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Warning! If you suffer from pediophobia, the irrational fear of dolls, do not listen to this episode. And definitely never visit our next location. As you walk through this small town in Japan, it may feel like all eyes are on you, but those eyes are not of the living. If you've ever watched Annabelle, Child's Play, Puppet Master, or Dead Silence,
You know that dolls can be quite terrifying, even if it's just your imagination. So imagine: living in a town with so many soulless residents, staring you down every day. Or even worse: imagine trying to go to sleep there. Welcome to Destination Terror, your passport to the scariest places in the world.
From haunted hotels to locations of unexplained creature sightings, we will travel to places that will provide excitement, adventure and horror. Today we are visiting the Village of the Dolls, a place where dolls have a disturbing and overwhelming presence, as they outnumber the locals by 10 to 1. So if you're into travel and all things scary, listen close and you might just discover your next exciting adventure destination.
But hopefully, not your final destination. Destination Terror is an EerieCast original podcast hosted by me, Carmen Carrion. If you would like to send us a suggestion or submit a story with your own experience, you can email them to carmencarrion at gmail.com or follow me on Twitter at Carmen Carrion. If you enjoy the show, please follow and rate Destination Terror on Spotify and Apple Podcasts to help us grow.
Also, check out EerieCast.com for more scary podcasts, such as Redwood Bureau and Tales from the Break Room. Jay said in his study trying to decide where to go for his 60th birthday, he had become quite the traveler in the last 25 years, divorced for that exact amount of time. And that's how he had begun coping. And eventually, travel became an addiction. He had also been through a string of women since then. Another addiction.
However, now he sat alone in his huge three-story house, feeling more alone than he ever had, and filled with regret that he had never done more with his life than work and travel. He had inherited this glorious home from his long-dead mother. He also had regrets there. He had become estranged from her after she had sided with one of his many exes, but in her dying days, she loved her son enough to forgive him for the brutal words he had said to her.
Jay sat recalling the last thing he had said to his mother now. "You will die alone." And she indeed had. His mom had left him everything, despite how cold he had been to her. He took a deep drag from his cigarette, now thinking of the past, and felt a tear prick the corner of his eye. How he wished she would have seen things his way, and she wouldn't have had to spend her last bit of time on this earth by herself. He knew in his heart he'd been right for cutting her out of his life.
That woman, that ex, had made his life hell. She was the first woman since his previous divorce with whom he wanted their relationship to work. But she hadn't felt the same way. He found out that she had been having an affair with someone much younger than Jay while she had been traveling for work. The man lived in Alaska and was her age. There was one thing that Jay hated to admit to himself. He didn't like women his own age.
He had always dated younger women, much younger. He preferred them to be no less than 20 years his junior. Well, Chastity, the girlfriend in question, was actually 30 years his junior. He really thought it was going to work out with her, a 30-year-old with small children. In his rage of finding out she had been sleeping with someone else, he had driven to her home to confront her.
She wouldn't allow him entry into her home because he had been utterly unhinged, screaming the worst profanities at her through her front door. When she wouldn't open the door, he had walked around to the backside of her property and shot her prize horse in the head. He spent a few months in prison, but his mother still admonished him for what he had done, even though he had already paid for it. That's when the bad blood between him and his mom began.
She should have sided with him no matter what, and he would never change his mind about that. Jay's phone rang, snapping him out of his thoughts and bringing him back to the present. Hello. It was his travel agent. He had been abroad seeing some of the world's most amazing sights in existence. He had decided to call Pam, his agent, and ask for a different kind of trip though. Somewhere less traveled. Somewhere that he could feel much more like a part of the culture, and less like a tourist.
Pam began talking in her overly sweet salesperson voice and naming off places she found for him to possibly vacation. Jay listened to her ideas, but nothing grabbed his attention. He tried to explain himself to her again. "Pamela, dear, I'm hearing your suggestions, but I don't think you understand what I'm looking for. I want to spend time among the locals wherever I go. I want to really immerse myself in the culture.
"I just need you to do what you're best at and find me somewhere sufficient for those basic needs. I don't require fancy hotels and touristy attractions. I want to rough it, if you will." Pam, the ever-amazing travel agent, immediately acknowledged his request with a fervent apology and promised Jay that she would find him the perfect place for his needs. They hung up with the usual pleasantries.
