In 2003, an aspiring young film maker put a composition doll he claimed was haunted, up for auction on eBay. The listing became the subject of websites, articles and discussions around the world. The doll was even discussed on Art Bell’s “Coast to Coast” radio show. A video was shown in which the doll’s arm supposedly moved, as well as it’s mouth as the word, “Here,” or “Harold,” according to Greg was heard. “Harold” became the doll’s name and it stuck.
Greg did all of this hoping to get $30 to $40 for a doll he thought would sell for $9 otherwise. When the auction ended the winning bid was around $700, but the winning bidder failed to pay for the doll. Greg re-listed it.
He freely admitted that what he was doing was a hoax to Kathy, a childhood friend of his older brother, who was bidding on Greg’s second auction of the doll. Not that Kathy cared, she was hoping to capitalize on the sensationalism around the doll and “flip” it for a profit herself after keeping it for 3 or 4 months. After winning Greg’s auction, strange events started happening almost immediately after she got it, according to Kathy. Not knowing whether the doll was, in fact, the cause of the things that were happening, or what to do about it, she eventually put the doll away in a closet. Instead of reselling it after a couple of months, she ended up keeping it for a year.
In 2004, Kathy put the doll back up on eBay, claiming that the doll wasn’t haunted but was, in fact, cursed. Only this time it wasn’t simply a claim she was making for the sake of selling the doll. She sincerely believed it was.
I am the person who bought the doll from Greg. I was living in Ireland at the time. The doll did not move on it’s own, or smell of pampers, or speak. It DID, however, contribute to two deaths within a six month period and some other creepy stuff while I had it because I wanted to restore it.
This doll was cursed, and while I had it, TWO people I knew died within six months of each other under tragic circumstances, and crazy stuff used to happen in my Dublin home. When I wrapped it up and put it away, nothing happened. When it was in the house and not in the storage shed, creepy things would happen.
We had a roommate who was a health nut, climbed mountains, dove, and was a very athletic guy. Harold was stored in the closet in his room. Three months after moving in, Stephen was diagnosed with lung cancer and died a few weeks later. He had to move in with us because Ronnie, the woman who he was living with, asked to see the doll one day when she was at my house the weekend before she went to Amsterdam for a visit. She fell down a flight of stairs while she was there and died instantly. Also, one day I heard a crash coming from the bathroom. I went in there only to find that everything had fallen out of the linen closet….and everything landed perfectly folded and stacked.
In addition, I was on the phone with my fiancee’ when all of a sudden i hear someone scream in the background that there was a huge brown wolf spider crawling up his back. At the same time, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a huge brown hairy spider (it is called a wolf spider) scurry across the living room rug and into the bathroom. Two hours later, Rick came home and showed me the area on the back of his shirt where someone had killed the spider.
My name is Anthony Quinata. I own Harold the Haunted Doll. I’m a psychic medium, speaker, and author of, “Communications from the Other Side – Death is Not the End of Life, Love, or Relationships.”
When I came across Kathy’s auction I was buying a number of supposedly haunted items on eBay for a book I was planning on writing, “Haunted eBay – Are You Going to Believe Me, or Your Lying Eyes?” My plan was to take the items I won and run EMF tests, EVP experiments, and have them read by a friend of mind who was also a psychometrist (a psychic who reads the energy of objects by holding them), April Palmer. I would then write about the results.
After reading the Greg’s original listing and seeing the videos of the dolls, I literally laughed out loud. The listing had a reserve on it so I placed what I considered to be a ridiculous bid on the doll, just to see what the reserve was. When I did, I barely triggered the reserve. Shortly afterward, I received an email from Kathy asking me why I wanted the doll. I wrote back explaining that I really didn’t want it, I was simply curious about how much her reserve was. Kathy told me that it reflected what she paid for the doll. I wrote her back and wished her luck with selling it.
She wrote another email to me saying, “I don’t think the doll is haunted. I do believe it’s cursed.” She told me that she had put the doll up once before, but the winning bidder failed to make payment after the auction ended. She went on to explain the strange mishaps that happened to her while she owned the doll. She went so far as to say that two of her friends inexplicably died shortly after coming in contact with the doll.
It was while we were emailing each other back and forth that I received a message from someone who called himself, “Strange Majik” He had outbid me for the doll, which was fine with me. “Don’t bother bidding anymore. I’ll just outbid you. This doll is mine.” That statement however, got my testosterone going.
