Robert the Doll

A Harlequin doll made for a Key West boy in the early 20th century and donated in 1994 to Key West's Fort East Martello Museum by an owner who said it moved about her house by itself.

The Key West Art & Historical Society says Robert was made in Germany by the Steiff Company as a one-off Harlequin doll in the early 20th century. Robert was a present for Gene Otto, whose father Joseph Otto was a Key West doctor. Wikipedia says the doll stayed in the family house at 534 Eaton Street during Gene Otto's art studies in Paris and New York. He married Annette Parker in Paris in 1930, and the couple lived in the Eaton Street house until his death in 1974. She died two years later.

Myrtle Reuter then bought the house. The society dates her purchase to 1974 and says she kept the doll when she moved house six years later, to Von Phister Street. In 1994 she gave Robert to the museum at Fort East Martello, saying he walked around her home unaided and was haunted. She died a few months after the gift. Wikipedia says later owners turned the Eaton Street house into a guest house.

At the museum the doll draws mail. Atlas Obscura was told that one to three letters arrive each day and that staff have filed well over a thousand. Many writers blame bad luck after a visit on having slighted Robert and ask his pardon. Others want his advice, or a hex on someone who hurt them. David Sloan, whom the society calls the leading expert on the doll, wrote the 2014 book Robert the Doll.