The Pattern of Fear: An Abandoned Doll, Haunted Homes, and the Unknown

At first, I couldn't hear anything except for this, like, static a little bit. But then I'd start hearing something. This weird, faraway, sing-song voice calling my name. Decades of encounters, impossible coincidences, and one terrifying attempt at an exorcism make this one of the most unsettling personal accounts we have received. My name is Edwin, and here is Sarah's truth. I've had unexplainable experiences as far back as I can remember. The first one that I remember is when I was seven years old. I was home alone. My mother was still working. I'd come home in the afternoon after school was out. I was a latchkey kid, I guess. I remember getting myself a snack. and I had this weird feeling like there was something in the hallway. Our kitchen branched off from the main hallway that had the bedrooms. I remember poking my head around the corner to look in the hallway, and I saw this large, bright white light that was as tall as the ceiling to the floor go from my room right across from my room, which was my parents' bedroom. I just like saw it move. I remember I wasn't scared. I was just like, hmm, what was that? I ran over to look in my parents' bedroom. I didn't see anything and I didn't see anything in my room, but I don't think I ever told my parents though. My mother is kind of religious. She'd never really liked to talk about supernatural things. So we wouldn't really talk to her about those things. The next big thing, I would say, was when my mom remarried and moved. We moved to this new home. This was a brand new, like, development block right near a cemetery. Used to be cornfields, but who knows what it was before then. I think one important thing to know is that this was in the Midwest, and in the Midwest, there's old Native American, like, burials. It wasn't uncommon for people to find, like, arrowheads in their garden. It was a brand new house. The people who had lived there before, it was a young couple. They hadn't even lived there a year. So it seemed like a great deal. My parents just assumed that they had bought above their means. But we found out, we kind of watched the whole little neighborhood do quick rotations. They'd put homes up for sale again and again. Within like a year or two, no one really seemed to stay for long. And terrible things seemed to happen to everyone. Happy couples would move in and move out in just a year, getting divorced. Healthy people would move in and get cancer or die. There was a father across the street who actually shot himself after living there for two years. Mind you, there were only like 10 homes on this block and it was in a really nice neighborhood. It was like a bit more expensive to live in, in a small village, not even a town. So middle of nowhere. So it was just kind of like odd all these terrible things were happening. Not long after we had lived there, started noticing a lot of spooky activity. One of the things that I felt right away was that when we would be like in the living room, which was just next to the entrance, would always get a feeling that like someone was watching you from that area for some weird reason. I know it sounds strange, but it always felt like that. And I would have friends you know because I'm in high school I'd have friends come over and do sleepovers and no one would actually want to stay at my house because they would always say the same thing they'd be like I feel like something's watching me I would never tell them my experiences because I wanted them to hang out with me I didn't want to tell them hey my house is haunted but they'd always seem to come to that conclusion that like that weird feeling that something's watching me from the hallway it would freak them out so nobody would ever want to hang out at my house But it also kind of felt validating because everybody had the same feeling as me that there was something watching us from the hallway. We had a storage area in the basement of the house and sometimes my brother and I would hear scratching noises. We had cats. But they were kind of like slow scratches. You know, cats often, there's a certain speedy. Rhythm to it. It's not really slow. That always kind of freaked us out, hearing that scratchy noise. And so we never actually checked it out because it was in this big dark room. My brother had told me that sometimes at night he would hear someone in the room almost and like a heavy breathing sound. but he couldn't see anybody there. We would try to tell our mom some of these things that we were experiencing, but she never really wanted to hear it. She didn't want to believe it. So we just kind of kept it to ourselves. We actually didn't even tell each other that we were experiencing these things until like a few years later. I think both of us kind of were worried like that we were going crazy. But once we started like talking about it and sharing like, yeah, these things are happening to me too. We tried to do like EVP, electronic voice phenomenon, set up a recorder in the basement, pressed record, and then left the basement, came back, and we actually, within a