“It probably will end up being yours,” I thought to myself, “but it’s going to cost you.” I decided I was going to bid up the doll, and “dump” the auction on Majik. The bidding “war” between us drove the price for the doll higher and higher. In the meantime, Kathy and I continued to email each other. I couldn’t help but wonder if she really was telling me the truth about her experiences since owning the doll.
On the last day of the auction, with only 4 minutes left remaining in the auction Majik placed a bid of $700. My bid came in at $720. I waited for Majik to outbid me. And I waited. And waited. The auction ended and eBay informed me I was the winner.
Kathy immediately emailed me and offered to let me out of paying. “I’m really worried about you having this doll,” she wrote me. “I should have just thrown in in the ocean.”
“A deal is a deal,” I wrote back.
A few weeks later my mailman at the time, also named Greg, told me, “I have a monster for you today.” Since I had been receiving so many packages from auctions I had won, I thought he was referring to a large “haunted” mirror I was expecting. When I saw the actual package and that it had come from Ireland, I knew Harold had finally arrived.
My first test on him was with my Tri-Field EMF meter. Nothing. Then I tried taking pictures to see if anything showed up other than the doll. Nope. Finally, I did a recording hoping to catch an EVP. No such luck. My last “test” was to have it read by April. I put the doll back into the Duane Reade bag it was in, but after all the stories I had heard from Kathy, I decided it was better to be safe than sorry, so I put a bottle of holy water and a crucifix into the bag with the doll as well.
When I took the doll to April for her reading, I didn’t tell her anything about it. When I took it out of the bag, she asked, “Is that Harold?”
“You know about Harold?” I asked. I was disappointed because I wanted her to do a clean reading, without any knowledge of the doll beforehand.
“Oh yeah,” she said, “he’s been all over the internet.”
My first impulse was to put the doll back in the bag, but I decided to have her to do the reading anyway. I turned my digital recorder on, and then took out the crucifix and holy water which I splashed on Harold. April chuckled, took the doll in her hands, and began giving me her impressions. Not two minutes later she said, “I’m sorry Anthony, but I just can’t do this anymore.”
“Why?” I asked her.
“Because the doll just threatened to kill me. I have a heart murmur, and it feels as though the spirit in the doll is squeezing my heart.”
Disappointed, and not really believing what April was telling me, I took the doll from her, and put it back in it’s bag. Later when I listened to the recording, I was stunned at what I had heard. As I was sprinkling the doll with holy water I heard agonized screams. I then heard April chuckle, and ask, “You’re sprinkling it with holy water?” A male voice responded, “Shut up, bitch!”
Then as she was doing her reading I heard, “I’m going to kill you… you bitch!” It was after that I heard April explaining that she felt as though the doll was trying to kill her. What followed was what I can only describe as an evil laugh. “Maybe there really is something going on with this doll,” I thought, after listening to the recording several times.
A year later, I was convinced that there really was something going on, and it was dangerous. I saw people injured, literally in front of my own eyes, in the presence of the doll. I myself had terrifying visions, and an injury that required surgery to correct. In 2005, I decided to put it away in a storage unit.
In May of 2013, my friend La Shan posted a picture of a doll she saw at a flea market on Facebook, and tagged me saying it reminded her of Harold. People asked about the doll. One woman who expressed her skepticism wrote to me the next day saying that Harold “visited” her that night. She wrote that the encounter was nothing short of terrifying.
In September of 2013, La Shan told me about a video on YouTube in which Harold was #5 in a series of videos about haunted dolls such as Annabelle, and Robert the doll. I checked it out and the number of views that video had suggested that interest in the doll was still strong. But there was also a lot of misinformation about the doll and it’s whereabouts, so I decided to announce that I am the person who won the doll in 2004 and continued to own it to this day.
I eventually took the doll back out of storage, deciding to pick up where I left off. I brought it to a psychic who said she knew nothing about the doll. “It’s happy it’s not locked up anymore,” she told me. She did a second reading, telling me how the spirit became trapped inside of the doll.
More incidents of people being harmed occurred, not only to others, but to me personally. More people began telling me about how they were “visited” by the spirit in the doll. “Harold is pissed,” a friend of mine told me. “He told me that he’s angry that you’ve had him for so long and haven’t helped him.”
What is the truth behind what is going on with this doll? Is it haunted? Is it cursed?
Categorised in: haunted, haunted doll
This post was written by Nadia Vella