Regular Episode
#140 – HAUNTED OBJECTS
October 30, 2017

#140 – HAUNTED OBJECTS

🎙️ Blake Smith and Karen Stollznow go full Halloween for this special bonus crossover with the Archaeological Fantasies podcast crew: archaeologists Sarah Head, Jeb Card, and Ken Feder. The topic is haunted objects — artifacts, dolls, mummy cases, concrete heads, and cursed tchotchkes of every variety — discussed with liberal application of whiskey, an almost criminal density of puns, and the kind of tangential energy you’d expect from a very good skeptics-in-the-pub night.

Fair warning from the hosts themselves: the language is uncensored, alcohol was consumed during recording, and this may be the most puns ever packed into a single episode. You have been warned.

🏺 The Moving Statue of Neb-Senu (Manchester Museum)

The panel kicks off with the case of a 3,800-year-old Egyptian statuette of Neb-Senu at the Manchester Museum, which security cameras caught slowly rotating inside its sealed glass case. The crew notes the skeptical explanation — vibrations from nearby traffic gradually spinning the flat-bottomed figurine — and points out that the “mystery” continued to circulate on cable paranormal programming years after the mechanism was well understood. As Jeb observes: the statue wasn’t haunted, it just happened to be 3,800 years old. Your IKEA shelf brackets, also rattled by lorries, remain stubbornly un-haunted.

🪆 Haunted Dolls: Annabelle, Robert, and the eBay Aftermarket

The conversation moves to the two great titans of the haunted-doll canon. Annabelle — actually a Raggedy Ann doll, not the sleek porcelain thing from the films — lives in Ed and Lorraine Warren‘s occult museum in Connecticut, where visitors were once warned not to look at it lest the spirit hitch a ride home with them. Ken shares a priceless anecdote: he once primed a student to ask the Warrens why they’d never accepted the James Randi challenge, and Ed replied that he could win it any time he liked — he just wasn’t in it for the money. The student immediately asked whether they were being paid for the lecture. The house came down.

Robert the Doll (Key West, Florida) gets a nod for its robust folk-curse ecosystem: visitors who photograph Robert without asking his permission are expected to write letters of apology when their lives subsequently deteriorate. Karen and Blake note that this is a textbook illustration of apophenia and confirmation bias at work — every subsequent misfortune gets filtered through the curse frame, while the hits register and the misses disappear.

Karen also flags a cottage industry of haunted objects sold on eBay and Etsy — including trinkets reportedly stolen from children’s graves and relisted as “possibly haunted” using carefully hedged language to sidestep platform bans on occult merchandise. As Karen notes: they are haunted now. Because you stole them.

📺 Reality TV and Manufactured Frights: Haunted Collector and Fact or Faked

Haunted Collector stars John Zaffis — Ed Warren’s nephew — who visits homes plagued by paranormal activity, identifies the offending object (usually something mundanely antique rather than the obvious creepy doll), and relieves the homeowners of it for safekeeping in his museum. Karen provides behind-the-scenes intelligence: a magician friend was contacted by the show’s producers — without the cast’s knowledge — to manufacture special effects to frighten the on-screen investigators. A related production ethics anecdote involves Fact or Faked: Paranormal Files, whose producers offered Karen’s husband $1,500 to make a Ouija planchette leap more dramatically in footage he’d already shot. Karen wrote about this for Skeptical Inquirer and the JREF.

The panel ties both stories to the broader reality-TV economy: the Writers Guild strike created a demand for cheap unscripted content, and paranormal programming filled the void with producer-shaped “reality” and a standing hunger for a Mulder-Scully conflict dynamic.

💀 The Unlucky Mummy, Scare-Gifts, and the Brady Bunch

Jeb introduces Roger Luckhurst‘s 📚 The Mummy’s Curse: The True History of a Dark Fantasy 💵, which traces how mummy-curse mythology propagated through the press and produced waves of what Luckhurst calls “scare-gifts” — people mailing pilfered Egyptian antiquities back to the British Museum in a panic. The specific object at the center of Victorian-era panic is the Unlucky Mummy (more precisely, a mummy-board in the British Museum’s collection), which accumulated a mythology of deaths and misfortunes entirely post-hoc — the “curse,” as Luckhurst documents, has no ancient basis whatsoever.

