Dollmaker Contest – CLOSED

Dolls.

They can be cute and cuddle playmates for children. They can also be evil creatures intent on eating your soul. They can be beautiful pieces of art. They can also be the stuff of nightmares.

But for the Dollmaker in BLOOD SECRETS, they are… special…

Chances are good that you’ve encountered dolls somewhere in your lifetime. Either you’ve enjoyed their company or you’ve run screaming in terror. I would be the latter if the doll in question is a clown. I used to think clowns were great. Then I saw Poltergeist. Nuh uh. No, thank you. And then, because I just can’t leave well enough alone, I read Stephen King’s IT…and saw the movie adaptation. Pennywise…Tim Curry… Yeah, that ended my relationship with clowns and clown dolls. Nope. Not interested. Beat it, Bozo.

So now I want to hear your best — and it can either be happy or creepy or somewhere in between — doll-centric memory or story. It doesn’t have to be long, just a few lines. Whatever you’re comfortable telling.

Here are the rules:

1. Leave your stories in the comments section for this post.

2. Contest will run until midnight (CT) July 11, 2011. Winner will be announced July 12, 2011.

3. One entry per person.

4. THREE winners chosen at random will receive signed copies of BLOOD SECRETS.

5. Contest is open to international readers.

There you have it, folks. Have fun.



16 Responsesto “Dollmaker Contest – CLOSED”

  1. Jennifer L. says:

    I had a lot of toys when I was a little girl. I’ve also always have had an overactive imagination. I was CONVINCED that my toys came alive at night and would have to put all of them in my closet. Then the movie Chucky came out. I had realistic looking dolls. I ended up with some destroyed dolls after that movie. Chucky still creeps me out and any realistic looking dolls still mke me cringe.

  2. Cheryl Bolton says:

    I once had a doll that had a smile that looked so evil I hhad to cover her face at night because it scared the hell out of me!

  3. Carey says:

    When I was a teen my older brother was very into comics and action figures. He had one that wast a realistic looking gobin with glow in the dark eyes. He woke from a dream and freaked out when he saw the eyes, so he put the goblin on the windowsill in the hallway. Needless to say when I woke in the middle of the night for a bathroom visit all I saw were glowing eyes on the window and it freaked me the hell out. I screamed woke the whole house and could not get back to sleep.
    It has been close to twenty years and the memory still gets my heart beating.

  4. Michelle O'Boyle says:

    My doll story is more recent. Everyday for lunch we have our set favorites to go to, but occasionally we will try an off the wall hole in the wall kind of place. Last week we tried “Into My Garden Tearoom” and from the outside it looked very quaint. When you walk in the door you are hit with the smell of your grandmothers house (old peppermints and moth balls) and the sight of an old fashioned toy store. So far it is your typical impression of how could I not have known there was a restaurant here.

    THEN on the way to the back of the store where the restaurant part is you see off to your left the reenactment of a baby viewing area. You know when people have babies and you come to see what it looks like, but you are given a window to look through of about 20 other babies and you have to try and guess which is the correct one. This is the same idea but with dolls. This room of dolls sits directly near the table we are set at and all the dolls eyes are open. They continue to stare at you intent on making your skin crawl with goosebumps and giving you the feeling of being watched. Creepy little babies is what they were. I kept having to check behind me to see if one would come to life and try to kill me over my chicken caesar salad. Needless to say I have never gone back to experience the baby viewing room from hell.

  5. Emily says:

    It is a little known fact that creepy dolls creep me right out- the ones with the eyes that move, or the permanent bottle mouth, or the eyelashes, or especially ones that have been “loved” (horrible maimed.) Ick.

    Anyway, I was at someone’s house and was asked to go get a suitcase out of their family room/basement (I know, I know, nothing good comes of going into the basement.) I go down there and right next to the suitcase is a crib, where there is a doll, wearing overalls, with hair all over the place, wide open eyes, and a mouth forming an O. The doll was positioned so it was standing up in the crib and holding the bars, just looking at anyone who came near. I don’t think I’ve ever run up stairs so fast in my life. Who does that?!

  6. Heather says:

    I was given a Mardi Gras doll when we moved to Gulf Shores. I was probably 12 at the time. The thing gave me the creeps. I put it in the loft of our condo. To mess with my, my dad positioned it so it’s arm was reaching through the railing. To this day I can’t stand that doll. My parents still have it. I refuse to bring it to my house.

  7. Jodi H says:

    When my daughter was 6 mos. old her father picked her up while I was working a weird split shift. When I came home at 3 am and went to check on her in her crib all I saw was her creepy life sized baby grinning maniacally at me from where my angel should have been snoozing. After I screamed through the house my brother explained where she was and was very patient with me when I hysterically ordered that demonic doll thrown in the OUTSIDE trash.

  8. otters50 says:

    I have hated dolls since I was small and saw an episode of the twilight zone with an evil killer doll. My parents wouldn’t even buy dolls for me as a child, because I couldn’t stand to have them in my room. I refuse to buy dolls for anyone as well.

  9. Ruth Thompson says:

    Ug…Clowns don’t freak me out but Creepy Dolls Diana Rowland’s doll was following me at RT 2010 cough she even has a twitter account. Watch out for that one. Um…From the killer doll in Friday the 13th (the series) to the Chucky movies. I believe it was the X files tale that creped me out the most.

