Hello, it's Richard MacLean Smith here, not the impostor you've been listening to on the podcasts the real One. Join me for Unexplained TV at YouTube dot com forward Slash Unexplained Pod. Human beings tend to see the world as a reflection of ourselves. We have a habit of finding or even projecting our own characteristics and values onto the non human. Take a cursory glance at folk tales from prehistory to Hollywood, and you'll see how often we transform other animals, plant life, and even inanimate objects into vessels for human behavior. Just think of the chatty furniture in Disney's The Beauty and the Beast. It's our inescapable, narcissistic way of making sense of the world. Maybe we can only truly empathize with beings and bodies if we anthropomorphize them, which is to say, perhaps we're only comfortable with things that look nothing like us as long as they act like us. But what about the opposite, What about things that look human that share our general physical contourts, but who are not like us at all. Such off kilter reflections can evoke unease, anxiety, even fear. In the nineteen seventies, a Japanese robotics expert named Massa hero Maurri examined this phenomenon. He suggested that in general, the closer something resembles a realistic human being, the more positive our response to it. For instance, if a human or robot followed our basic physical template and possessed an artificial intelligence with which we could communicate, we'd have much more natural affinity for it than we would for a pile of loose hard drives and wires sitting on a desk. However, Murray also noted an anomaly in this hypothesis. There is, he believed, a point just before something becomes completely indistinguishable from a real human in which we begin to fixate on the last small degrees of difference and they horrify us. It turns out we would rather something be explicitly signposted as recognizably other than be almost but not quite us. This is a concept known as the uncanny valley, so named for the sharp drop in our positive response when plotted on a graph. It's a term that's become more and more relevant with the rise of sophisticated technology that can create human like figures, whether they are lifelike robots, photorealistic animations and video game characters, or those strange, deaged actors now common in movies. Get these depictions marginally wrong, as Robert Zemachus famously did in his two thousand and four animation The Polar Express, and you'll send many kids and some adults home from the cinema with a profound sense of unease. Zemachus's movie is full of dead, glassy eyes and facial expressions that reach for but do not quite convey human emotion. For those with young children. You might have found something similar in the indefatigable series of cartoons known as Cocoamelon. And that creepy aspect of the Uncanny Valley goes much further back than cinema. It seems to be heart baked into our instincts. You're listening to Unexplained, and I'm Richard mac lean Smith. One intriguing and alarming idea is that our aversion to the uncanny is a defense mechanism, a trace memory of a time when humanity perhaps came into contact with a mysterious predator that either looked like us or was able to pretend well enough in order to draw close and then hurt us. More recently, the widespread fear of clowns has been attributed to the uncanny Valley, specifically the gulf between what a clown's face seems to indicate and their contrasting behavior. We just can't read them, and that leaves us us wrong footed and afraid. Other theories suggest that our fear of the almost but not quite human is actually just one more manifestation of our fear of death. A corpse, after all, is a human being with the spark gone from the eyes and a slack, passive face. That's impossible to interpret. But there is one version of human imitation that we treat more positively on the whole. Though it is as inscrutable as a clown or a corpse, it appears across cultures and throughout time, a samilocrum that seems to have always been by our side, into which we invest profound emotion and from which we take great comfort. What happens though, when that comfort turns to terror. Jeane Otto first met Robert in nineteen o four, when Jean was four years old. The two quickly became inseparable. A pair of twin shadows flitting around Jean's family home at five hundred and thirty four Eaton Street in Florida's Key West. The pair would play together and eat together at the dinner table. Robert even sat at the side of the tub while Jean bathed, and then they would be tucked in to sleep side by side in Jean's small bed. It should have been a consolation for Minnie and Thomas Otto that Jean, their imaginative, sensitive child, had such a close companion. But Robert was not a school friend or a boy from the neighborhood. Robert was a three foot tall cloth doll stuffed with straw and wool. There is some uncertainty as to how Robert first came into the Otto family's possession. One origin story begins with Jean's grandfather bringing the doll home as a birthday gift from a trip to Germany. That's where the doll was manufactured in the town of Gingen by the Stife Company, celebrated toy makers, who are credited with making the first ever teddy bear in nineteen o two in honor of then U S President Theodore Roosevelt. Another darker legend claims that Robert was gifted to Jean by a servant of the Ottos who was very close to the young boy. As the story goes, when she was unfairly fired by Jean's father, the servant, who hailed from the Bahamas, resorted to voodoo practices for her revenge, infusing the doll with strange powers and unnatural properties. Neither story has been verified, though research certainly gives the former more weight. Robert was