Haunted Objects

Haunted objects are things said to carry a spirit or a curse: dolls, paintings, chairs, mirrors, boxes and jewellery. The most famous include Annabelle, the Raggedy Ann doll kept by Ed and Lorraine Warren in their occult museum in Connecticut; Robert the Doll, displayed at the Fort East Martello Museum in Key West, where visitors write him letters of apology; and Japan’s Okiku doll, whose hair is said to grow, kept at a temple in Hokkaido. In England, the Busby Stoop Chair is displayed out of reach at Thirsk Museum so that no one can sit in it.

These stories tell us a lot about how people think. Psychologists describe “magical contagion” – the intuition that objects absorb something from the people who owned them – and confirmation bias, which makes owners notice every misfortune after acquiring a cursed item and forget the rest. Some famous curses began in the press: in 1985 British tabloid stories claimed that prints of a painting called The Crying Boy survived house fires unharmed, starting a nationwide panic.

Haunted objects are also a business, sold online and displayed for paying visitors, and their back-stories often grow with each retelling. Our files trace each object’s documented history and how its legend developed.