couple seconds of that tape, which was brand new, we could hear what sounded like this deep whisper saying, I played that tape to other people too. Didn't tell them. Why we recorded it or where it was recorded or what was on it, just to see, like, get their unbiased take of what Do they hear? And everybody kind of comes to the same conclusion that it's like someone whispering, get out. So it's kind of freaky. After living there for like a. Year, I moved my bedroom to the basement to get a bigger bedroom and kind of away from the rest of the family. That's when I started experiencing a lot of sleep paralysis. I would wake up at night in the middle of the night. I wouldn't be able to move. but I could see this like shadow entity standing at the foot of my bed or at the. Doorway to my bedroom. There was one really scary. Incident when I was having the sleep paralysis and I could hear two of them whispering in my ear saying terrible things. I can't even remember what they were, but I just remember feeling absolutely terrified. There was another experience in the basement where I got that feeling that I was being watched. I looked up and I saw what looks like the silhouette of a person, but it wasn't a shadow person. It was like you could see through it. It was transparent, but it was kind of like shimmery, kind of like on a hot day when you're looking down the road and it's kind of shimmery at the end. Because of the heat. It looked like that. So really weird. It looked like it was like walking towards me. I was totally terrified. I ran up the stairs. I went outside in the sun because this was like maybe two in the afternoon and just stayed outside for a while. Later on, I had a boyfriend and he was in the basement waiting for me, I guess, to watch like TV. He had ran up the stairs and said he described the same thing, this like transparent human shaped like entity. I had never told him that I had seen that in the basement. So that also felt kind of validating that, okay, I'm not crazy. Other people are experiencing this too. The scariest thing that ever happened was when I was home alone. I think my parents and my brother were off on some like sports thing. So I was home alone and I had taken a nap in the afternoon. I ended up sleeping quite a bit. When I woke up, it was nighttime. It was dark. And I didn't have any lights on, of course, because it was light out when I had started this nap. But when I woke up, I woke up to this sound of scratching. And I could hear what sounded like from the other side of the sofa, the back of the sofa, was this scratching noise. But again, like we have cats, but this was a super long, slow scratching sound. Cats don't make that noise. I remember laying there absolutely terrified because I'm home alone. I can hear the scratching sound. What is that? I was scared to turn around and look, but I felt like I had to get out of there before something would happen. So I remember just waiting until I could shoot up and run into my room and shut the door. And I just left the lights on for the rest of the night in my room. Several years later, my mom died. confided in me that the thing that convinced her to finally sell the house was one time in the middle of the day after I'd gone to college. It was like the afternoon, right? And suddenly like she said, everything went dark. It's like she went blind and she heard this like disembodied voice tattoo get into her car and commit suicide by running into something. Suddenly like she could see again and she ran out of the house and into the sun. For her to like actually like admit that to me, like something was in that house. I don't know what it was. But like that whole block had something wrong with it. It was a dead end street near a cemetery, all new homes, but nobody stayed longer than three years. Who knows what this land was before it was farmland. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that it was next to a cemetery. I don't know. I never like was worried about living next to cemeteries until that experience. But I think there's a lot of things out there that we can't even begin as humans to understand, but it was something and I don't think it wanted us there. When I was in college, my first apartment was in a really bad neighborhood. I was really poor. And we weren't living in the best apartment building either. One night, we heard intense sobbing on the other side of our bedroom wall. It was like our neighbor, something was going on. She was just really upset, just sobbing, sobbing, sobbing. I woke up in the middle of the night with that feeling that you're being watched And I felt something touch my arm. It was very light. It was like if someone were to like touch the hair, just the hair, not your skin, just the hair on your arm, you can kind of feel it, right? I felt that. And at first I was like, oh, did I just imagine that? Let's see if it happens again. And then it happened again. And then again. I was like, okay, something's like touching me. I can't see anything there. I'm just gonna put my. Arms underneath my blanket and go back to sleep, right? That morning, there was an ambulance that