The doll
I brought it up so now I want to talk about it.
I packed the box that has all my photos in it and put it in storage, but next time I hit the storage building I will grab the picture of the doll.
In case you didn't read my last post (and I would not blame you in the least for not reading it, it's freaking long...), my "graduation" into the rank of druid priest came when I was able to give a full accounting of the history of a certain doll that my grandfather posses.
To start with, when I was a kid we went to visit my grandparents once (I was 6 or 7, it was some rather short amount of time before my parents got divorced at any rate). They lived in Vienna, Virginia at the time. Their house, like many in that area, had a basement. In the basement was a bar area, a washroom, a bathroom, and a storage closet.
I was cautioned to not go down there alone, nor to ever step foot in the storage closet. Also to stay out of the washroom, because under the stairs was a passage between the washroom and the storage closet. Naturally I railed against this and stated that I wanted to sleep down there. After a bti of rampaging about how there really wasn't any room anywhere else, my sister and I were relgated to sleep down there with my mom. Woot!
Or so I thought. Night 1, my sister and I go to bed at 9:30, my parents stay up playing cards till some time later. Might as well have been 12 years to me... Now to set the atmosphere my grandfather is a HUGE historian, so all along the walls in the basement were antique pictures of dead relatives / ancestors. This basement was rahter large, and there were shitloads of dark corners, so it was pretty intimidating.
Anyway, so we lie down and go to sleep. As with any kids, we talked for awhile beforehand. I start to nod off and hear singing. I tell my sister to shush. It persists. I start to listen more carefully and it is high pitched nursery rhymes. I tell her again to shut up, a bit more forcefully, she goes "I thought it was you". We both shush and still we hear it. Of course I scream for my mommy. As soon as I scream the singing stops. I hear my parents still upstairs playing cards and bitching at each other, as they always did.
I scream for several more minutes, my sister joinign in, and FINALLY I hear my dad go "is that the kids?" He made a comment about going to blister our asses for not being asleep (empty threat my dad never laid a hand on us...) and goes to come downstairs. My mom stops him and comes down to see about us. I tell her in what was surely that rapid kid-babble what happened. She laughed at me and goes "THAT is why you don't sleep down here".
She agrees to come down to bed and before coming to sleep she opens the storage room door and says soemthing and then comes to bed. Next morning she tells my grandfather about it and laughter ensues of course. Many told you so's abound. Anyway, he asks if I want to know what it was. I say yes VERy tentatively, because I was scared to know.
He holds my hand and we all 4 (my dad is a purely logical being and has no insight into such matters, and my grandmother flatly refused to ever go down the basement stairwell... in 25 years of living there she only once set foot down them and ended badly - another story for later) go down into the basement.
We go into the storage closet and across the room is this big metal shelf. Top shelf is this doll. Looks frigging ancient. He tells me the doll was singing, and I of course go "nuh-UH". He tells me that he had had it for years and that it had special abilities. Whatever, I was out of that room and didn't go back down the rest of the trip.
Flash forward to my druid training. As an ovate here I am trying to learn to view the past in the same damn house with this doll. And believe you me strange things do happen. Maybe for the upcoming Samhuinn I will try to post a different story every week, as I have many of them.
Delving my mind into the past I kept seeing an old furnace. Flashes, bits, pieces. As time went on I see the furnace, I see a kid, I see a man, I see a ventriloquist. Bits and pieces come together. I ask my grandfather several dozen times over the weeks if he knew what any of it was. "You tell me" was all I ever got back.
Still flashes start to become moving images, bits of story. still no fucking clue what I was seeing. I would try to concentrate on going back to the creation of Stonehenge, or to the second world war, or some other time period, and although I could see and glean information I kept getting this overriding furnace storyline.
Skip forward more and here is what I finally learned from all of it: in the early 1800s an ancestor of ours had a child who was a midget. He had some severe health problems and died very young. The man was a ventriloquist and as a remembrance for his son he had a doll crafted in his son's image. Not exactly a lookalike, but I guess as close as you could get in those days. After the father died, the doll continued to talk. In truth, the father's love for his son imbibed much of the essence of both son and father into this doll.
With them both gone, the echoes of energy stayed in this doll, as wood has an EXCELLENT spiritual memory. In the early days the doll could actually carry on a conversation at certain times of year. Not by moving mouth, of course, but by way of a shrill vibration of speech, much like how a tree communicates. Part audible, part mental.
Anyway, this thing was a bane on the family, and several, and I do mean SEVERAL people tried to destroy it. All with no such luck, and I know of at least one ancestor who I saw killed through a manipulation of energy by this doll. More on that in a second.
Flash forward to the 1950s, around the time my grandparents got married. My grandfather got a notifcation that his great uncle had passed away from sudden heart failure, and left him all the posessions in his house, and asked for the property to be sold.
So he goes to the house for all that funerary type stuff, and goes to looking through the hosue for what to keep and what to sell, etc. Into the basement he goes and there is this old coal burning furnace. He opens it up on a whim and inside is this... object.
