BY JORDAN DOLL BEST OF 034 When I was a kid I had this friend. His name was Cooney. He was a raccoon and the best friend I’ve ever had. He showed up alongside several other somewhat forgettable gifts one Christmas morning and we hit it off immediately, sharing many of the same tastes and opinions. We were quite inseparable, Cooney and I. We built forts together, rode BMX together, and every night before bed, he would perch atop my head so we could both read comics before going to sleep. I know, we were adorable. We had a rich, full friendship despite his notable impediment of being an inanimate stuffed animal. It never seemed to be much of a hurdle for us really. Looking back, I remember Cooney as having a very distinct personality. A somewhat more pragmatic and bashful version of myself. He was a comfort when things creaked in the night and an ally when my brother was hogging the Nintendo controller. In fact, he seemed so much like a person to me, that had he come to life all of a sudden — had I woken up one morning to find Cooney making us both breakfast and suggesting activities for the day — I wouldn’t have been in the least bit surprised. I think every kid with a cherished stuffed animal expects this to happen on some level. That their chum might wake up at any moment, and the two of them can finally get some real work done. Move into their own apartment, start a band, buy dirt bikes, all of it. It never happened, which is fine. It doesn’t happen for everyone. But what if it did happen? And what if the friend you got wasn’t very nice at all. What No. 142 if he was, simply put, a monster? In a small museum in Key West, Florida there sits a doll named Robert. He is dressed in an old-fashioned sailor suit and his fabric skin and hair are faded to a dull grey-brown, flecked with holes of natural decay, understandably, as Robert is more than 100 years old. He is kept behind glass and gets hundreds of visitors every year. He has been featured in countless television shows and books and has even had a few awful (just awful) films made about him. "Why?" you ask. Because Robert is allegedly haunted as fuck. Like trunk-of-a-serial-killer’s-car haunted. Like ancient-abandoned-amusement-park haunted. Robert the Doll was gifted to young Robert Eugene Otto when he was about 6 years old. One story says the doll was simply a gift from his grandfather, while another tells it was given to him by a disgruntled former employee of the Otto family: a Bahamian maid who was fired after being accused of theft. Some stories say she made the doll herself using some of the boy’s own hair, but frankly, that story seems a little too Hollywood (and maybe a tiny bit racist?). Whatever its origin, the boy became immediately enamored with the doll. He would play with it for hours on end, even gifting the doll his own name and insisting that the family call him by his middle name, Gene, instead. This was only the beginning of what would prove to be a very long, very strange friendship. The doll slept in Gene’s room and even had a seat at the dinner table.
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