pulled someone out that was dead. I never asked if it was our neighbor or what happened. Now I kind of wish I did because I was wondering, was that her? Did she die? And then was she like being a spirit before she passes on and like, you know, trying to get my attention? I don't know. But I always regretted not finding out what happened to her. So there's a book. Called Mothman Prophecies, you've probably heard of it or seen it, by John Keel. It's about his experiences in Point Pleasant. The book is very different from the movie. The book's final hypothesis. Spoiler alert, is that all these weird things that people were experiencing at the same. Time, Mothman, Men in Black, aliens, etc., He came to the conclusion that it might just be fairies messing with humans and taking different approaches, different disguises from time to time to fit the culture. So at that time, all of these people were going to Point Pleasant because there were a lot of stories suddenly, like in the 60s, of UFOs and ghosts and Mothman and other weird things. It was all happening at the same time, but his approach was different from others in that he didn't just focus on the one area. that he was interested in, like he just focused on the alien stories, the UFO abduction stories. He absorbed everything and tried to look at it holistically. I think that experience to me is that it's like you don't know what it is. It could be anything. So you try not to get your bias in the way, which I later learned is something that I'm not alone in when it comes to this book. I was reading how his attention on these entities, because he was like writing stories about them, people's experiences in this book, it's like he got their attention and they started doing things to him. But I think the weird thing was when I started reading this book, some of those weird things from the book started happening to me in real life. The first thing that happened, I didn't at first connect it to the book was I was doing like a donut run. With some girlfriends in college. We were running like late at night to this like donut store that You'd get donuts at like 1 a.m., freshly baked. It was really awesome. There were like eight of us and we all experienced it together. We were jogging to this place and this old car like stops on the side of the road next to us. This guy pokes his head out and says, hey, do you girls want to ride? And we all kind of look at each other like, who is this guy? What? No. We all say like, no. And then suddenly he takes this like old fashioned camera that looks like it's like from the 60s, you know, with like this big bulb. you know, stereotypical like newspaper reporter would like, you know, flash. When they take a photo. He takes a photo of us. There's this bright bulb goes off and we're all kind of blinded for a second. And then he like peels out and like quickly like drives away. That was weird. Didn't think of that as anything like supernatural, but there's a chapter in his book called Phantom Photographers where people were reporting that they would see these, someone like taking photos of them with this bright flash sometimes even when they were like on the second or third floor of their house where they'd see this person in the window taking a you know a picture of them with a camera and the bright flash would go off and like how would they get up to that floor there's no ladder they just disappear after that I thought that was a weird coincidence at first but then the following semester I transferred to another college to study Japanese. And I was brand new to town. I had a new number. I didn't have any friends yet. I hadn't told anybody that I was reading this book. So it's brand new. And I started getting what the book called phantom phone calls. It would start getting these anonymous calls, like, you know, the caller ID wouldn't, you know, it wouldn't come up with anything. I can't remember what it used to do in the 90s. What was it? No, the 2000s. This is aging me. I think it was like Number can't be read or something. Anyways, it was a number that sometimes phones can't show the caller ID. So I would get these anonymous phone calls. At first, I couldn't hear anything except for this static a little bit. But then I'd start hearing something, this weird faraway sing-a-song voice calling my name. It would be set in this questioning tone, like, Sarah? Sarah? it like didn't sound human it was weird and it was really freaking me out because I was new to town nobody knew this number I called the police they started you know investigating they were tapping my phone and they confirmed that I was getting these calls but they weren't able to trace it because it was in some big like corporate network I can't remember exactly how they phrased it but this whole thing is very similar to what Kiel described in his book I kept waiting, you know, on these calls to hear something else, but it would just be this muffled silence on the other end. Like they were doing this like super long distance call. I was always the one who hung up because it was creepy and like I was alone in the city and eventually they stopped. Later