indeed a Stife product, although it seems he was not designed as a doll at all. Rather, the oversized, unfinished model was intended only as part of a clown display for a shop window. Robert the doll's face is unpainted and strangely expressionless, slightly simion in shape. It's completed by a pair of beaded eyes and an unnerving shallow mouth, half carved in an unsettling jestures smile. At some point, Jean's mother, Minnie, thought it fitting to dress the doll in a blue and white sailor's costume made from sackcloth. She'd originally bought it for her son, but he'd since outgrown it. She thought it amusing how cute Robert looked in it. Then Jean thought it only right that Robert had his own stuffed toy, a ragged dog like bundle that Gene arranged to fit neatly under Robert's arm, as if he were deliberately carrying it around. As for Robert's name, it was Jane who chose it, or rather gave it to him. Quite literally. Jean had been christened Robert Eugene Otto, but in an act of friendship, Jeane decided to give the name Robert to his new friend and instead took the shortened version of his middle name for himself. He would go by Jane for the rest of his life, both in name and appearance. The lines began to blur early between the boy and his doll. The pair were inseparable, with Jeane often seen lugging him from room to room, the doll cumbersome and unwieldy in the little boy his arms. At times, Jean's parents, Minnie and Robert, would hear talking coming from a distant room of the house, only to find Jean and Robert sitting cozily together as Jeane whispered conspiratorially into the ear of his fabric playmate. One day, Minnie found another stuffed toy of Jean's on the floor of his room, ripped apart, with its inners strewn across the floorboards. It wasn't me, said Jeane innocently when she confronted him about it later. It was Robert. Other times furniture was found overturned, books in heaps at the bottom of shells, dishes broken, and every time it was the same, It was Robert. Jean would plead, Robert did it? Such deferred responsible ability is standard childlike behavior, as is the investment of personality in a dull or imaginary friend. Psychologists call such things transitional objects, inanimate items that children imbue with personal meaning that provide comfort and help bridge the gap between dependence and independence. But the era's nascent chance. Psychology could not explain what Jean's parents later heard coming from their son's room. It was Thomas's father who heard it first, that same conspiratorial whisper from his son, but this type accompanied by a completely different voice. Minnie and Thomas would often listen at Jean's bedroom door to the strange chatter coming from within. The pair of distinct voices ricocheting back and forth. One spoke in the high, lilting tenor of a child, but the other was deep, rough and demanding, often shading into anger. But what was most disconcerting, according to Minnie, was that the two voices often overlapped they were speaking at the same time. On one occasion, Minnie became so unnerved by the voices she heard coming from Jean's bedroom that she couldn't help herself from bursting in to try and bring an end to it. What she found shocked her deeply. There huddled in the corner of the room was Jeane, while Robert the doll was sat upright in a hard backed chair, his inscrutable gaze seemingly pinned on the frightened boy, who appeared to be doing all he could to hide from him. It was some time later, when Jean was ten years old, that Minnie and Thomas were woken by screams for help coming from their son's room. They rushed to his door, only to find it inexplicably jammed shut. Together, they wrestled desperately with the handle as their son continued to shriek for help from inside, until finally they wrenched the door open. They found Jean carying in fear at the back of the room. The contents of which were in complete disarray, with toys and furniture strewn all about. Through hitching breaths, Jean told them that he had awoken to find Robert sitting at the foot of his bed. When he cried out, the doll had become enraged and reached havoc in the room before locking the door. In shock, A pale faced Minnie scanned the room. Even pieces of furniture far too heavy for Jean to have moved on his own, had been completely tipped over. Whatever strange dynamic had developed between Jean and Robert, it soon began to spread to the rest of the house. One afternoon, according to one maid, giggles were heard coming from somewhere in the house. When they followed them, they were led to a room that was completely unoccupied save for Robert the Doll, who seemed to appear there as if from nowhere. Another maid claimed when they were cleaning the house one morning, she caught a movement out of the corner of her eye. When she looked up, she was certain she saw the legs of Robert the Doll's sailor suit disappearing around a bend in the staircase. When no one else was at home. Visitors to the Otto household showed a distinct aversion to Robert. Several reported seeing the doll's blank expression subtly shift, or his lidless eyes blink. Others also heard giggles from rooms occupied only by the doll. All impossibilities, it seems. But as the strange events around the doll began to escalate, staff began to quit and Jean's friends called less frequently. At some point, an aunt of Thomas Otto's came to visit. She was so unsettled by Robert and his influence over Jean that she demanded the doll be cast out at the house. Immediately aware of how deeply his son cared for the eerie toy, even if he did seem so often afraid of it, Thomas instead compromised by removing Roberts to the attic. He promised he would remain there for the rest of his aunt's visit. The following