“All the dolls look similar. They are very realistic. People living in the community said it is not only the dolls that are creepy but where they are placed that is strange.”

The crime reports out of Festus – a small town on the eastern border of central Missouri – usually look like those of any other small municipality … DUIs, break-ins, noise complaints, etc. Residents may be referring to those as “the good old days” now that the city is in the throws of a mysterious epidemic of creepy dolls appearing in odd places that is keeping people and their kids indoors and the police on alert.

“When we found this one, it was laying in front of our building. We picked it up and it was the doll, they’ve been hanging on top of stop signs, laying in front of the license office.”

On a stop sign? That IS creepy.

The worried residents of Festus told local media they‘re finding the dolls on the ground, on the tops of road sign, hanging from light poles, leaning up against a building and other strange spots. The locations aren’t the only creepy part – the dolls are sometimes carefully placed to appear to be small children – sitting, leaning against a wall, on the ground as if they fell, etc. (Video here and photo here.) That causes concerned witnesses to stop and see what’s going on, says police chief Tim Lewis.

“If you were to see it from behind it looks like a little girl. If you’re out and about and you see that, it looks like a little girl crying, against a pole and someone is going to stop,” he said. “In this town, people are good-hearted. People are going to stop to make sure that’s not a child. They are going to get hit or they are going to get run over and then you’re dealing with a catastrophe.”

It’s bad enough when they realize they stopped for a doll. What’s worse is when they flip it over and find the doll has no face. Some have no heads at all. The doll leaning against the building had its hands sewn to its face. Many of the dolls appear at busy intersections, causing traffic jams. Others are in remote locations. No matter where they are, no one has seen (or admitted to seeing) who puts them out. Some have quickly disappeared and no one seems to have seen that either. Chief Lewis suspects the culprit or culprits are hiding, watching the commotion and laughing. While the number incidents have gone down, local station KSDK reports that at least one creepy doll has appeared in nearby Crystal City.

“Dolls are just creepy in general to me. I don’t like them.”

What about puppets?

Resident Logan Galczynski probably speaks for many people who feel the same way about life-sized dolls as they do about clowns. Some think it’s linked to the new Annabelle movie, but it could be something more sinister, like the so-called voodoo dolls found last year all over the Russian town of Zavetny. Those were the size of adult store mannequins but dressed like school girls. The voodoo part comes from the dolls being pierced by needles, some threaded. That thread finally help investigators determine that the dolls were once used in puppet theater, then donated to a museum, threw them out (too creepy?) but they were found and given to a school, which also threw them out (definitely too creepy for school) but someone found them in the trash and began placing them around town. That culprit was never caught.

Are the residents of Festus and now Crystal City doomed to deal with the dolls forever? Will they desert their towns, leaving them to the dolls like the island of haunted dolls in Mexico known as La Isla de las Munecas? Perhaps Logan Galczynski is right.

“Dolls are just creepy in general to me. I don’t like them.”

Source: Mysterious Universe