Jay placed the phone back down and rose from where he'd been sitting at his desk. He stretched out his back with a sigh and rubbed his silver beard before heading downstairs. The stairs creaked beneath his feet as he descended onto the bottom floor. He walked over to his bar in the parlor and poured himself a large scotch. Drinking was his other favorite pastime. He took a seat on the emerald green Victorian couch, facing the fireplace, and took a gulp from his mega-print glass of scotch.
Jay woke up the next morning to the ringing of his phone. He groggily reached over to his end table and answered in a sleepy and slightly hateful tone. Hello. Hello, Jay. How are you this lovely morning? It was Pam, the travel agent. Dear Lord, what do you want this early, Pamela? Well, I stayed up all night looking for the perfect place for you to escape to for a while. Now, before you say no, just hear me out.
Jay's ears perked up at this information, and he sat up in the bed. Scratching the scruff on his chin, he told Pam to continue. "Okay. It's in Japan. Nagoro, to be exact. It's well off the beaten path, and there are a few residents that live there. It's a place deep in Iya Valley. It can't be accessed by regular means of transportation. There is airplane and train travel involved, and then a bus to finish taking you to the village. How does this sound so far?"
Pam asked with excitement in her voice. "So far, so good. Sounds nice. And I haven't been to Japan, so that's a bonus," Jay said with a bit of happiness in his voice, much to Pam's delight. "So the village only has one touristy thing. So the village only has one touristy thing. It's very short on living residents, but there are over 300 to 400 other residents.
Jay stopped her then. "What do you mean, 'other residents'?" "Well, the village is basically a ghost town. There's a woman there that creates dolls. Nearly human-sized dolls." She began this in an effort to make the village feel less isolated, depressing, and dead. "Now this does draw some travelers, but not many during this time of year. Also, there are no hotels, so I can set you up in the nearest city.
Pam sat listening to Jay's light breathing on the other end of the phone. Finally, after what felt like an eternity, he responded, "No hotel accommodations are required. I'll figure that out when I get there. Please get the rest of my arrangements made." Pam couldn't believe he had actually agreed to go to this location, but she was so happy that he had. Jay was her least favorite client, but even so, she did try her hardest to find what all of her clients wanted.
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Nagoro, a village with a population of less than 30 people, has become a unique tourist attraction. Its streets are far from bustling and things are remarkably still, eerily so. The atmosphere is downright disturbing. As you walk the streets, you will see the figures of many people, some sitting on porches or street corners. You will find classrooms filled with children, but what makes this disturbing is that almost none of them are real.
But they are everywhere you look. They are, however, not people. They are actually life-size dolls who make up the majority of Nagoro's population. Dolls outnumber humans by a ratio of more than 10 to 1. The handmade dolls are one woman's attempt to alleviate Nagoro's loneliness. As time passes, this small village becomes increasingly depopulated.
The village of Nagoro on the southwestern island of Shikoku, in Japan, was once home to hundreds of residents. But over the years, Nagoro's population had fallen dramatically, as the elderly die and the village's young inhabitants left to find work and better lives in cities, leaving the very old, the pensioners, as Nagoro's only residents today.
The village, also called Kakashi-no-Sato, or Scarecrow Village, is not unlike other rural areas in Japan, facing this depopulation trend. Since 2010, the nation has lost about 1.4 million of its people, and it's having a major impact on both the economy and society. However, it appears that no one has left Nagoro.
Each doll appears to contain the soul of a departed villager. According to a local official, the figures have even been added to the census records of the village, with detailed descriptions of each figure. In this way, the dolls appear to have a larger-than-life presence in the village of Nagoro. It all started when Tsukimi Ayano, 67, returned to Nagoro.
where she was born and raised. Prior to that, she had spent her entire adult life in Osaka, Japan's third largest city. Ayano has made a unique contribution to Nagoro's rapidly declining population since her return. She noticed that the village, which had once housed over 300 people, had shrunk to just 35. Following her father's death, Ayano decided to create a scarecrow in his image.
one that looks so much like him that her neighbors began initiating conversations with it. Nearly 15 years later, Nagoro is populated by 10 times the number of Ayano's lifelike dolls as actual people, with many of them representing people who have recently died or moved away from the village. In Fritz Schumann's short documentary, "The Valley of the Dolls: About the Artist", Ayano says of her creations: "When I make dolls of dead people, I think about them when they were alive and healthy.