morning, Thomas's aunt failed to show for breakfast. When a maid was sent for her, they discovered a horrifying scene. The aunt lay dead in her bed. The coroner recorded the death as a severe stroke, but when the Otto's later retrieved Robert from the attic and Jean's insistence. They did so with a renewed and heightened nervousness. For the rest of Jean's childhood, the doll would not leave his side. Over time, Jean would eventually grow up and be forced to leave Robert behind. He studied art at Chicago's Academy of Fine Arts, then joined the Art Students League in u He traveled through Spain and Italy before studying in Paris at the Academy Julianne, following in the footsteps of his famous countrymen James McNeil, Whistler and John Singer Sargeant. It was in Paris that he met Annette Parker, a young woman from Boston who'd moved to the city to study music. On May third, nineteen thirty the two were married. Initially, they moved back to New York City, where Annette or Anne as she was known, performed as a pianist at the revered Rainbow Rooms in the Rockefeller Centre. Jean continued to paint, honing the skills that would make him an artist of some latter renown. In nineteen thirty four, the young couple decided to move to key West into Jean's family home, which he renamed the Artist's House. Though five hundred thirty four Eaton Street looked just as he remembered, in truth, much had changed. His father, Thomas, had died in nineteen seventeen at only fifty two years old. His mother, Minnie was still living, though she suffered from mental decline during her widowhood. By then, she had vacated the house and lingered on as a frail facsimile of the woman she'd been until her own death in nineteen forty five. Robert, though, was very much still there, and when Jean returned home, he quickly resumed his attachment to the doll. At dinner times, Robert was afforded his own seat at the table, and was even brought into the marital bed to lie beside Jean and Anne. During the day, Jean propped Robert up in an upstairs window facing the street. It wasn't long before passing school children began to spread rumors about the dolls, supposedly changing expressions and blinking eyes. Some even reported that Robert would duck out of sight, only to reappear again moments later. Anne quickly and understandably took a dislike to the doll, and eventually Robert was dispatched back to the attic. One day, when walking home, Anne looked up to see the infernal doll staring at her from out of the attic window. When she asked Jeane about it, he explained simply that Robert had requested that if he were to stay in the attic, did he at least have a view of the street. Quite what the ensuing decades of Jean and Anne Otto's married life was like is hard to say. Stories persisted for years, such as Robert appearing suddenly downstairs despite having seemingly been left in the attic. Anne and Jean were also said to regularly find him sitting in a rocking chair by a window on the second floor. Despite it all, Jean never rid himself of Robert, and until his death in nineteen seventy four, he would often visit him in his attic room, even staying up there to paint with him from time to time. When Jean died, Anne quickly left the so called artist's house and moved back to France and then Connecticut, where she died in nineteen seventy nine. She did not take Robert with her. After that, the aspirational former home of the Ottos remained empty for a few years before it and Robert were bought by a woman named Myrtle Reuters, who rented it out to tenants. But according to local word, Robert did not go quietly into the night after Jeanne's death. One afternoon, a plumber working in the same room as Robert claimed he heard giggling and turned to find the doll had suddenly moved to the complete other side of the room. Tenants regularly claimed to hear what they took to be the sound of tiny, frustrated footsteps pounding down from the attic. If anything, Robert's abandonment and as some might say, his grief, seemed to have made him more malicious. In nineteen seventy nine, Malcolm Ross, a reporter from Florida's Lara's Hill newspaper, visited the artist's house to investigate all the peculiar rumors. Accompanied by a friend, Ross ventured up to the attic room at the top of the property to pay Robert a visit, where he reported being riveted by the doll's black marble eyes when we walked through the door. Ross later wrote the look on Robert's face was like a little boy being punished. It was as if he was asking himself, who were these people in my room? And what are they going to do to me? Ross's friend then pointed to the well furnished room and mocked what he saw as Jeane Otto's childish pandering to the doll. Just then, the journalist looked back at Robert, whose face, it seemed to him, had changed to exhibit a very clear sense of disgust. There was some kind of intelligence there. Ross wrote that doll was listening to us. When Myrtle Reuter's moved out of the artist's house in nineteen eighty, she took Robert with her. In nineteen ninety, four, months before her death, she donated him to the local Fort East Martello Museum known as the Fort for Robert. This is a certain kind of homecoming, as it was Jeane Otto who designed the museum's art gallery shortly after his return to Key West. Many of his oil paintings still hang there. But rather than calming the story surrounding Robert, the move prompted a whole new evolution in his legend. At first, the museum didn't put Robert on display, but soon word got around about what they had, and after frequent requests to see him, it was agreed that he would be placed in a glass case for public viewings. It's there now, on a miniature stool, his sailor outfit now slightly yellowed, and