5 Modern Horror Scenes Ripped Out of History Books

5 There Were "Killer Doll" Legends a Century Before Chucky

The Scene:

In Child's Play, a boy is given a doll as a gift, but little does he know that it has an evil spirit trapped inside thanks to a voodoo spell. The doll does various evil things that the kid gets blamed for, but when he tells people that the doll is alive, no one believes him ... until the doll starts killing people, that is.

The History:

Child's Play was partly based on the early 1900s Key West, Florida, legend of Robert the Doll ... who is still around. Here's a picture of him:

Purportedly, a young boy named Gene Otto was given a life-size straw doll made in his likeness, which he named Robert. From that day onward, Gene and Robert were inseparable. They'd dress alike and sleep together, and Robert even got his own spot at the dinner table.

But then things got weird(er). Some versions of the story say that one of the servants, who was of Caribbean descent, was treated unfairly by the family and cursed Robert with a voodoo spell.

So the story goes that members of the house staff claimed that Gene would sometimes talk to Robert, who would reply in an entirely different voice. When things would end up misplaced or broken around the house, Gene would claim that Robert did it, but no one would believe him. Eventually, Robert was relegated to the attic and forgotten about.

But when Gene grew up, his parents' house became his, and upon moving in, he rediscovered Robert in the attic. According to some tellings, Robert once again gained a seat at the dinner table, and Gene would even prop him up in a chair next to his marriage bed every night.

After Gene Otto's death, Robert was left behind in the house, which passed from owner to owner. Various stories of noises and childlike giggling were reported in the house until Robert was finally donated to a museum in 1994. Today, Robert is a tourist attraction and an amusing urban legend no one at the museum actually believes in ... until he starts killing people, of course.

4 There Were UFO Sightings in the 19th Century

The Scene:

In the 1993 film Fire in the Sky, six loggers working late in the mountains come across an actual, no-shit flying saucer while driving in their truck. One of the men approaches the UFO and is knocked out cold by a light coming from it. The other five get the fuck out of there fast, and when they come back, there's no trace of their friend.

Obviously, stories about UFO encounters are older than a movie from the 1990s: We've told you before that alien abductions in fiction are older than real-life claims of abductions by decades. But the idea of spotting spaceships in the sky goes back to even before that ... as in, before human flight was even possible.

The History:

In 1865, a St. Louis newspaper reported that a trapper named James Lumley was working late in the mountains, much like the dudes from Fire in the Sky, when he spotted a "bright, luminous body in the heavens," followed by an explosion. Instead of sticking around to get picked up by it, though, he kept his distance, and the next day he found a large stonelike object with "curious hieroglyphics" carved into it, broken glass, and traces of a dark liquid.

But perhaps the most amazing story of old-timey UFOs is the one that took place in Aurora, Texas, in 1897: As reported by the Dallas Morning News, a mysterious "airship" crashed down on the small town, and when the authorities examined the remains of the pilot inside, they found him to be "not an inhabitant of this world." The pilot was buried in the local cemetery, and supposedly his grave is still there, although unmarked.

We're not saying it was a real spaceship; we're just pointing out that even this story predates The War of the Worlds. The sci-fi tropes that this seems to be referencing didn't even exist yet.

3 An Ancient Roman Writer Was Haunted by Chain-Rattling Poltergeists

The Scene:

In the final act of Poltergeist (you know, the part with all the panty shots and skeletons), the Freeling family finally discovers the horrifying secret behind their haunted house -- the builders had relocated a cemetery on the land, but only moved the headstones. They left the bodies behind, and so the angry dead took vengeance on the living.

Poltergeist isn't the only movie where you can find this scenario: The Amityville Horror, The Shining and dozens of other stories feature it, too. Typically, it's an ancient Native American burial ground, specifically, so you wouldn't think that this storytelling device is much older than the New World ...

The History:

... except it totally is. A letter written in the first century by Roman magistrate Pliny the Younger has this and a lot of other haunted house tropes as well. In his letter, Pliny told of a philosopher who moved to town, needed a place to stay and saw how cheap a particular house was. He was informed of its purported haunting, but, you know ... a cheap house is a cheap house, and if you throw your toga parties in the public square, you might get arrested.

That night, to prove that he wasn't some pansy, the philosopher sent his servants away and stayed up all night writing. Before long, he heard the clanking of chains and ghostly wailing. He ignored it right up until the noise was in his room. Then, the ghost of an old man with a long beard and chains appeared and beckoned with a skeletal finger for him to follow.