on, when I was like describing these experiences, like someone had said, oh, yeah. That's called the John Keel experience. That can happen when people read the book. And I'm like, oh, my God. So really, it's a really interesting book. And it transformed how I, you know, see the supernatural occurrences. Like, who knows what it could be? I try not to put a label on it, like a ghost or a demon or not, because it could be anything. But I guess read at. Your own risk, because things can happen. So after college, I moved to Japan. I was a translator for the government. And I was sent to a place in the middle of nowhere. And I was with my ex at the time. He was not a very nice guy. He was very negative. He was abusive, too. There is a saying in Japan where, you know, people run into debt with loan sharks and they'll just abandon their house, their lives, and they'll, like, take another identity and somewhere else in Japan to like run away from those money lenders. We were living in this small, you know, village, not even a town. And he had found a house that was abandoned. It looked normal on the outside, but inside it was, the door was unlocked and it was like close to downtown. So I don't know how he found this place was like abandoned or I don't think he was opening random doors of houses, but. Kind of feel like maybe it was his negative energy that was attracted him to it. He told me about it. We went inside and it was like stepping into a time capsule. It was clearly like no one had lived there for a long time, but it still had all of the furniture, all of the clothes in the drawers. It looked like there were dishes in the sink that hadn't yet been cleaned. And there was a. Calendar on the wall. I think it was like from the 60s or something. And it's like these people just up and like vanished, but left everything there. And no one had like disturbed it. It was a thick layer of dust on everything. It was definitely like aged. It was decaying. It was very eerie. It felt like you were being watched. It felt like we weren't supposed to be there. But we went in anyways, stupidly, I guess. On the second floor was like where they slept. They were like, you know, rolled up futons and whatnot. It was a very traditional Japanese house. I found some old coins that were no longer in circulation that I took. And there were a couple of dolls there. Japanese kimono dolls in these glass cases. One looked like the rest of the house. It was, you know, very falling apart. It was like, you know, brown, black in some places. It was just disintegrating and full of dust. But there was another doll and this one was much larger. It looked brand new, not a speck of dust on it. It had like the white skin, a single hair on the like the head wasn't disturbed. It was wearing this red kimono carrying a red umbrella and it was just It was the most beautiful doll I'd ever seen. I don't know how to describe it. It was just, it was gorgeous, but it wasn't, it wasn't falling apart at all. It looked brand new, which was weird. That should have been a warning sign, I guess. But I took the smaller doll that looked older, like the rest of the house. And I also took that beautiful brand new looking doll with me home to our home in that town. It wasn't long after that where the relationship finally fell apart. It was going to anyways. for the better really. I was living alone after that breakup. I started hearing whistling sounds now and then. And I would see like from the corner of my eye, it looked like a woman with long black hair in her face. When I would like, you know, try to turn or move my eyes directly to look at it head on, it would disappear. But I would hear the whistling sound and then when I would turn, I would see that from the corner of my eye for a split second. And it felt like I was being watched all the time, like the doll was watching me a bit. It creeped me out, but it was such a beautiful doll. I'm sure I could have sold it online for a lot of money because it was really amazing. With that breakup and that relationship, which was so toxic, I had health problems and I just got into this terrible depression. I ended up, moving, leaving my job and moving to a much larger city, something closer to civilization, a brand new apartment. It was really nice. But not long after that, things started happening again. When I moved into the apartment, it felt light and airy. It was, it just felt, had a good vibe, but eventually it started to feel really thick and heavy, just like the place I had left before. Of course, I still had that doll with me. I had it in the living room. And eventually I would start waking up at night and I would hear what sounded like pots and pans just being roughly cleaned and thrown around. I could even hear what sounded like a can that would fall out of the cabinet and make that rolling sound on the ground. I'd be like, oh my God, someone broke into my apartment and they're doing something in the kitchen. Do I just stay here quietly? What do I do? And when I would get the courage to take a look at the kitchen. I didn't see any mess. I didn't see any can on the ground. There was no