It's about 3 foot high, and covered in burnt newspaper. He pulls it out and brushes away the paper and there is this doll. Perfect condition, not a scratch on it. In actuality, the uncle had tried to burn the doll, and enraged the doll got back at him. Leastways that is what I saw, that man did not seem in poor health, so I don't buy that his heart just stopped... anyway.
Over the years my grandfather (and me through his eyes) saw and heard that doll do some strange fucking things.
So armed with the full story I go to my grandfather, obviously excited and tell him the whole story. "Most of that I already knew" he says, "expand on it." I had a wealth of newfound knowledge on the subject so asked him what he wanted to know. "What does he want?" he asked. That, I had no clue about. Insight into this doll was difficult. I was getting better at talking to trees, but the fineries were lost on me. Same with the doll. The answer seems simple enough in retrospect, but it took me a good week of sitting in front of that doll trying to commune (being nervous as fuck, too, let me tell you) with him. ALWAYS in my grandfather's presence because I *was* so nervous.
I was finally able to talk to it, and discern what he wanted: a companion. He sang because he wanted company. He moved because he wanted attention. He didn't like being locked away out of sight, out of mind. So that pretty much marked the end of my ovate training, but the story is really about the doll.
5 years ago my grandparents moved to Florida. A year later my grandad calls me and tells me that he found her. A companion. Didn't talk much about it, and I was too busy to really involve myself in it. 3 years ago I got my job at Samsung, and they sent me to Miami for 2 weeks to train. So while there I went to see my grandparents in Fort Lauderdale. Sure enough, he found an antique doll, not a ventriloquist doll, just your average little girl's doll, that had "stories" surrounding it. After the first night, according to my grandfather, niether one has since made a peep.
And sure enough, I tried to commune with either one, and they are empty husks for all I can tell. My grandmother finally can stand to be near the thing, and the "curse" appears to be totally gone.
In the end, all he wanted was love. He waited over a century to find her, but he did. This wierd amalgam of a man's spirit and his son's had actually yearned for and found love.
To be perfectly honest, it was one of the first things that made me realize my marriage needed to end. Because if such a wierd little piece of randomness can find "happiness" and a soulmate, then by god I knew there had to be something more meaningful out there for me...
I will post the picture of both dolls as soon as I get to the storage building next.
I swear it is all 100% true. Not only have I seen it all with my own eyes, but my grandfather has many, many documents that back it up. He even has the original bill of sale for the doll and journal entries from ancestors who had written about the odd happenings.
The moral of the story is that love truly is what the world is about...
Peace and light,
-Shawn
I packed the box that has all my photos in it and put it in storage, but next time I hit the storage building I will grab the picture of the doll.
In case you didn't read my last post (and I would not blame you in the least for not reading it, it's freaking long...), my "graduation" into the rank of druid priest came when I was able to give a full accounting of the history of a certain doll that my grandfather posses.
To start with, when I was a kid we went to visit my grandparents once (I was 6 or 7, it was some rather short amount of time before my parents got divorced at any rate). They lived in Vienna, Virginia at the time. Their house, like many in that area, had a basement. In the basement was a bar area, a washroom, a bathroom, and a storage closet.
I was cautioned to not go down there alone, nor to ever step foot in the storage closet. Also to stay out of the washroom, because under the stairs was a passage between the washroom and the storage closet. Naturally I railed against this and stated that I wanted to sleep down there. After a bti of rampaging about how there really wasn't any room anywhere else, my sister and I were relgated to sleep down there with my mom. Woot!
Or so I thought. Night 1, my sister and I go to bed at 9:30, my parents stay up playing cards till some time later. Might as well have been 12 years to me... Now to set the atmosphere my grandfather is a HUGE historian, so all along the walls in the basement were antique pictures of dead relatives / ancestors. This basement was rahter large, and there were shitloads of dark corners, so it was pretty intimidating.
Anyway, so we lie down and go to sleep. As with any kids, we talked for awhile beforehand. I start to nod off and hear singing. I tell my sister to shush. It persists. I start to listen more carefully and it is high pitched nursery rhymes. I tell her again to shut up, a bit more forcefully, she goes "I thought it was you". We both shush and still we hear it. Of course I scream for my mommy. As soon as I scream the singing stops. I hear my parents still upstairs playing cards and bitching at each other, as they always did.
I scream for several more minutes, my sister joinign in, and FINALLY I hear my dad go "is that the kids?" He made a comment about going to blister our asses for not being asleep (empty threat my dad never laid a hand on us...) and goes to come downstairs. My mom stops him and comes down to see about us. I tell her in what was surely that rapid kid-babble what happened. She laughed at me and goes "THAT is why you don't sleep down here".
She agrees to come down to bed and before coming to sleep she opens the storage room door and says soemthing and then comes to bed. Next morning she tells my grandfather about it and laughter ensues of course. Many told you so's abound. Anyway, he asks if I want to know what it was. I say yes VERy tentatively, because I was scared to know.
