what Robert originally looked like, as well
as documents that show Robert's sailor outfit was likely one
of Jean's own from his childhood, a photo of Jane
wearing a similar ones on display at the museum, and
the lion doll that Robert holds was not crafted until
nineteen sixty four and was made in Japan. So if
you're imagining Robert running around in a sailor outfit carrying
a lion as he causes death and dismay, well instead
imagine him in a harlequin outfit without the toy lion.
And honestly, I don't want to keep hammering on this,
but you probably shouldn't even imagine him running around. Just
a week before I wrote this episode a ghost hunter
died after visiting the allegedly demonically possessed doll. Annabel of
the Warrens fame that Raggedy and Dohl did not kill
Dan Rivera, but that will not stop news outlets from
making that connection. Stories like that make good fodder on
slow news days. And it seemed to me that if
there were credible stories or claims about Jens Doll, there
would be evidence in the news or books from Key West.
And to be clear, there are stories about Jane and
his wife, but they are about art and culture and
not dolls and curses. And there is no mention of
Robert in Jean's lifetime. And if you find out I'm
wrong on this, I would love to see some contemporary
evidence from within Jane's life. Send it my way via
Blake at monster talk dot org or over at the
monster Talk Facebook group. I don't do Facebook, but Karen
and my wife Kathleen see to it that I hear
about stuff posted there. So when do the stories about
Robert actually make it into print? This was where things
got interesting to me. The first really useful story about
the doll shows up Halloween of nineteen eighty nine. In
an article titled The Legend of Auto's Doll by Scott Iamen.
I'm going to read some excerpts from the article The
Legend of Auto's Doll, but check the show notes and
you can see the full article The Legend of Auto's
Doll by Scott Iimen. The snapshot is blurred, as if
the camera are the object it was photographing moved. It
is too poor in quality to be reproduced, but it's
just as well for the images unsettling. The picture shows
a doll about the size of a six year old child,
dressed in a pink and green harlequin costume. Its face
is round but with pinched features. The eyes are blank
black beads. The overall effect is subtly unpleasant. Robert Eugene
Otto loved this doll. He had loved it since he
was a child in the early part of this century,
when it had been given to him by a black
girl his parents helped raise Gene. Otto adopted the doll
as his alter ego and named it Robert. When he
would get in trouble, he would blame the doll. Robert
did it, he would say. Otto grew up met his
future wife at the Sorbonne and brought her home to
Key West to live with Robert in the family house
at three pot fifty four Eden Street. He built a
special attic room for Robert, complete with his own proportionally
correct furniture and toys. It was about this time, in
the nineteen forties that stories about Robert began to leak
out of the house. A plumber doing work in the
attic swore he heard the doll giggle, and when he
turned his back and looked at the doll again, it
had moved through a different place. Little beaded voodoo figures
that rested in Robert's lap would occasionally be found against
the opposite wall, as if Robert had heaved them in
a fit of temp It was said the doll was
in some strange way of wear of what went on
around him. Jeane Otto died in nineteen sixty nine, and
it was said that in the months preceding his death,
as his health failed, he spent a great deal of
time in the attic room talking with Robert. A few
years later, when his wife became ill with the cancer
that killed her, she sold the house with the proviso
that the attic room and cedar chest in it that
contained Robert would be undisturbed. It was in the late
seventies that Malcolm Ross, a teacher at Florida Keys Community College,
was invited to look at Robert and his room by
some friends who were renting the house. He walked into
the room and felt a kind of strange force field.
Ross was riveted by Robert's eyes at first when we
walked through the door. The look on his face was
like a little boy being punished. It was as if
he was asking himself, who are these people in my room?
And what are they going to do to me. Ross's
friends explained the legend that surrounded Robert and began pointing
out the kitty furniture. Ross looked at the doll and
noticed a change in his expression. It seemed that Robert
was following the conversation. Ross's friends made an airy comment
about what a fool Auto must have been to make
such an emotional investment in a doll. When Ross glanced
at Robert, he saw an expression that he remembers this disdain.
This doll is listening to us, he thought. Soon after,
the man who had bought the home from Otto's widow
died of carbon monoxide poisoning from a faulty exhaust system
in his car. It was then purchased by Tom Belford.
Somewhere in all of this, Robert vanished. Nobody who lives
in the house now has ever heard of him. Jeane
Otto is buried in the family plot at the Key
West Cemetery. It's fenced in and bricked over like a patio.
There's a statue of a deer there to mark the
grave of particularly beloved family pet. Beside Otto, his wife
and his parents, several dogs are interred. There was evidently
no place for poor Robert, which is surprise. It was
the least Gionado could have done. Whatever their bargain was,
Robert appears to have kept up his end. A few
things of note here. First, did you catch how the
dolls described He's wearing the harlequin outfit, not a sailor's outfit.