The dolls are like my children. Ayano makes the dolls from straw, fabric, newspaper and old clothes. She is always making new ones to replace older figures that wear out, from being exposed to the elements. She says the mouths are the hardest part. The lips are the key to making many expressions appear realistic. There are dolls almost everywhere in town, waiting for buses, farming and simply hanging out.
Some are even attending a wedding for a pair of traditional dress dolls. Most, however, are located along the roadside and serve to attract visitors. You can take a virtual tour of Nagoro's Main Street and see them for yourself. As a result of Google Earth, hundreds of handmade dolls have now repopulated Nagoro's nooks and crannies. They've turned into a tourist attraction, revitalizing the town in their own unique way. However, not all of the figures can be seen from the road.
When the local elementary school closed in 2012, Ayano filled it with childlike dolls and staff. The once abandoned school is now home to students who are eagerly awaiting the start of classes. Two lone dolls sit at desks in one classroom, representing the last two students who attended the school before it closed. The current residents enjoy the figures and appear to be irritated that visitors sometimes find them creepy.
Finding them creepy makes perfect sense when you consider how many of the dolls are based on actual residents. Any creepiness that does exist stems primarily from the way the dolls appear to take over in the stillness of Nagoro, which has been largely abandoned. Dolls are creepy. They have soulless, unblinking eyes. They appear to have the ability to come to life at any time and murder everyone with their cold hands.
Their uncanny plastic and cloth features morphing from a facade of innocence to pure evil. So an entire village, populated primarily by life-size dolls, is a terrifying prospect. In fact, it sounds like the perfect place to shoot a horror film. There is even a psychological reason that dolls seem so creepy to many of us. The first horror movie I ever saw where a doll was an evil killer monster was Child's Play.
Chucky scared me so bad as a kid, I still refuse to watch the movie. And then along came Annabelle. If you weren't creeped out by dolls before then, watching this movie will definitely alter that for you. Numerous films and television shows have capitalized on a similar premise. Dolls are creepy as hell. The more human-like they appear, with moving glass eyes, realistic hair, or a slight blush on the cheek, the stranger we find them.
But why do we find them so unsettling? It's related to how our brains detect and pay attention to faces. According to Talia Wheatley, a cognitive neuroscientist at Dartmouth University, "She's been using our responses to dolls to look into a simple skill that we all have, but that remains a mystery in neuroscience: how do we tell a 'who' from a 'what'? And what can the creepiness of a doll tell us about that process?"
She claims that it all starts with how we perceive faces. We have paid special attention to them since we were babies. According to studies, newborns pay more attention to actual faces than to faces with scrambled features. It's also been proven that the brain shows activity in specific regions to any face in just 170 milliseconds, allowing us to notice them quickly. Our brains aren't picky when it comes to rapid face recognition.
Two circles and a curve produce the same face response as a human face, which is why we sometimes see faces in inanimate objects, such as power outlets and wood grain patterns in our cabinets. But if that was the extent of our facial recognition capabilities, we'd be lost in the world.
Wheatley wrote, "We must be able to distinguish faces worthy of our thoughts, feelings and actions from false alarms that are not actually faces. Otherwise we might regard clouds, cars or houses as objects with a mental life. The ability of our own brains to distinguish between who and what lies not only in our ability to see faces, but also in our ability to determine whether a face has a mind attached to it."
Wheatley showed Dartmouth students a series of images that morphed from a doll to a human baby, with many in-betweens, in 2010. She said, "We knew that one endpoint was a doll, and the other endpoint was a human being. The question was whether there'd be any consistency, and when people determined it slipped from one to the other, they discovered that people were very specific about what that spot was. It wasn't halfway.
Our standards for humanity are higher. People perceived the image to be 65-67% human. Whether people were asked if the face "had a mind", could form a plan, or was able to experience pain, the same tipping point occurred, indicating that recognizing life in a face is tantamount to recognizing the capacity for a mental life.