his trusty Teddy Bear still in the crook of his arm. Behind him. Written in chalk on a blackboard are three simple rules. Anyone visiting Robert must first greet and introduce themselves. They must never take photographs of him without first asking permission, and before leaving, they must say a form more goodbye. The rules are enforced as best they can be by the museum staff. Not for them, they say, but for the safety of the museum's guests. To ignore or break them, some say, risks what has come to be known as the Curse of Robert, the doll misfortune that can follow the discourteous guest home, no matter how far away that may be. At first hearing, it sounds like a great marketing ploy, the kind of story attached to macabre displays throughout history as a way of selling tickets. But the museum also displays the letters they've received from visitors over the past three decades. Dozens are pinned to the wall of Robert's display. Hundreds more are stored electronically, almost all of them offering apologies and beg Robert for his forgiveness for their indiscretions. One signed only with the name Lori Anne, relates how the writer flouted the rules and tried to take photographs of Robert without his permission. Each time she tried, a brand new camera failed to capture the image, But when Lori Anne turned to test the camera on the display case opposite Robert, it apparently worked without a hitch. Only when she got home, Lori Anne uploaded the photos and saw that Robert's reflection was captured in the glass. From there, lor Anne writes, it all went wrong. Her computer was immediately infected with a devastating virus. She was hurt at work and lost her job. Then she lost her new truck and finally her home. The letter ends, I didn't believe it before, but now I do. I apologize if I upset you. Staff at the Fort Museum are equally respectful and wary of Robert. There are still reports of giggles emanating from empty rooms, and how Robert can sometimes be found in different positions inside his glass case, without the alarm ever being triggered. Goodelia Estevez, who worked as a docent at the museum in the early two thousands, told a PBS reporter how every morning she would open the museum and make her presence known, as if she were dealing with a potentially dangerous animal. However, Estevez said that the atmosphere in the fort was at its strangest and most chaotic when Robert was moved elsewhere. Every October he would be temporarily relocated to the Key West Museum of Art and History at the Customs House, and in his absence things would escalate. The museum's cat would howl incessantly. Staff reported physical pushes from assailants they couldn't see. Some years, Robert had to be recalled early to settle things down. It was as if he were happier there, Estevez said, And he may be able to make some bittersweet sense of that. Some morning, she says, she would open up the museum and find an empty wooden chair in front of Robert's case, as if someone had come to visit His old friend. Jean Otto never quite matched the fame of whistler or sergeant. Search his name now, and any mention of his art is buried between a hundred references to his infamous door. But Jean did have some remarkable success. He returned from europe An artist already worthy of note, and cemented his regional reputation as someone who could find the essence of the Florida Keys in oil and canvas. To possess one of his landscapes, said one nineteen fifty four review, is to have an ever more beloved window into mystical light flooded Key West. Jean was not just a painter of landscapes, though, once he moved back to Florida, he increasingly turned his hand to the art of still life paintings. In December nineteen fifty three, the Key West Tribune ran a feature on gene noting the ringing brilliance of his depictions of porcelain and metal objects and the highlighted realism of his fruits, fabric and flowers. Gene Otto, the critic asserts, is not limited by narrowness of concept. He finds loveliness and inspiration in the familiar and commonplace, but translates it through his genius into a supreme experience. Yet for all of that's skill and encompassing inspiration, there is one thing that Gene never seems to have painted Robert. Despite all the years they spent together, with Gene often painting in the very attic room that he had fitted out for his doll, not once did he take Robert as his subject. Now that Gene is gone, no one will ever know. Why was it the strange expression that eluded him, the inscrutable, uncanny valley of the doll's face, so reminiscent of but so far from human? Or was it simply because Robert had never allowed it? This episode was written by Neil McRobert and produced by me Richard mclin Smith. Neil is the creator and host of his own brilliant podcast called Talking Scared, in which he discusses the craft of horror, writing with everyone from Tennanerieve Do to the God of horror himself, Stephen King. I can't recommend it highly enough. Unexplained as an AV Club Productions podcast created by Richard McClain Smith. All other elements of the podcast, including the music, are also produced by me. Richard McClain Smith. Unexplained The book and audiobook is now available to buy worldwide. You can purchase from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Waterstones, and other bookstores. Please subscribe to and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts, and feel free to get in touch with any thoughts or ideas regarding the stories you've heard on the show. Perhaps you have an explanation of your own you'd like to share. You can find out more at Unexplained podcast dot com and reach us online through Twitter at Unexplained Pod and Facebook at Facebook dot com. Forward Slash Unexplained Podcast

