Can an enchanted doll bring you riches and health or even injure or kill someone? Can
a doll be inhabited by a ghost and have a mind of its own? And what exactly is voodoo,
anyway, beyond all the stuff you’ve heard about it in the movies?
The truth is far darker and more complex than you could possibly imagine,
and if you stick around, you may just learn a thing or two about
making or avoiding curses. Can you really afford to click away?
So, if you’re just a casual enthusiast, we know what you’re probably thinking: A voodoo doll is
a small doll made of cloth or string with some kind of magical connection to another person.
When a voodoo practitioner - such as a Bokor in Haitian Vodou - sticks the doll with pins
or twists around its limbs, the person connected to the doll experiences those very same injuries.
In spiritualism, this is known as “Sympathetic Magic” or “Imitative
Magic,” wherein the practitioner is able to use an object - known as an effigy,
a fetish, or a poppet, more on that later - to affect the tangible reality of another person.
Voodoo dolls are probably the most famous form of sympathetic magic as depicted in media,
but do real-life voodoo dolls really work the way they do in fiction?
Here’s where we hit you with the first major curveball of the video:
Voodoo dolls, as you know them, actually have nothing to do with Voodoo.
That’s right - You’ve effectively been lied to your whole life about the nature of these
cursed effigies. The truth is, they’re about as Voodoo as latkes and communion
wafers - And the concept of using a Sympathetic Magic doll to harm people has long been decried
in various voodoo-practicing communities. In 2020, the Louisiana Voodoo High Priest,
Robi Gilmore, hoped to clarify some misconceptions about Voodoo dolls. He said:
“It blows my mind that people still believe [Voodoo dolls are relevant to Voodoo religion].
Hollywood really did us a number. We do not stab pins in dolls to hurt people; we don't take your
hair and make a doll, and worship the devil with it, and ask the devil to give us black
magic to get our revenge on you. It is not done, it won't be done, and it never will exist for us.”
If you’re feeling a little lost here, don’t worry;
it’s all going to make sense in the end - Because these enchanted and cursed dolls really do exist,
even if not in this particular culture. But what is this culture, anyway?
As High Priest Gilmore was alluding to,
Hollywood movies don’t always have the most accurate portrayals of other people’s beliefs
and lifestyles. So before we tell you where these dolls actually come from,
how to make them for fun, profit, or doing evil - hey, we’re not here to judge,
as long as you like and subscribe - let’s take a second to talk about what voodoo actually is.
We’ve been using it as a catch-all term so far, which is similar to saying “Christianity”
as though it’s one unified body and not a complicated collection of groups and
sects. All modern voodoo practices can be traced back to West African Vodun,
a spiritual practice performed by the Aja, Ewe, and Fon peoples of Benin, Togo, Ghana,
and Nigeria. These practices were unique to the African continent until two things far
scarier than any evil spirit took hold: The Western slave trade and Colonialism.
As Christian colonists occupied various African nations and a number
of West African Vodun practitioners were kidnapped and shipped abroad as slaves,
Vodun took on some interesting transformations. It started to undergo a process called religious
syncretism, which is when the religious practices of different belief systems
blend as a result of either forced combination or cultural exchange.
Part of the reason Christianity has spread so far is its talent for Syncretism - For example,
Christmas, the most famous Christian holiday,
was adopted from European Pagan Winter Solstice practices.
Vodun was about to have a similar transformation, merging with Catholicism on various fronts to
create the belief systems that come to mind when we think of Voodoo today. These include Haitian
Vodou, Louisiana Voodoo, Cuban Vodú, Dominican Vudú, Hoodoo, and a host of others. We’ll take
a closer look at Haitian and Louisiana Voodoo and a little Hoodoo, too, since when you’re picturing
Voodoo in your head, a strange combination of the three is probably what’s going on in there.
Haitian Vodou was the first to develop, as early as the 16th century, as a combination
of West African religious traditions and Catholicism. It’s comprised of a
vast collection of religious practices based around the veneration of spirits known as Lwa
or Loa - Some of whom you may be familiar with, like Papa Legba and Baron Samedi,
who are both extremely popular in the next step from Haitian Vodou - Louisiana Voodoo.