When Wheatley asked participants why they felt that way, one said it was because the doll "started to look back at me." Wheatley used EEG to measure the brain responses of people looking at doll faces, human faces, and the face of a clock in a follow-up study.
She discovered that the brain perceives faces in two stages. The first we already know: a face can be detected quickly. However, there is another, longer process in which our brains attempt to determine whether a face has a mind. If the brain decides that the face does, your attention is drawn to it. If you believe something does not have a mind, your interest will wane. Wheatley believes the first part is very primitive, which is why even newborns can do it.
That needs to be quick because it's about survival at that point, to detect possible faces very quickly, she says. However, the second stage goes beyond mere survival. You're basically looking to see if this person has a mind with which you can connect. Is anyone home? That's where the creepiness comes in. Your brain is looking for a mind, and not finding it with dolls or other human-like objects that do a better job of mimicking what real faces look like.
However, it receives many of the same cues as faces with minds. "There are signals telling our brain that this thing is alive," she explains. "However, we know it's not alive, and the contrast is extremely unsettling."
Of course, not everyone finds Dahls scary. But for those of us that do, the village of the Dahls would definitely be a terrifying destination.
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When Jay exited the flight that brought him to Japan, he felt excitement like he hadn't felt since he inherited his mother's mansion. He made his way to where his transportation to Iya Valley was located. When he arrived, he was happy to see that the driver had been anticipating his arrival. The man that was to take him most of the way there did not speak much English.
It was at this realization that he silently beat himself over the head, for not bothering to even pick up a Japanese to English translation book. The ride was long and silent, so long that Jay had fallen asleep in the back of the car. It was a good thing he had taken a long nap, because when they reached the stopping point, he was going to have a long hike ahead of him. He was determined to make this trip as authentic to the culture as possible. He knew he could have driven to Nagoro, but he had decided he wanted to rough it.
The road became bumpy, and Jay's head bounced off the window knocking him awake, rather unceremoniously. He heard laughter from the man in the front seat as he grumbled from his head getting rattled. They soon approached the drop-off point, and the car came to an abrupt stop. Jay got out and walked to the trunk of the sedan. The man popped the trunk open and Jay removed his hiking pack. The pack was heavy with food, a tent, water, and a map, and any other provisions he might need for the treacherous hike.
The man wished him farewell in his native tongue and then was off. He sped off rather fast. Jay couldn't help but notice. Jay walked briskly ahead, ready to see the village of dolls. He hadn't told Pam because it wasn't her business, but he had plans to stay in the forest near the village, rather than opt for a hotel in a neighboring city. He hiked along in the humidity that he was not accustomed to. He was from New England, and this was too much for him.
He had to keep stopping for water breaks. Finally, the sun began to set, and he took out his tent and set up a small camp. The next morning, he made himself a breakfast of fried bacon and eggs over the campfire and swigged down his Starbucks canned coffee before heading onward. Jay hadn't realized how close he was to the village the day before. If he had just kept going for two more hours, he would have been there.
As he walked over the top of the last hill, he could see the village down below in a small valley. A smile plastered across his face, he walked to his latest adventure. The village was eerily quiet, and sure enough, he could see lifelike dolls scattered around. There were some in the likeness of old men sitting on benches, in front of huts, and the eyes seemed to follow him as he walked past them. Then he saw a woman standing in front of a well, frozen in place.
The well had drawn his attention as it was beautiful, the stonework rising from the ground with a wooden bucket hanging from the woman's hands. Jay was awestruck by the craftsmanship of the doll, until she threw the bucket down and ran into a nearby home. Jay nearly had a heart attack at this. He could have sworn she was a doll too, but apparently his eyesight had betrayed him. He walked toward the hut she had run to and tapped lightly on the bamboo door frames.
He didn't hear anything, so he tapped again, and still nothing. Jay was feeling on edge now, as he turned and surveyed the village better. There were dolls everywhere. He turned back to the hut's entryway and slowly began to enter. Once he was standing inside, he saw the woman again. She was crouched in a corner with wide, scared eyes. Jay stayed planted where he was standing and tried to convey that he was not a danger, but the woman stayed stark still.