Hello, it's Richard MacLean Smith here, not the impostor you've been listening to on the podcasts the real One. Join me for Unexplained TV at YouTube dot com forward Slash Unexplained Pod. Human beings tend to see the world as a reflection of ourselves. We have a habit of finding or even projecting our own characteristics and values onto the non human. Take a cursory glance at folk tales from prehistory to Hollywood, and you'll see how often we transform other animals, plant life, and even inanimate objects into vessels for human behavior. Just think of the chatty furniture in Disney's The Beauty and the Beast. It's our inescapable, narcissistic way of making sense of the world. Maybe we can only truly empathize with beings and bodies if we anthropomorphize them, which is to say, perhaps we're only comfortable with things that look nothing like us as long as they act like us. But what about the opposite, What about things that look human that share our general physical contourts, but who are not like us at all. Such off kilter reflections can evoke unease, anxiety, even fear. In the nineteen seventies, a Japanese robotics expert named Massa hero Maurri examined this phenomenon. He suggested that in general, the closer something resembles a realistic human being, the more positive our response to it. For instance, if a human or robot followed our basic physical template and possessed an artificial intelligence with which we could communicate, we'd have much more natural affinity for it than we would for a pile of loose hard drives and wires sitting on a desk. However, Murray also noted an anomaly in this hypothesis. There is, he believed, a point just before something becomes completely indistinguishable from a real human in which we begin to fixate on the last small degrees of difference and they horrify us. It turns out we would rather something be explicitly signposted as recognizably other than be almost but not quite us. This is a concept known as the uncanny valley, so named for the sharp drop in our positive response when plotted on a graph. It's a term that's become more and more relevant with the rise of sophisticated technology that can create human like figures, whether they are lifelike robots, photorealistic animations and video game characters, or those strange, deaged actors now common in movies. Get these depictions marginally wrong, as Robert Zemachus famously did in his two thousand and four animation The Polar Express, and you'll send many kids and some adults home from the cinema with a profound sense of unease. Zemachus's movie is full of dead, glassy eyes and facial expressions that reach for but do not quite convey human emotion. For those with young children. You might have found something similar in the indefatigable series of cartoons known as Cocoamelon. And that creepy aspect of the Uncanny Valley goes much further back than cinema. It seems to be heart baked into our instincts. You're listening to Unexplained, and I'm Richard mac lean Smith. One intriguing and alarming idea is that our aversion to the uncanny is a defense mechanism, a trace memory of a time when humanity perhaps came into contact with a mysterious predator that either looked like us or was able to pretend well enough in order to draw close and then hurt us. More recently, the widespread fear of clowns has been attributed to the uncanny Valley, specifically the gulf between what a clown's face seems to indicate and their contrasting behavior. We just can't read them, and that leaves us us wrong footed and afraid. Other theories suggest that our fear of the almost but not quite human is actually just one more manifestation of our fear of death. A corpse, after all, is a human being with the spark gone from the eyes and a slack, passive face. That's impossible to interpret. But there is one version of human imitation that we treat more positively on the whole. Though it is as inscrutable as a clown or a corpse, it appears across cultures and throughout time, a samilocrum that seems to have always been by our side, into which we invest profound emotion and from which we take great comfort. What happens though, when that comfort turns to terror. Jeane Otto first met Robert in nineteen o four, when Jean was four years old. The two quickly became inseparable. A pair of twin shadows flitting around Jean's family home at five hundred and thirty four Eaton Street in Florida's Key West. The pair would play together and eat together at the dinner table. Robert even sat at the side of the tub while Jean bathed, and then they would be tucked in to sleep side by side in Jean's small bed. It should have been a consolation for Minnie and Thomas Otto that Jean, their imaginative, sensitive child, had such a close companion. But Robert was not a school friend or a boy from the neighborhood. Robert was a three foot tall cloth doll stuffed with straw and wool. There is some uncertainty as to how Robert first came into the Otto family's possession. One origin story begins with Jean's grandfather bringing the doll home as a birthday gift from a trip to Germany. That's where the doll was manufactured in the town of Gingen by the Stife Company, celebrated toy makers, who are credited with making the first ever teddy bear in nineteen o two in honor of then U S President Theodore Roosevelt. Another darker legend claims that Robert was gifted to Jean by a servant of the Ottos who was very close to the young boy. As the story goes, when she was unfairly fired by Jean's father, the servant, who hailed from the Bahamas, resorted to voodoo practices for her revenge, infusing the doll with strange powers and unnatural properties. Neither story has been verified, though research certainly gives the former more weight. Robert