one there. The door was still locked from the inside. But I would start hearing this like every night and it was just, you know, creepy. I had made a new friend, another expat. We were talking about dreams and I was telling her how I have this weird fear of staircases, specifically when I would walk up staircases. Since I was as far back as I can remember, I've just been terrified of them. I can't remember the name, but there's a specific fear of like, you know, walking up staircases. I would try to rush up staircases wherever I was, whether it was home or like at school or whatnot, as fast as possible, because it would feel like there was someone bad behind me that was going to hurt me. I've always been like that. And I would always have reoccurring dreams again, as far back as I can remember of me going up some kind of staircase or it's like a movie theater and it becomes really hard to climb. And there's something scary behind me that's trying to hurt me. And she had said that she actually came from a long line of Wiccans. And she said, someone pushed you down the stairs in your previous life. And that's why you're scared of stairs. And I was like, oh my God, that actually kind of makes sense. And ever since she told me that I'm no longer scared of staircases and I don't have those reoccurring dreams anymore, which is crazy. Not only would I feel like the doll was following me with their eyes, but I would feel like this weird, like intense someone watching me, intense negativity, thick air in the kitchen and specifically the bathroom, which is really weird. But she told me, yeah, I didn't want to tell you. But when I went to your house, I felt like there was something in the kitchen and the bathroom. And I was like, oh, my God, I didn't even tell you that. But you literally said the same rooms where I feel the most freaked out, which makes me feel like, OK, maybe it's actually real and it's not just in my head. She told me that there was something bad hanging around and that the way to get rid of it would be an exorcism. And she said, unlike the movies, you don't want someone else to do the exorcism because they know that that person doesn't live there and they don't have as much power to get them out. You have to do it yourself. It's scary, but it's honestly the best way for them to take you seriously and to leave. So she told me how to do it. I did it. The next day, it felt like the apartment that I had first moved into. It just felt normal. It felt light. I didn't feel like I was being stared at all the time, like I was being watched. The air didn't feel thick. It just felt normal. The doll, because she. Didn't know if it was coming from the doll or not, but it was like, I don't want to take that chance. And yeah, it was a gorgeous, amazing, beautiful doll that I could have made a lot of money off of. But like, just in case that was possessed or something, I didn't want that to happen to anybody else. So I put it in the garbage and I covered it with a bunch of things just in case someone from the building would see it on top of the garbage, think it's nice and take it home. I just make sure it. Was all covered and all activity stopped. I didn't hear the weird noises in the kitchen anymore at night. Didn't feel like I was being watched, et cetera. So I think it, it worked. What I learned later when I told other friends about that experience in Japan, my Japanese friends would say they were so freaked out about the story because I found out that's actually like one of the oldest ghost stories is if you find a doll in an abandoned house, do not take it home because there's like something about a ritual that some people do when a child is stillborn, sick or dies. The soul goes into that doll or something, so you're never supposed to take it because it could be like possessed with something dark. I guess one thing to mention, too, that's kind of interesting, and I don't know if it's connected, but I have temporal lobe epilepsy. I came across an article once that said that there was some research done that people with this specific kind of epilepsy report a higher rate of feeling watched. I can't help but feel like, is my brain just like, you know, because my neurons act a little differently, sometimes they go a little haywire, then other, you know, normal-brained people, like, does that mean I kind of have this, like, radio receptor that allows me to tune into things that other people can't? You know, I think of, you know, snipers in the military. They're taught not to look at the target when they're shooting them because there's a weird phenomenon that's, it's been proven. We don't know how it works, but there's been a lot of research that, like, People can tell when they're being watched. You know, when you're on the bus and you feel like you're being watched, you look up and sure enough, there's someone staring at you. You can feel it. So I always kind of wondered, like, when you feel like you're being stared at in a house or something, maybe you actually are being stared at because someone's watching you. You can sense that. And maybe they can sense when you can sense them. I was