Once again, these are the religious beliefs of West African traditions
mixed with Catholicism and a little bit of Cuban Santeria, practiced almost exclusively
in Louisiana. There’s often crossover with the African-American folk religion of Hoodoo,
also known as Gullah or Lowcountry Voodoo. This was a combination of Central African
folk religion brought to the US by slaves, combined with Christianity and Indigenous
knowledge of plants. But where do Voodoo dolls come into all this, you’re probably wondering?
Even if practitioners of Vodou, Voodoo, or Hoodoo have never stuck pins into
magical effigies of their enemies, the general concept of this related
to these Syncretic religions had to come from somewhere - But where?
Talismans are a part of various Voodoo traditions, with some of these being dolls. A talisman,
for the record, is any object imbued with magical power. There are a few prominent
examples of these in Voodoo - Take, for example, the gris-gris. The gris-gris is a
common Voodoo amulet made from a small cloth bag filled with verses from an ancestor and
some small objects of magical significance, used for protecting the wearer from evil or bad luck,
and, in some cases, even being used as a kind of supernatural contraceptive.
Note: Please don’t do this, it won’t actually stop
anyone from getting pregnant or getting an STD. Okay, moving on.
Some Haitian Vodou practitioners have been known to leave dolls
at grave sites as a medium to commune with dead ancestors,
too, placing a kind of spiritual significance on the dolls in question.
But it’s not all about healing and communication. Voodoo as a concept emphasizes balance, and
one supernatural method of striking out against one’s enemies in Hoodoo is Goofer Dust. While the
exact definitions vary, Goofer Dust is a hexing material that can be derived from graveyard dirt,
and used in magical rituals to bring harm upon one’s enemies. Modern Goofer Dust recipes may even
include things that are actually harmful, like pesticides and expired medications. In any case,
you don’t want to be on the wrong side of an angry Hoodoo practitioner with a fistful of Goofer Dust.
Probably the closest thing to Voodoo dolls, as we know them in actual voodoo-adjacent belief, is the
Nkondi, an enchanted statuette created by people who ascribe to traditional Kongolese spirituality.
Meaning “Hunter”, Nkondi are menacing figures shaped after warriors and often
struck with a variety of nails by the Nganga - a religious practitioner - who constructed
them. The purpose of driving in the nails is to excite or anger the Nkisi, or spirit,
within, allowing it to leave the body of the statue and hunt down the owner’s enemies or
those who wish to do them harm. Given that they’re stuck full of piercing objects and
designed to hunt down the enemies of the conjurer who created them, they definitely
feel like they’re in a similar neighborhood to our traditional idea of a voodoo doll.
Of course, the main reason why we associate these sympathetic magic dolls with voodoo is
pop culture: The 20th century saw a boom of books and movies that tied the two concepts together,
from horror B-movies like 1932’s White Zombie and 1943’s I Walked With A Zombie, to more mainstream
fare like Indiana Jones and the Temple Of Doom and even Scooby Doo On Zombie Island.
These days, the only people in Louisiana you might see playing into the Voodoo doll
myth are local entrepreneurs looking to sell amusing junk to tourists who want to
buy a souvenir with a voodoo vibe. But if Voodoo dolls aren’t voodoo,
what are they? Did they just come out of thin air, dreamed up by writers and
directors who wanted something that felt spooky and African to make cheesy horror movies about?
No. In fact, most of the real inspiration from Voodoo dolls in the sense of good or
evil sympathetic magic comes from an unlikely source: The British Isles.
Dating all the way back to the Middle Ages, there were practitioners of folk magic
throughout England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales known as the Cunning Folk. These would
often be local wise women who would perform basic benevolent spells for the community in
exchange for some kind of payment, including the warding off of witchcraft. That’s right,
under the framework of old British folk magic, Cunning Folk performed feats of magic with the
help of nature, and witches were those who practiced black magic and were in
league with the devil. Though, of course, witch hunters rarely saw the difference.
The closest religious practices you’ll find to the classic Voodoo Doll are practices used by
the Cunning Folk and the witches they were said to have waged war against. Scottish Witches were said
to have made use of the Clay-Body, or clay corpse. A witch would make a Clay-Body in the likeness of
someone they wished to do harm to, then place it under a running stream. If the spell worked,
then as the stream washed the doll away, piece by piece, the victim would waste away, too.
It’s said that if the witch wanted to increase the suffering of the victim,
she could stick the body full of pins before doing the stream part of the ritual.