  10. Carmen R says:

    I have never liked dolls but when I was little everyone bought them for me. Some of them had the creepy eyes that would follow you. I would get so freaked out by them that I would cry at night. Finally my parents said they would pack them up but what they ended up doing was just putting them in my closet. This did not help the fear at all because I then had the creepy dolls in my closet which was even more scary

  11. Antonio Marchena says:

    When I was a little kid, my great grandmother had a porcelain doll on a little table close to her armchair. Red hair, white dress, a crack under her lower lip and the creepiest brown eyes I’ve ever seen. If I close my eyes and think about it, I get the chills…

  12. Natalie Hillier says:

    When I was a little girl my grandmother used to give me a little china doll each year for xmas from a different country, I swear those dolls used to talk to each other at night lol funny part…I couldnt understand a word they said they all spoke their own language lol. But we all know they didnt talk to each other at night, those dolls creeped the hell out of me lol.

  13. Theresa B. says:

    A few years ago, the local museum was running a children’s summer camp. While the kids were outside, one of the interns moved an old doll from one end of the sofa in the parlor to the other just to freak out the kids. A couple of the kids came in to use the restroom and noticed the doll had ‘moved’. They ran screaming back outside trying to get my friend (who is the curator) to come inside. In the meantime, the museum secretary noticed the doll out of place and moved her back. When the group of kids and the intern came back in, EVERYONE was shocked. This was two years ago and we’re still hearing stories of the “haunted doll”. Interestingly enough, the museum IS haunted. My paranormal team has investigated it on many occasions, but the doll isn’t the culprit. LOL!

  14. Jessica S. says:

    I became creeped out by dolls/dollhouses after I saw the movie Secrets in the Attic. A murder mystery story that was also a book, but basically there’s a dollhouse in the attic and the dolls FREAKING MOVE! They put themselves in the rooms where they were murdered and it goes on and on. And there’s other family troubles and whatnot. But it was just creepy!!

    One point in the movie the young girl goes up to the attic to close the house up and you can see the shadowy figure of one of the dolls moving! It was creepy!! And we had a dollhouse in our basement, nothing at all like the one in the movie, but still a dollhouse with dolls. Very very creepy. Now dollhouses just scare the crap out of me!

    There was even an episode of Supernatural that did stuff with dollhouses!

    And speaking of creepiness and dolls, Chucky?! Never saw the movie, but the glimpses I caught scared the crap out me! Made me be EXTREMELY nice to my dolls, not that that was the case in Chucky!

  15. Carolsue says:

    I used to have a friend when I was a child who had dozens and dozens of dolls and she talked to these things like they were real. They were more important to her than her real friends (which were getting to be fewer and fewer). If you didn’t play along with the doll thing, she wouldn’t talk to you. Her brother once stole one of her dolls and threw it in the swimming pool to “drown.” This poor girl literally went into mourning for weeks, like it was her own child. Looking back, this poor girl needed psychological help. Because of this, I’ve always hated dolls.

  16. Candy Lynn says:

    WARNING: This stories is about to sound like some sort of “girl scout fire camp ghost stories” but I swear on my life its true.

    When I was young, ok so it was only about 11 years ago it seems like a long time to me, about 8 or so my grandmother and grandfather own a farm on the outskirts on Pennsylvania. My sister, and I used to spend every moment we could out there. It was a lovely, almost mystical place. The corn stalks grew a good foot taller then Tiffie, my sister, and I would wonder in the for hours on end. Needless to say it was heaven.
    I even had my own room there!! I thought that was the coolest thing in the world. I would wake up ungodly early in the morning just to watch the sun rise. Once it was up I would run down the hall to my grandparents room and jump up and down on the bed they shared until one of them awoke with promises of home made french toast, and beacon!! That was when I noticed her for the first time, or should I say it. My grandmother had just started to rise and my head began to swim with notions of cinnamon and the pop-fizzle of beacon. I turned to race her down the stairs when my eyes looked with this dead eyed alien nick-knack wear MY picture was supposed to be.
    ” That’s Victoria” my grandmother said. God the little witch had a name.
    “Your grandfather just bought him for me at the sale.” she continued
    It was at the moment I realized I hated Victoria and had to find a way to be free of her dead black stair.
    Shortly after that I ran back to my room to get dressed. Grand mom and pop-pop had already gotten up and headed down stairs for the day. I knew I had my chance. I tip toed back down the hall, and slipped into there room were I proceeded to stuff Victoria’s porcelain butt up on to the top shelf in the closet!
    I skipped both happily and triumphantly down the stairs after that and went about my merry way. I helped grand mom make breakfast and called pop-pop in from the field. It was a normal day. Grand mom sent me up stairs a after breakfast do grab her favorite record (I KNOW! A record player!! I know come one.. they at least had castes tapes by that point, but you know grandparents, always suck it there ways.) As I walked into her room my mouth must have dropped down the the floor. I couldn’t believe it. How had the little witch done it. She was back in her stop, no my pictures spot! I was so angry by that point that I took my pop-pop’s box knife and I chopped off ALL her hair! I stuffed her in the shed after that and hadn’t thought about her since.
    Until one day 5 years later. My grandparents farm went under and they moved into the city. There new apartment was much smaller then their old house so they had to sell somethings and give some stuff away. All the kids got presents. I had already gotten my fair share when one more gift showed up. My mother had it waiting for me on the kitchen table when I came home from school. I walked into my house and could have sworn I was 8 years old all over again. There she sat. Victoria, in all her glory (not to mention a full head of hair) looking at my with the dead stair. I put her up in my closest and that is were she sits today. (in a box, with a lock on the outside)
    —————————————–
    I know my story was rather long, and I thank you for sticking it out and reading threw it. I promise that all of it was one hundred percent true, and as one hundred percent as creepy as it sounds!!
    Also, if anyone is looking to by a porcelain doll named Victoria I know where you can get one real cheap!

Leave a Reply to Ruth Thompson