He holds my hand and we all 4 (my dad is a purely logical being and has no insight into such matters, and my grandmother flatly refused to ever go down the basement stairwell... in 25 years of living there she only once set foot down them and ended badly - another story for later) go down into the basement.
We go into the storage closet and across the room is this big metal shelf. Top shelf is this doll. Looks frigging ancient. He tells me the doll was singing, and I of course go "nuh-UH". He tells me that he had had it for years and that it had special abilities. Whatever, I was out of that room and didn't go back down the rest of the trip.
Flash forward to my druid training. As an ovate here I am trying to learn to view the past in the same damn house with this doll. And believe you me strange things do happen. Maybe for the upcoming Samhuinn I will try to post a different story every week, as I have many of them.
Delving my mind into the past I kept seeing an old furnace. Flashes, bits, pieces. As time went on I see the furnace, I see a kid, I see a man, I see a ventriloquist. Bits and pieces come together. I ask my grandfather several dozen times over the weeks if he knew what any of it was. "You tell me" was all I ever got back.
Still flashes start to become moving images, bits of story. still no fucking clue what I was seeing. I would try to concentrate on going back to the creation of Stonehenge, or to the second world war, or some other time period, and although I could see and glean information I kept getting this overriding furnace storyline.
Skip forward more and here is what I finally learned from all of it: in the early 1800s an ancestor of ours had a child who was a midget. He had some severe health problems and died very young. The man was a ventriloquist and as a remembrance for his son he had a doll crafted in his son's image. Not exactly a lookalike, but I guess as close as you could get in those days. After the father died, the doll continued to talk. In truth, the father's love for his son imbibed much of the essence of both son and father into this doll.
With them both gone, the echoes of energy stayed in this doll, as wood has an EXCELLENT spiritual memory. In the early days the doll could actually carry on a conversation at certain times of year. Not by moving mouth, of course, but by way of a shrill vibration of speech, much like how a tree communicates. Part audible, part mental.
Anyway, this thing was a bane on the family, and several, and I do mean SEVERAL people tried to destroy it. All with no such luck, and I know of at least one ancestor who I saw killed through a manipulation of energy by this doll. More on that in a second.
Flash forward to the 1950s, around the time my grandparents got married. My grandfather got a notifcation that his great uncle had passed away from sudden heart failure, and left him all the posessions in his house, and asked for the property to be sold.
So he goes to the house for all that funerary type stuff, and goes to looking through the hosue for what to keep and what to sell, etc. Into the basement he goes and there is this old coal burning furnace. He opens it up on a whim and inside is this... object.
It's about 3 foot high, and covered in burnt newspaper. He pulls it out and brushes away the paper and there is this doll. Perfect condition, not a scratch on it. In actuality, the uncle had tried to burn the doll, and enraged the doll got back at him. Leastways that is what I saw, that man did not seem in poor health, so I don't buy that his heart just stopped... anyway.
Over the years my grandfather (and me through his eyes) saw and heard that doll do some strange fucking things.
So armed with the full story I go to my grandfather, obviously excited and tell him the whole story. "Most of that I already knew" he says, "expand on it." I had a wealth of newfound knowledge on the subject so asked him what he wanted to know. "What does he want?" he asked. That, I had no clue about. Insight into this doll was difficult. I was getting better at talking to trees, but the fineries were lost on me. Same with the doll. The answer seems simple enough in retrospect, but it took me a good week of sitting in front of that doll trying to commune (being nervous as fuck, too, let me tell you) with him. ALWAYS in my grandfather's presence because I *was* so nervous.
I was finally able to talk to it, and discern what he wanted: a companion. He sang because he wanted company. He moved because he wanted attention. He didn't like being locked away out of sight, out of mind. So that pretty much marked the end of my ovate training, but the story is really about the doll.
5 years ago my grandparents moved to Florida. A year later my grandad calls me and tells me that he found her. A companion. Didn't talk much about it, and I was too busy to really involve myself in it. 3 years ago I got my job at Samsung, and they sent me to Miami for 2 weeks to train. So while there I went to see my grandparents in Fort Lauderdale. Sure enough, he found an antique doll, not a ventriloquist doll, just your average little girl's doll, that had "stories" surrounding it. After the first night, according to my grandfather, niether one has since made a peep.
And sure enough, I tried to commune with either one, and they are empty husks for all I can tell. My grandmother finally can stand to be near the thing, and the "curse" appears to be totally gone.
In the end, all he wanted was love. He waited over a century to find her, but he did. This wierd amalgam of a man's spirit and his son's had actually yearned for and found love.
To be perfectly honest, it was one of the first things that made me realize my marriage needed to end. Because if such a wierd little piece of randomness can find "happiness" and a soulmate, then by god I knew there had to be something more meaningful out there for me...
I will post the picture of both dolls as soon as I get to the storage building next.
I swear it is all 100% true. Not only have I seen it all with my own eyes, but my grandfather has many, many documents that back it up. He even has the original bill of sale for the doll and journal entries from ancestors who had written about the odd happenings.
The moral of the story is that love truly is what the world is about...
Peace and light,
-Shawn