And Jean's wife is conspicuously not buried in that family
plot despite what the article claims. There's no mention of
the now classic elements of the Robert legend, despite this
being much closer to the origins of the tale. And
did you notice that the doll vanished Nobody who lives
in the house now has ever heard of him? Well,
that's not consistent with fact either. But of a particular
interest to me is the bit about the teacher Malcolm
Ross being invited to look at the doll. I did
some digging, and it looks like Ross was really big
into theater and dolls, and as a teacher, of course,
he had access to hundreds of students to whom he
would have been able to tell his experiences with the
scary doll. He seems like a likely vector for the
spread of these Robert legends, although this is merely speculation,
and the article mentions the house as a rental. I
frequently would read that after Jene died, Anne had moved
to Boston, and there's more to that story, as documented
in the Sloan book, and it's a sad story about
bitter disputes over inheritance. I don't know what sort of
a person Gene was, but it sounded like he had
a big ego and was quite disappointed by failing to
ever emerge as a dominant painter in Key West's culture.
Anne herself was a talented pianist who gave up for
dreams of professional music to be a socialite wife. I'd
like to know more about what their real marriage was like,
but one can draw many dramatically different images from the
few dots that document their story. When both of them
were gone, the house became a rental property, and there's
various ads for the property to be found in Key
West to Miami papers. The home was and still is
a beautiful and well placed property. Notably, there was a
turretid room built for the Auto children. It seems very
plausible the Autos had decorated it as Jane remembered it
from his childhood. They'd both moved away, but returned in
the nineteen forties when Jeane's mom was dying. After her death,
they restored the house, and I can't help but wonder
if they simply used this oversized harlequin doll as a
decoration for an attic playroom which was already adorned with
furniture from Jane's childhood. It would probably seem to an
uninformed outsider that the room was not decorated with a doll,
but rather for the doll. Myrtle Reuterer bought the house
in the early nineteen seventies and held on to it
and the doll until nineteen ninety four. According to Sloane's book,
she donated the doll because she felt it was haunted
and that the doll had locked her in a room
at one point. Now this story's in the book, but
the donation documentation does not show any mention of supernatural antics.
But they do mention that the doll was donated along
with the clothes, and that the doll's clothes and the
lion were formerly gene autos. Since nineteen ninety four, Robert
has resided at the museum, but was not always on display.
To begin with, he was kind of a curiosity, only
shown by request, But as the folklore around the doll grew,
he became a focus of local interest. In two thousand,
David Sloane, who had been growing a ghost tour business
in Key West, wrote his book about the doll. Even
his book doesn't have all the creepy folklore that has
now accreed it into the narrative fog around Robert. And
that is the real truth about Robert the Doll. The
documentation about him will tell you he's a century old
window display stuffed with excelsior, But any folklorist would tell
you he's actually stuffed with story. He has become a
magnet for folklore, the nucleation point for a sprawling storm
of curses, death, obsession, and dark magic. Or maybe he's
just an old doll in a sailor's outfit. It would
be really fascinating if there were documentation of some of
the many legends, but folklore is about the spread and
growth of stories, and Robert the Dahl is an extraordinary
example of how legends don't require evidence. We stitched them
together from patchwork and loose threads until they form a
life of their own. This episode would not have been
possible had it not been for the Permuter Triangle Adventure
cruise that was put together by the Skeptoid podcast. Brian Dunning,
the longtime host there, and Jeff Wagg were especially helpful
in preparing this episode, and I should thank my wife
Kathleen for twenty five years of marriage and so many
of our own adventures. My co host from the in
Research of podcast, Jeb Card, gave me a lot of feedback.
And thanks to all the folks who actually joined me
to visit Robert the Doll in Key West. What a
treat that was. It was so great meeting so many
of you and face to face. And I know years
ago we tried to arrange a similar crews to visit
Atlantis with Ken Fader, and this felt very much like
a little bit of that dream coming true. And I
hope someday we get to do a Monster Talk trip
like this, because it's an absolute joy to basically have
a roaming conference at sea and imports. But even if
I never do anything like this again, I will always
treasure the memory of this trip. Monster Doll, You've been
listening to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters. I'm
Blake Smith and I'm Karen Stolsner. You just heard a
summary of my research on Robert the Doll from my
twenty twenty five trip to Key West. Karen wasn't able
to be here this week, but please pick up a
copy of her latest book, Bitch, The Journey of a Word,
which is available at bookstores and online. Monster Talk theme
music's by Pete Stealing Monkeys. Next week we'll be talking Magpies.
This has been a Monster House presentation