was indeed a Stife product, although it seems he was not designed as a doll at all. Rather, the oversized, unfinished model was intended only as part of a clown display for a shop window. Robert the doll's face is unpainted and strangely expressionless, slightly simion in shape. It's completed by a pair of beaded eyes and an unnerving shallow mouth, half carved in an unsettling jestures smile. At some point, Jean's mother, Minnie, thought it fitting to dress the doll in a blue and white sailor's costume made from sackcloth. She'd originally bought it for her son, but he'd since outgrown it. She thought it amusing how cute Robert looked in it. Then Jean thought it only right that Robert had his own stuffed toy, a ragged dog like bundle that Gene arranged to fit neatly under Robert's arm, as if he were deliberately carrying it around. As for Robert's name, it was Jane who chose it, or rather gave it to him. Quite literally. Jean had been christened Robert Eugene Otto, but in an act of friendship, Jeane decided to give the name Robert to his new friend and instead took the shortened version of his middle name for himself. He would go by Jane for the rest of his life, both in name and appearance. The lines began to blur early between the boy and his doll. The pair were inseparable, with Jeane often seen lugging him from room to room, the doll cumbersome and unwieldy in the little boy his arms. At times, Jean's parents, Minnie and Robert, would hear talking coming from a distant room of the house, only to find Jean and Robert sitting cozily together as Jeane whispered conspiratorially into the ear of his fabric playmate. One day, Minnie found another stuffed toy of Jean's on the floor of his room, ripped apart, with its inners strewn across the floorboards. It wasn't me, said Jeane innocently when she confronted him about it later. It was Robert. Other times furniture was found overturned, books in heaps at the bottom of shells, dishes broken, and every time it was the same, It was Robert. Jean would plead, Robert did it? Such deferred responsible ability is standard childlike behavior, as is the investment of personality in a dull or imaginary friend. Psychologists call such things transitional objects, inanimate items that children imbue with personal meaning that provide comfort and help bridge the gap between dependence and independence. But the era's nascent chance. Psychology could not explain what Jean's parents later heard coming from their son's room. It was Thomas's father who heard it first, that same conspiratorial whisper from his son, but this type accompanied by a completely different voice. Minnie and Thomas would often listen at Jean's bedroom door to the strange chatter coming from within. The pair of distinct voices ricocheting back and forth. One spoke in the high, lilting tenor of a child, but the other was deep, rough and demanding, often shading into anger. But what was most disconcerting, according to Minnie, was that the two voices often overlapped they were speaking at the same time. On one occasion, Minnie became so unnerved by the voices she heard coming from Jean's bedroom that she couldn't help herself from bursting in to try and bring an end to it. What she found shocked her deeply. There huddled in the corner of the room was Jeane, while Robert the doll was sat upright in a hard backed chair, his inscrutable gaze seemingly pinned on the frightened boy, who appeared to be doing all he could to hide from him. It was some time later, when Jean was ten years old, that Minnie and Thomas were woken by screams for help coming from their son's room. They rushed to his door, only to find it inexplicably jammed shut. Together, they wrestled desperately with the handle as their son continued to shriek for help from inside, until finally they wrenched the door open. They found Jean carying in fear at the back of the room. The contents of which were in complete disarray, with toys and furniture strewn all about. Through hitching breaths, Jean told them that he had awoken to find Robert sitting at the foot of his bed. When he cried out, the doll had become enraged and reached havoc in the room before locking the door. In shock, A pale faced Minnie scanned the room. Even pieces of furniture far too heavy for Jean to have moved on his own, had been completely tipped over. Whatever strange dynamic had developed between Jean and Robert, it soon began to spread to the rest of the house. One afternoon, according to one maid, giggles were heard coming from somewhere in the house. When they followed them, they were led to a room that was completely unoccupied save for Robert the Doll, who seemed to appear there as if from nowhere. Another maid claimed when they were cleaning the house one morning, she caught a movement out of the corner of her eye. When she looked up, she was certain she saw the legs of Robert the Doll's sailor suit disappearing around a bend in the staircase. When no one else was at home. Visitors to the Otto household showed a distinct aversion to Robert. Several reported seeing the doll's blank expression subtly shift, or his lidless eyes blink. Others also heard giggles from rooms occupied only by the doll. All impossibilities, it seems. But as the strange events around the doll began to escalate, staff began to quit and Jean's friends called less frequently. At some point, an aunt of Thomas Otto's came to visit. She was so unsettled by Robert and his influence over Jean that she demanded the doll be cast out at the house. Immediately aware of how deeply his son cared for the eerie toy, even if he did seem so often afraid of it, Thomas instead compromised by removing Roberts to the attic. He promised he would remain there for the rest of his aunt's visit. The