Voodoo Dolls
Not me, but a story passed onto me by my grandma about my now late aunt. In all seriousness, I think it was just a hell of a coincidence, but it is still pretty damn spooky.
A bit of context: my aunt was an assistant costume designer for a lot of famous movies and Broadway productions. Casino with Robert De Niro, Marvin’s Room with Leonardo DiCaprio, Ransom with Mel Gibson, she was the head of the puppet shop for the original Lion King musical, and I’m pretty sure she worked on the first production of Cats. So, to be clear, costume design and everything that goes into the production of a major feature film or Broadway musical is grueling, and there is a crazy drug culture that you’re probably going to get sucked into. My aunt lost her sense of smell from cocaine use. It’s bad.
Onto the story.
Back in the 90s, my grandma went to New Orleans on vacation, and my aunt, ever the eccentric, asked her to bring back a dozen voodoo dolls. My grandma agreed, I believe she wanted to take home something as a souvenir for herself as well, and eventually she found herself touring one of the many little tourist trap museums in the city.
The tour was fine, and she ended up in the gift shop, browsing their selection of dolls. For the record, my grandma is a huge, nearly six foot tall Jewish woman from the Bronx, so she’s insanely abrasive and has zero reservations about speaking up if she wants something, at the expense of any social niceties. It’s made going out to eat with her extremely embarrassing, but I digress.
Anyway, she looked at the tour guide (and owner? I wasn’t clear on that part) and loudly announced that their selection of voodoo dolls was lousy, and asked if they had anything better. Turns out, they did. Tour guide/owner led her into a backroom, where a couple people were working on making the dolls. The selection back there, she said, was far superior to the ones in the front. The tour guide then asked what specifically she was looking for. My grandma said she needed a dozen for my aunt, something for her to help with her knee pain, which bothered her mostly at night, and then something to protect my uncle, who had recently taken to motorcycle riding. She wanted a good luck charm so he wouldn’t get into a wreck.
The tour guide provided. He gave her a dozen dolls, then a charm which he said would help with the knee pain, just place it under your bed at night, and then a second charm for good luck my uncle could hang on the handlebars of his motorcycle.
So that was that! She went home, followed the directions, her knee pain went away. My uncle thought it was silly, but humored her by hanging up the charm, and to its credit, he never got into an accident.
My money is just on the fact that the dolls worked as placebo, or my grandma’s knee pain was merely a temporary ailment that went away naturally, and my uncle was just a safe biker.
But the real story is with the dozen she gave to my aunt. So at this point in time, my aunt had moved to Las Vegas to work on the film Casino, and she brought the dolls with her to hang up in her office. One of her coworkers took a liking to one of the dolls, which just so happened to also be my aunt’s favorite.
Eventually, this coworker asked if he could have the doll. My aunt shut that down real quick. Absolutely not, it was a present from her mom, it was hers, and not only that, it was also the best one of the bunch. She wasn’t giving it away. He offered to buy it, no dice.
He tried a few more times after this to convince my aunt to let him have the doll, but she remained firm.
Then the doll went missing. It was pretty obvious what happened to it. The guy took it, and this was confirmed once his office was cleared out and they found it in one of his desk drawers.
You see, the office had to be cleared because three days after the doll went missing, they found this coworker floating facedown, dead in a pool.
Now, I’m a skeptic. I don’t believe in magic, or ghosts. I don’t even like astrology. I am the most mundane person you’ll ever meet. If you asked me, I’d say it was a work party, they found coke in his system, I expect he fell into the pool while on a coke binge and drowned, and no one found him until the next morning because they were all either high or drunk themselves.
That being said… it is a little creepy. And I can’t help but wonder if somehow that little voodoo doll tugged at his karmic strings so that maybe he took a little too much, maybe he stepped a little too close. Maybe, just maybe, in some weird, vague, and highly metaphysical way, it arranged for him to drown.
Probably not. But still.
Crazy, right?