with the same and this is like I was with that same ex who was, you know, not a not a good guy. He was from Taiwan. We were visiting his family. They were taking me around, you know, to see the different temples and stuff, you know, as you do with like visiting tourists, right? You know, those temples, those Chinese temples where, you know, they have the like the two lions in front. There's like supposed to be the male and the female. I think they're supposed to be lions, but like they look a little different. So one night while, you know, I was there staying at his family's house, I'd woken up And I was having sleep paralysis. But this time it wasn't like the shape of like a person shadow entity. It was those things like at the temple, those like lion kind of things. And they were everywhere in that room. They were on the walls. They were on the ceiling. They were on the floor. And they're all like crawling towards me. And it was like really scary. And eventually, you know, I shook out of it. I'd go back to sleep, but then it kept happening again and again and again. I think I had like sleep paralysis. Seeing those things. Four times at least, it was a really rough night. It just kept happening over and over again. And that kind of made me wonder when you're in different cultures, you experience like similar things, but they're a little different. You know, there's different folk tales and stories and mythology and there's just different entities, different types of entities in different places. So I'd never seen any other kind of shadow person like that before, but this was the Taiwanese-Chinese version. As he had explained to me, these are negative entities that... they're basically feeding off your fear. So they're trying to scare you. When they find a good host, they just kind of like stick around. And I feel like the more I've heard like other people's stories, and I like to read about, you know, because I like to understand what's going on, the more I read about like, you know, the supernatural and different people's beliefs. More and more, I feel like there are just lower, not necessarily ghosts, but like there are lower level entities that just like, they're like parasites. They are thriving on your negative emotions. When you're really depressed, like I was in Japan after breaking up with my ex, it's like you attract them and you're. Something to feed off of. And sometimes it's sadness and sometimes it's fear and sometimes it's a mix of both. I've had experiences in every place that I've lived in, but I don't get them anymore. And it all started, sometimes when people do ghost investigators or paranormal investigators, I've heard them say, Sometimes when you have certain people with you, when you're investigating something, you'll get more activity. And there are some people, it's like they're nullifiers. They seem to like dead and all sensitivity and activity. Like you can't sense it anymore. Nothing happens if they're with you on that trip. I think my husband might be one of those like nullifiers because I used to be able to go into homes or places or even outside. And I would, I mean, I don't know if it's real, but I would feel like, oh, there's something over there and it's positive or it's negative. I stopped having any experiences and I stopped feeling anything as soon as I started spending a lot of time with him. Eventually I married him. So I'm not, I haven't experienced anything. He's amazing. I love him so much, but now I'm like, I can't sense things and I'm not really experiencing things anymore. But this one time. We had moved countries because we met in Japan. We moved back to the States together, got married. Before he joined me back in the States, it was like two months for him to like quit his job and move everything. I started feeling things again but then he came back and then it just completely went away so I don't know I feel like I was very like sensitive before and that but then everything just like I can't feel anything which some people are like oh well that's great you don't sense anything but it's like no actually I would want to know if there's something in the house so. I can take care of it but it's also there's not always. Bad things I felt really good things too like I don't know, this sounds crazy and weird, but it's like, there were moments where I'd suddenly feel like something was with me and it was really loving and just incredibly kind. And like, it felt really good. And of course there'd be moments where it's like, oh, there's something really scary here, something bad here. I can't sense that anymore. I do have a daughter and I wonder like, will she pick up what I have? And obviously like, she probably won't live with us forever. Will she then, being away from the nullifier, her dad, will she. Start experiencing things? And do I need to help her and protect her? So I've started meditating and getting into one of those magic school things to try to see if I can get my abilities back a little bit, just enough to be knowledgeable to protect myself and help her understand what she can do. And anyways, so I haven't really experienced