following morning, Thomas's aunt failed to show for breakfast. When a maid was sent for her, they discovered a horrifying scene. The aunt lay dead in her bed. The coroner recorded the death as a severe stroke, but when the Otto's later retrieved Robert from the attic and Jean's insistence. They did so with a renewed and heightened nervousness. For the rest of Jean's childhood, the doll would not leave his side. Over time, Jean would eventually grow up and be forced to leave Robert behind. He studied art at Chicago's Academy of Fine Arts, then joined the Art Students League in u He traveled through Spain and Italy before studying in Paris at the Academy Julianne, following in the footsteps of his famous countrymen James McNeil, Whistler and John Singer Sargeant. It was in Paris that he met Annette Parker, a young woman from Boston who'd moved to the city to study music. On May third, nineteen thirty the two were married. Initially, they moved back to New York City, where Annette or Anne as she was known, performed as a pianist at the revered Rainbow Rooms in the Rockefeller Centre. Jean continued to paint, honing the skills that would make him an artist of some latter renown. In nineteen thirty four, the young couple decided to move to key West into Jean's family home, which he renamed the Artist's House. Though five hundred thirty four Eaton Street looked just as he remembered, in truth, much had changed. His father, Thomas, had died in nineteen seventeen at only fifty two years old. His mother, Minnie was still living, though she suffered from mental decline during her widowhood. By then, she had vacated the house and lingered on as a frail facsimile of the woman she'd been until her own death in nineteen forty five. Robert, though, was very much still there, and when Jean returned home, he quickly resumed his attachment to the doll. At dinner times, Robert was afforded his own seat at the table, and was even brought into the marital bed to lie beside Jean and Anne. During the day, Jean propped Robert up in an upstairs window facing the street. It wasn't long before passing school children began to spread rumors about the dolls, supposedly changing expressions and blinking eyes. Some even reported that Robert would duck out of sight, only to reappear again moments later. Anne quickly and understandably took a dislike to the doll, and eventually Robert was dispatched back to the attic. One day, when walking home, Anne looked up to see the infernal doll staring at her from out of the attic window. When she asked Jeane about it, he explained simply that Robert had requested that if he were to stay in the attic, did he at least have a view of the street. Quite what the ensuing decades of Jean and Anne Otto's married life was like is hard to say. Stories persisted for years, such as Robert appearing suddenly downstairs despite having seemingly been left in the attic. Anne and Jean were also said to regularly find him sitting in a rocking chair by a window on the second floor. Despite it all, Jean never rid himself of Robert, and until his death in nineteen seventy four, he would often visit him in his attic room, even staying up there to paint with him from time to time. When Jean died, Anne quickly left the so called artist's house and moved back to France and then Connecticut, where she died in nineteen seventy nine. She did not take Robert with her. After that, the aspirational former home of the Ottos remained empty for a few years before it and Robert were bought by a woman named Myrtle Reuters, who rented it out to tenants. But according to local word, Robert did not go quietly into the night after Jeanne's death. One afternoon, a plumber working in the same room as Robert claimed he heard giggling and turned to find the doll had suddenly moved to the complete other side of the room. Tenants regularly claimed to hear what they took to be the sound of tiny, frustrated footsteps pounding down from the attic. If anything, Robert's abandonment and as some might say, his grief, seemed to have made him more malicious. In nineteen seventy nine, Malcolm Ross, a reporter from Florida's Lara's Hill newspaper, visited the artist's house to investigate all the peculiar rumors. Accompanied by a friend, Ross ventured up to the attic room at the top of the property to pay Robert a visit, where he reported being riveted by the doll's black marble eyes when we walked through the door. Ross later wrote the look on Robert's face was like a little boy being punished. It was as if he was asking himself, who were these people in my room? And what are they going to do to me? Ross's friend then pointed to the well furnished room and mocked what he saw as Jeane Otto's childish pandering to the doll. Just then, the journalist looked back at Robert, whose face, it seemed to him, had changed to exhibit a very clear sense of disgust. There was some kind of intelligence there. Ross wrote that doll was listening to us. When Myrtle Reuter's moved out of the artist's house in nineteen eighty, she took Robert with her. In nineteen ninety, four, months before her death, she donated him to the local Fort East Martello Museum known as the Fort for Robert. This is a certain kind of homecoming, as it was Jeane Otto who designed the museum's art gallery shortly after his return to Key West. Many of his oil paintings still hang there. But rather than calming the story surrounding Robert, the move prompted a whole new evolution in his legend. At first, the museum didn't put Robert on display, but soon word got around about what they had, and after frequent requests to see him, it was agreed that he would be placed in a glass case for public viewings. It's there now, on a miniature stool, his sailor outfit now slightly yellowed, and