The same guilt-and-return dynamic plays out at Petrified Forest National Park and in Hawaii, where visitors who pocket lava rock or petrified wood send apologetic letters to the Park Service — sometimes years later, with precise coordinates for re-deposit — blaming every subsequent misfortune on their stolen souvenir. Ken connects all of this to the Brady Bunch Hawaii episodes and their cursed tiki idol, which remain many viewers’ first encounter with the “exotic object brings bad luck” narrative.

🐑 The Hexham Heads and the Were-Sheep-Man

The centerpiece of the episode: the Hexham Heads, two small stone-like objects unearthed in a garden in Hexham, Northumberland, in 1971. Rapidly identified as ancient Celtic artifacts, they passed into the hands of Celtic scholar Anne Ross, who added them to her collection — whereupon neighbors of the original finders began reporting nocturnal visitations by a creature described as half-man, half-sheep (designated here, lovingly, as the Were-Sheep-Man), and Ross herself started seeing spectral werewolves in her home. Her family’s response — essentially “oh, werewolf on the landing, carry on” — is a highlight of the episode.

The resolution is satisfyingly mundane: local man Desmond Craigie, who had lived in the house years earlier, came forward to explain that he had made the heads himself out of concrete as toys for his children. Compositional analysis confirmed it. The “2,500-year-old Celtic artifacts” were 1950s concrete novelties. Their current whereabouts are unknown, though they passed through the hands of Don Robbins, an enthusiast of stone tape theory — the idea that objects record and replay electromagnetic impressions of past events — before that framework was quietly retired in favor of quantum entanglement language, which Jeb considers an equally poor substitution.

Jeb’s broader point lands well: the unlucky mummy has no real ancient curse; the Hexham Heads have no real antiquity; the “Indian burial ground curse” trope is largely a European colonial projection about a century old. Haunted objects, he argues, are fundamentally about the modern desire to re-enchant the landscape.

💎 Favorite Haunted Objects (Lightning Round)

Each panelist nominates a favorite:
– Ken: Annabelle — for sheer franchise value.
– Karen: The broader phenomenon of haunted objects sold on eBay and Etsy, with a specific nod to the Dybbuk box.
– Blake: The Hope Diamond, which he has only ever seen on In Search Of but has always admired.
– Sarah: The crystal skulls — definitively identified as products of late Victorian craftsmanship, yet immortal as icons of fringe archaeology and, latterly, as a vodka brand filtered through “Herkimer diamonds” (a.k.a. quartz, a.k.a. basically charcoal).

📚 Further Reading

– 📚 The Mummy’s Curse: The True History of a Dark Fantasy 💵 by Roger Luckhurst
– 📚 Ancient America: Fifty Archaeological Sites to See for Yourself 💵 by Ken Feder
– 📚 In Quest of the Hexham Heads 💵 by Paul Screeton

🔗 Related Links

– Hexham Heads (Wikipedia)
– The Unlucky Mummy (Wikipedia)
– Annabelle doll (Wikipedia)
– Robert the Doll (Wikipedia)
– Hope Diamond (Wikipedia)
– Crystal Skulls (Wikipedia)
– Stone Tape Theory (Wikipedia)
– Adrian Shine and the Loch Ness Project (Wikipedia)
– Apophenia (Wikipedia)
– Trafficking Culture — research on the illicit antiquities trade

Note: ads inserted into the distributed audio alter the timestamps in unpredictable ways, so timing references in these notes are approximate.

Happy Halloween! In this special bonus episode (no charge for our Patreon supporters) we join the Archeology Fantasies podcast crew (Sarah Head, Jeb Card and Ken Feder) to talk about “Haunted Objects” and a variety of other spooky topics.

Warning: The language in this episode is uncensored, there are way too many puns, and alcohol was consumed during the recording. You’ve been warned.

Mentioned in the episode

Music

  • Monstertalk Theme: Monster by Peach Stealing Monkeys
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