But even closer to our traditional idea of a voodoo doll is the humble Poppet.
Used by both Cunning Folk and witches, these little dolls can be made from almost anything,
Including carved roots, grain or corn shafts, fruit, paper, wax, potato,
clay, branches, or cloth. Like a lot of effigies and talismans in spiritualism,
the Poppet is a tool to channel the intent of the practitioner. When done right, it’s
believed that any treatment visited on the Poppet will affect whatever person it corresponds to.
But the important thing to remember is that not only can you make a poppet at home pretty easily,
but they don’t even need to be a tool for doing harm. Many people who practice Wicca or Paganism
today create poppets for a variety of reasons, like bringing love into your life - which you can
allegedly do by infusing your poppet with rose quartz, rose petals, parsley, and peppermint.
You can also create a poppet for wealth and prosperity by filling a cloth poppet with
touches of cinnamon, orange, ginger, or even a piece of cash. And heck, if you’re worried that
someone might be using an evil poppet or other talisman to cast a hex on you or your loved ones,
you can even create a protection poppet. Some practitioners say that the best way
to do this is by creating a poppet out of modeling clay and infusing basil, patchouli,
and notes of coffee with hematite, amethyst, and black onyx stones to enhance the spell’s power.
Another strangely adorable subset of the Poppet is the Kitchen Witch,
which, as the name suggests, is an effigy of a witch placed in a person’s kitchen to ward
off bad luck. Those wacky Europeans, what will they come up with next?
Of course, Europe and the British don’t have a monopoly on supernatural dolls. In the Indigenous
Hopi people of the Americas, there are the Kachina Figures. These are ornate dolls made to teach
young women or new brides about spirits known as the Katsinas, who control many aspects of the
natural world under the Hopi belief system. There are also hōko dolls from Japan, made from silk and
human hair, which are meant to act as protective talismans for young women and unborn children.
Even as far back as Ancient Egypt, there’s the Ushabti - funerary statuettes buried with
important figures like pharaohs, who would then become servants to their masters in the afterlife.
But of course, as anyone who is a fan of horror movies knows, there’s an even darker
side to cursed and enchanted dolls. Some spiritual practices hold the belief that
a doll can become possessed by a malevolent spirit or even a demonic entity. Of course,
the science is out on this, but there are a shockingly vast number of reported incidents
of dolls acting on their own or even cursing the people unfortunate enough to interact with them.
To close out our journey into the scarier side of dolls, let’s take
a look at some of the most infamous and terrifying examples right here.
Probably the most famous of them all - and also the only “real life” haunted doll to inspire
a multi-movie franchise - is, of course, Annabelle. This nightmarish Raggedy Ann
was given to a nursing student in the 1970s, where she terrified everyone in the dormitory
by moving around when nobody was looking and writing sinister notes in people’s journals.
When the student understandably wanted nothing more to do with this incredibly creepy doll,
she gave it to the Warrens, a pair of paranormal investigators and notorious
fraudsters. Annabelle sits in a glass case in the Warrens’ paranormal museum to this day.
Then there’s Robert the Doll, an early 1900s nightmare belonging to the Otto family of Key
West, Florida. After seeming to spread bad luck to everyone around him, connecting him to a string of
unfortunate deaths, he was interred at the East Martello Museum. According to local legends,
anyone who takes a photo of Robert without first asking for his permission is doomed
to be haunted by him, with the only cure being to send a written apology letter to
his exhibit. This seems a little ridiculous, but Robert’s exhibit is surrounded by apology
letters from people who took his photo without permission and suffered the consequences.
And for our money, the creepiest of them all is Letta - Whose name is literally short for
“Letta Me Out.” This doll with a mug that only a mother could love was found underneath the
floorboards of a house in the Australian town of Wagga Wagga over 40 years ago but
has been allegedly dated to be over 200 years old. And we’re sorry to tell you that she hasn’t
aged gracefully. Its current owner, Kerry Walton, claims that it causes a profound sense of dread,
has moved of its own volition, and has been impossible to get rid of.
And to keep the Louisiana tradition of using Voodoo Doll legends to fleece tourists,
he’ll let you take a photo with Letta for five Australian dollars. What a bargain.
Now check out “Real Creepy Cursed Objects.” Or watch this instead!