The curious tale of a particularly persistent Elsa doll has been lighting up paranormal circles and national headlines this week. I’d be remiss if I didn’t also share it here for posterity. Add it to my doll collection.
As Emily Madonia explained in a recent interview with Houston’s KPRC, her Texas family had owned the Elsa doll, based on the character from the popular Disney movie Frozen, for six years. In December, however, they finally attempted to throw it away. Attempted being the key word.
And not before it exhibited some rather peculiar behavior.
The doll, gifted to her daughter on Christmas of 2013, reportedly worked normally for two of those years. Pressing a button on its neck would make it say Elsa quotes, and it would sing the worldwide shared nightmare phenomenon “Let It Go” from the movie (I’ll admit, I do kind of like the French version).
Yet, at a certain point, the doll began to activate on its own. It would speak and sing without any input from its owners. Then, it randomly started to speak Spanish.
None of that, however, is at all strange compared to what happened when the Madonia family decided to get rid of the old, seemingly broken Elsa doll.
In December, after they threw it away, the doll came back. A few weeks later, they found it “inside of a bench in their living room,” according to KPRC.
In response, they tried to throw it away even harder, wrapping it in a garbage bag within a garbage bag buried at the bottom of their garbage can. As Madonia shared on Facebook, they then “wheeled it to the curb and it was collected on garbage day.”
Even after all that, the curious little doll in the blue dress somehow returned again, this time showing up in their backyard.
As a final attempt to get rid of the doll, the family sent it off over many state lines, to a friend in Minnesota. That’s where it can be found today, taped to the front of a jeep. Will it return again?
“This is an unsolved mystery, period,” Madonia wrote in a Facebook post. She’s since made the original posts that sparked the current wave of news stories private, though she says the articles based on her story have been “fun to read.”
As to whether or not the doll is “haunted” or that anything paranormal is afoot, Madonia isn’t quite so sure. “I can’t say I believe or don’t believe in this,” she wrote, “I don’t know.”
Explanations?
Without looking into how these are made, it’s easy enough to assume that the doll’s randomly turning on might be caused by a glitch. And the speaking and singing in Spanish may be the same — I’d be willing to bet the dolls contain multiple languages by default, each one set depending on its target market. Technology breaks, sometimes.
That said, a YouTube commenter on a video of the Elsa doll claims that she owns the same type of doll, and that they are in fact bilingual by design. It also goes off and on randomly in both languages. I, of course, can’t verify any of this, as I unfortunately don’t have an Elsa doll of my own.
That still leaves the strange reappearances of the doll, though. I’ll leave that for you to ruminate on. What do you believe?