The philosopher followed the ghost into his yard and marked the spot where it stopped. The next morning, he had his servants dig up the spot and found the body of a man bound in chains. They gave the corpse a proper burial, and according to Pliny, the haunting ceased.

We lost count somewhere along the way, but that story has approximately every single feature of every haunted house story ever, and it was written nearly 2,000 years ago.

2 There Was a Song That Supposedly Made People Commit Suicide in the 1930s

The Scene:

Suicide Club is a Japanese horror movie about an inexplicable wave of suicides that hits Tokyo. A group of detectives (from Tokyo's Paranormal Suicide Investigation Unit, apparently) eventually figure out that the deaths are connected to a pop group that likes to include subliminal messages encouraging suicide in their songs.

A similar premise was explored in another Japanese movie called The Suicide Song, about an infectious tune that drives people to kill themselves. So, which one of these movies ripped off the other? Neither: They both ripped off reality.

The History:

Shockingly, this particular premise doesn't come from Asia, but from Europe. In the 1930s, the Hungarian song "Gloomy Sunday" gained worldwide notoriety due to its alleged connection to 18 suicides in Budapest according to some sources, and "more than one hundred" according to others. Here it is:

The depressing song became known all over the world for supposedly causing the death of anyone who listened to it ... so, naturally, music companies started telling their artists to record English versions of it in the States, where rumors continued linking it to suicides. The New York Times blamed the song for the death of a university student who, according to classmates, had recently been trying to memorize the lyrics.

But is there any truth to this? Well, the suicide rate in Hungary has historically been one of the highest in the world, so you could probably find a dozen suicide victims who were listening to any given popular song of the era every week. Perhaps "Gloomy Sunday" simply gained more publicity because the lyrics themselves were about suicide.

However, there's one suicide victim whose connection to the song can't be disputed: the guy who wrote it. In 1968, and with a song about suicide as his only hit, Rezso Seress killed himself by jumping out of his window. Even if his decision had nothing to do with the song, he had to know that everyone would totally assume it did, right?

1 The Zombie Apocalypse Is as Old as the Written Word

The Scene:

In the first episode of The Walking Dead, the protagonist wakes up from a coma to find that while he was sleeping, dead people started coming out of their graves and eating live people, causing society as we know it to crumble one bite at a time.

Ask most horror fans and they'll tell you that this idea dates back to George Romero's Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead movies (where the slogan was "When there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth"), or at most Richard Matheson's I Am Legend novel, which used a plague of vampires instead of zombies. However ...

The History:

What if we told you that people have been obsessed with the zombie apocalypse since ancient Mesopotamia? In The Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest parts of which date back almost 4,000 goddamned years, there's a segment where Ishtar, the goddess of love, war, sex and presumably bipolarity, is rebuffed by Gilgamesh. As revenge, she goes to her father, Anu, and threatens to unleash an army of zombies if he doesn't help her:

"I will knock down the Gates of the Netherworld,
I will smash the door posts, and leave the doors flat down,
and will let the dead go up to eat the living!
And the dead will outnumber the living!"

Dead people eating living people? Check. Complete and utter destruction of society? Check. All of it being caused by some horny chick? OK, this part is new. Ishtar makes the exact same threat in another ancient poem, The Descent of Ishtar, so apparently this was her thing.

But there's more: The next known mention of the zombie apocalypse is in the Bible, of all places, as God's revenge for messing with Jerusalem: "And the Lord will send a plague on all the nations that fought against Jerusalem. Their people will become like walking corpses, their flesh rotting away." (Zechariah 14:12)

The passage goes on to specify that people will then "fight against each other in hand-to-hand combat" -- the only thing Zechariah neglected to mention is that some of them will have crossbows.

And then, in another book of the Bible, the prophet Isaiah even gives some advice to old-timey survivalists: "But your dead will live; their bodies will rise ... Go, my people, enter your rooms and shut the doors behind you; hide yourselves for a little while until his wrath has passed by." (Isaiah 26:19-20)

Maxwell Yezpitelok lives in Chile and writes things. You can bother him on Twitter. For more from Ashe, check out Weird Shit Blog and The Ashe Can.

For more ways that truth is stranger than fiction, check out 9 Real Life Mad Scientists and The 5 Most Ridiculous Attempts to Be a Vampire in Real Life.