“This one story that happened to my, uh, my two cousins, on my dad’s side of the family, Alicia and Carina. They are very, very, uh, I guess you could say—very easily susceptible to spirit—spiritual, supernatural occurrences. Like, they’re just a magnet to that shit. It’s just, since they were young, that’s how it’s been, you know. It’s kind of, uh, within my own family it’s kind of, we just kind of accept it for what it is. Like, shit, it happens. Um, so they live in Hesperia now. But when they were little girls, they moved into the house they are in now. And they got it for super cheap because they realized, like, after, uh, a little boy passed away, um, in the tub. His mom left to go grocery shopping, like, really quick just to get something and he was, uh, I think he had Down Syndrome, and he passed away. You know this actually happened, like, this is actually, like, a true story: he passed away. Um. So when they got the house there was some furniture some stuff left behind. Uh, and in my cousin’s room there was this doll. This doll, it was just there, you know. And my uncle says like, ‘Oh, I’ll keep this for Carina.’ So once they start moving in, this one night, my uncle and aunt told me that Carina just, they just hear Carina scream. At the top of her lungs, just scream. And they open the door and she’s just, she’s just crying. And they’re like, ‘What’s wrong? What’s wrong?’ ‘The doll was staring at me, was like, looking right at me’ And they’re like, ‘What?’ (scoffs) Like, ‘Oh my God, what are you talking about?’ Like, ‘Just stop. Go to sleep,’ you know? And this, this occurred like throughout a few weeks and almost every night, like, Carina would just, she had, like, no sleep because she would always claim that the doll would, at night, like, stand up and look at her and laugh. And she, her parents didn’t believe her. So this one time, my uncle was just so fed up with it, like, ‘Look, this is not real. You need to stop.’ Like, ‘You’re imagining things,’ you know? They got her a night-light, all this shit. So my aunt put the doll with all the other dolls in this little chest and put—just there, like, he’s not gonna get out, like, relax he’s in there you’re fine. That night, my aunt told me, when she went into the room all the fucking dolls, like, the thing was open and everything was scattered. And the doll was just, like, there. Like just, uuuhhh, just kind of there. Like, looking, like, at the doorway. And my aunt looked at my cousin. And she’s like, ‘Wait, why’d you make this mess?’ She’s like, ‘I didn’t do it. This wasn’t me I didn’t do it.’ And she asked my cousin, like Alicia, my little cousin Alicia,  ‘Alicia’s not—like, she wasn’t even here she was with my grandma.’ So like what the fuck? And my aunt was just, like, you’re being stupid, like, you did this shit. And, uh, this one time my aunt was vacuuming the living room and, uh, they’re have a, like, I guess you could say, like, somewhat of a poltergeist, like, they’ve experience the shit where you see the chairs, like, stacked up Like that’s happened to them. Like, they’ve seen it. And, so from that, they had a priest come to the house and like legitly bless it. You know. Um, so maybe for awhile, things started, like, things were completely fine. And it was’t until there was a barbeque at, they had a barbeque at their house. And my uncle decided, ‘you know what? Fuck it. I’m gonna—we’re gonna take this doll, and I’m just gonna throw it away, like, it’s done.’ You know, uh, so when people were coming, my grandpa at the time, he saw, he saw, like, this doll, perfectly fine on the trash can and he’s, like, why are they gonna throw this away? So he brought it back into the house. And you know from the perspective of everyone who’s outside, you just see a bunch of kids running out of the—outside in the back yard just running, just screaming, like ‘OH MY GOD!’ and my aunt was like what’s wrong, like, what happened? What’s wrong? What’s wrong?’ They said that—these are like little kids, a like my cousins, who said that, they claim that they saw the doll run across the room like the hallway.  And they all just ran out, screaming. It’s just… what the fuck? So from that they just, they just burned the doll, they got rid of it. They legitly just got rid of it. Um but I could like vouch for that. My brother, like, my oldest brother who’s 25, 26 now, he was a kid when that happened, like he was one of the kids that was there. You know. Like for him, it’s just, like, “Dude, I have no idea what the fuck happened. It was just there.” You know, but, yeah… just shit like that… like, supernatural shit.

“But the way that my family sees it, well my dad, my dad’s like her (the secondary informant) dad, like, “That’s bullshit. Like you don’t pay attention to it. You know, you don give it energy, like it feeds off energy, like it needs to be noticed, you know so if you make that conscious decision, like okay I see it,  I’m gonna acknowledge it, it’s just (snaps), it’s gonna keep coming back, it’s gonna keep coming to you, you know. But for some—like my grandmother, and just this—but it’s mostly with older generations—”

Secondary informant: “They just love it! They just dig it.”

Primary informant: “It’s like older generations, you know, it’s an older generations thing.”

My informant is of Mexican ancestry and his family is very open to the idea of the supernatural. He says that his family frequently shares stories about ghosts, hauntings, and unexplainable occurrences. Although he is more skeptical than his older relatives, the older women are especially into it, he still enjoys sharing the stories he’s heard. He can’t help but believe that there’s at least some truth to what his family members are telling him.

Stories about dolls who are haunted or possessed are very popular within the fantastic genre of literature, art, and film.  My informant’s tale is a unique one and tells of something supernatural experienced by his relatives.