anything in the home too much. But recently in the last year, there were a couple of creepy instances where We were looking for something. We couldn't find it. And we searched like the whole house. Like one time was her ballet slipper. We were missing one ballet slipper. I was like, I know I just saw that. And we don't live in a huge place, but it's like we ripped everything apart. Couldn't find it. Of course, wouldn't you know, at the last minute, we found it sitting in the middle of. The floor in her bedroom. And it's like, I know that was not there before. she was surprised too. Like she would have said something if it was like, if she saw that on the floor and my husband, we were going crazy and it just appeared. There's been a couple instances of that, which kind of made me go, huh? Like, is that, is there something here messing with us? Sarah, thank you so much for sharing your experiences with us here at true scary story. There is one thing that we talked about the beam of light. Now, I explained to you about why it was so unsettling to me to hear about this. And it's because one of the very, very first experiences I ever had regarding the paranormal had to do with this exact thing. A beam of light that was coming from my closet in the middle of the night. Now, I rarely share this story because it sounds really odd and not a lot of people have, I guess, a similar experience, right? But I clearly remember this. I was in my bedroom. And I was woken up by this strong beam of light. And I'm saying it felt like a helicopter spotlight, like a searchlight. It was just shining right at me. Followed with this, I guess it was like a humming, like wind. Kind of like, I don't know if my mind was interpreting it as a helicopter being really windy. But it just felt like this really deep hum at the same time. Of course, I got really, really scared. I told my dad about it eventually. And he... You know, he kind of listened to me, said, well, you know what? If it was coming from here, maybe there's something here. And we went through the closet and we found a box of my books, like paranormal storybooks. My mom never liked me listening to or reading scary stories like that, especially true accounts. So she put them in a box and put them in the closet. I didn't know they were in there anymore. I just kind of forgot about them. But it was really eerie. I don't know those two things are connected. But still, that beam of light, like thinking about a white beam is unusual because many paranormal accounts happen at night where these beams of light would be highly destructive. I don't know what they are. I don't know what they mean. But if anyone else out there is listening right now and has an explanation, please let me know. Now, there's also other things, right, mentioned in this story. I know that I've collected a few things from antique shops. Actually, one of the dolls, the one that usually sits in the background of my recordings. It is about a hundred and something years old. And nobody wanted to get the doll. And they actually gave her to me with a really steep discount. So I took it. Nothing feels bad about it. Nothing at all. But there is one doll that we got for an experiment. It was supposed to be a haunted doll. Like I buy a haunted item from eBay. And we see what happens. And that doll definitely, I don't even like looking at it, actually. Its name is Estevan. It actually has a story attached to it, as in like literally a written out story that came with the doll. But anyway, the point here is, can things have things attached to them? Like can items from antique shops have energies attached to them? And what can we do about them? Also about these experiences. Does stress, memory, coincidence sometimes explain them? Or is it just it happens so often, like these incidents are so common that an explanation just wouldn't be satisfying anymore. So we just stick with what doesn't make sense. I mean, what do you think? And also, if you have ever brought anything home, an object from an abandoned place, something from an antique shop that caused unusual things to happen. Has that ever happened to you? Do you think these stories grow from expectation, maybe, that we got something we shouldn't have or something that belonged to someone we don't know? Is it folklore? Or do these things actually exist? Let me know. You can send it in through a comment. You can tell me via email, hello at truescarystory.com. Or find a way to get in touch with us through DM. You can find me on social media as Edwin Cove, E-D-W-I-N-C-O-V. Very interested in finding out your thoughts. This episode of True Scary Story was edited and sound designed by Sarah Voorhees Wendell of VW Sound. Additional production by me, Edwin Covarrubias, and the Scary FM team. If you have a story that you want to share, again, head on over to truescarystory.com and send it in through the form. We get in touch with you, and if it fits the format of the show, we schedule a call and get you on to share your experiences with the rest of us here at True Scary Story. As always, thank you very much for listening. Keep it scary, everyone. See you soon.