his trusty Teddy Bear still in the crook of his arm. Behind him. Written in chalk on a blackboard are three simple rules. Anyone visiting Robert must first greet and introduce themselves. They must never take photographs of him without first asking permission, and before leaving, they must say a form more goodbye. The rules are enforced as best they can be by the museum staff. Not for them, they say, but for the safety of the museum's guests. To ignore or break them, some say, risks what has come to be known as the Curse of Robert, the doll misfortune that can follow the discourteous guest home, no matter how far away that may be. At first hearing, it sounds like a great marketing ploy, the kind of story attached to macabre displays throughout history as a way of selling tickets. But the museum also displays the letters they've received from visitors over the past three decades. Dozens are pinned to the wall of Robert's display. Hundreds more are stored electronically, almost all of them offering apologies and beg Robert for his forgiveness for their indiscretions. One signed only with the name Lori Anne, relates how the writer flouted the rules and tried to take photographs of Robert without his permission. Each time she tried, a brand new camera failed to capture the image, But when Lori Anne turned to test the camera on the display case opposite Robert, it apparently worked without a hitch. Only when she got home, Lori Anne uploaded the photos and saw that Robert's reflection was captured in the glass. From there, lor Anne writes, it all went wrong. Her computer was immediately infected with a devastating virus. She was hurt at work and lost her job. Then she lost her new truck and finally her home. The letter ends, I didn't believe it before, but now I do. I apologize if I upset you. Staff at the Fort Museum are equally respectful and wary of Robert. There are still reports of giggles emanating from empty rooms, and how Robert can sometimes be found in different positions inside his glass case, without the alarm ever being triggered. Goodelia Estevez, who worked as a docent at the museum in the early two thousands, told a PBS reporter how every morning she would open the museum and make her presence known, as if she were dealing with a potentially dangerous animal. However, Estevez said that the atmosphere in the fort was at its strangest and most chaotic when Robert was moved elsewhere. Every October he would be temporarily relocated to the Key West Museum of Art and History at the Customs House, and in his absence things would escalate. The museum's cat would howl incessantly. Staff reported physical pushes from assailants they couldn't see. Some years, Robert had to be recalled early to settle things down. It was as if he were happier there, Estevez said, And he may be able to make some bittersweet sense of that. Some morning, she says, she would open up the museum and find an empty wooden chair in front of Robert's case, as if someone had come to visit His old friend. Jean Otto never quite matched the fame of whistler or sergeant. Search his name now, and any mention of his art is buried between a hundred references to his infamous door. But Jean did have some remarkable success. He returned from europe An artist already worthy of note, and cemented his regional reputation as someone who could find the essence of the Florida Keys in oil and canvas. To possess one of his landscapes, said one nineteen fifty four review, is to have an ever more beloved window into mystical light flooded Key West. Jean was not just a painter of landscapes, though, once he moved back to Florida, he increasingly turned his hand to the art of still life paintings. In December nineteen fifty three, the Key West Tribune ran a feature on gene noting the ringing brilliance of his depictions of porcelain and metal objects and the highlighted realism of his fruits, fabric and flowers. Gene Otto, the critic asserts, is not limited by narrowness of concept. He finds loveliness and inspiration in the familiar and commonplace, but translates it through his genius into a supreme experience. Yet for all of that's skill and encompassing inspiration, there is one thing that Gene never seems to have painted Robert. Despite all the years they spent together, with Gene often painting in the very attic room that he had fitted out for his doll, not once did he take Robert as his subject. Now that Gene is gone, no one will ever know. Why was it the strange expression that eluded him, the inscrutable, uncanny valley of the doll's face, so reminiscent of but so far from human? Or was it simply because Robert had never allowed it? This episode was written by Neil McRobert and produced by me Richard mclin Smith. Neil is the creator and host of his own brilliant podcast called Talking Scared, in which he discusses the craft of horror, writing with everyone from Tennanerieve Do to the God of horror himself, Stephen King. I can't recommend it highly enough. Unexplained as an AV Club Productions podcast created by Richard McClain Smith. All other elements of the podcast, including the music, are also produced by me. Richard McClain Smith. Unexplained The book and audiobook is now available to buy worldwide. You can purchase from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Waterstones, and other bookstores. Please subscribe to and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts, and feel free to get in touch with any thoughts or ideas regarding the stories you've heard on the show. Perhaps you have an explanation of your own you'd like to share. You can find out more at Unexplained podcast dot com and reach us online through Twitter at Unexplained Pod and Facebook at Facebook dot com. Forward Slash Unexplained Podcast