She had tears pouring from her eyes and rolling down her face. But she made no noise. He couldn't even hear her breathing. Finally, Jay walked toward the woman. He put his hand out toward her, but as he did, she toppled over. Jay jumped back in shock. The woman had straw protruding from her neck. She wasn't a woman at all. Jay let out a scream that he heard from outside of his body and took off running.
His heart was about to beat out of his chest as he ran further into the village looking for a place to hide. He saw a sturdy looking building with doors and windows. That's where his legs started to carry him. Once inside with the door shut firmly behind him, he walked slowly down the only hallway he saw. The building was dark and growing darker as black rain clouds were billowing over the valley. He turned into the first room he saw. To his horror, it was filled with doll children.
Each desk was occupied, and every child faced the front of the class. The eyes were looking at a chalkboard with a lesson written in Japanese. Jay turned and took off running back the way he had come. He ran out of the building with his brain in panic mode, hot tears of fear pouring down his cheeks against his will. He had to slow his pace to keep from having a full-blown heart attack. Jay was beginning to question his sanity. Had he really seen what he thought he saw?
No, he finally convinced himself. Yet there was the fact that he still hadn't seen a person, not a real one. Jay found a clearing slightly behind the village and hunkered down. He watched the village as the rain clouds grew bigger and blacker while he did. He didn't see anything for several hours. No movement, no people, nothing. And it wasn't long before he was soaked from the rain that had opened up upon him.
Jay had a troubled past, and in the dark and rain, he had let his memories of his mother's death come back to him now. He had cut her out of his life because she had sided with that wench Chastity, but now he wanted nothing more than to be in his mom's warm embrace. He was scared like a little boy, and he hated it. He remembered his words to her, that she would die alone, and he regretted them, because in the moonlight, he could now see movement.
Dolls, dragging their heavy bodies towards him. Jay jumped up from his spot and began to frantically run again, this time toward the hill he had crested when he first saw the village of Dolls. He ran like a madman toward that hill. His salvation lay just over it. The ground was slippery and muddy. Jay kept falling and getting up, but his body was battered and tired.
He was trying not to lose the will to run, but a heart attack five years ago left him feeling like he was going to have a repeat. He looked around again and didn't see any dolls coming after him. He slowed his pace, stayed close to the edges of the huts, and tried to catch his breath. Jay felt like he was either going insane or possibly he had walked into hell this day.
He didn't know which, because as he looked between the huts, he was hiding behind. He now saw the dolls back in their original places. He decided he definitely was not going back into the village. He leaned against the building he was hiding behind and slid down into a sitting position. The rain was still hammering down on him, and the water and mud were ever growing. Again, his mom popped into his head. He couldn't understand why, at a time like this, he couldn't stop thinking about her.
When Jay told her she was going to die alone, she had accepted it and told him she knew. It was like she had expected him to do this someday. But he knew that was impossible. Sitting on the slurping muddy ground, Jay sat tormented by his fear of what was after him in this village, but also tormented by his last interaction with his mother. This was insane. He had to stop thinking of that now and focus on getting over the hill and back to safety.
Jay stood up and could hear the mud squelch as he did. When he looked around the hut, he saw that all the dolls' heads were turned to face him. This made his chest burst with adrenaline, and he started the mad dash toward the hill again. However, Jay wouldn't make it to the Hill of Salvation. While he had been sitting there hiding and being tormented by his past evil deeds, toward his mother, his heart had been giving out.
This must be why she had kept cropping into his memories. At a time like this, his shame and guilt was coming full circle. Jay had thought the chest pain to be from all the running and panic, but in fact, his heart was taking its last beats. He fell over, face first, into a puddle that was a mere three inches deep. It was there that Jay realized he was going to drown in a damned puddle of water, while stupid dolls closed in on him.
And his last thought was, oh, how he would have liked to have had one more mega pint of scotch. The following day, a tour bus led out several people to look around the village of the dolls. In front of a hut that had been erected early that morning by the remaining human residents, a man-sized doll sat on a bench, holding a mega pint with amber-colored liquid, with a huge grin that had been stitched onto his face.
Thank you for joining us to explore the Village of the Dolls. Tune in next week as we discuss another terrorific destination. I'm Carmen Carrion. Remember, you can send me suggestions and stories of haunted places to my email, carmencarion at gmail.com or follow me on Twitter at Carmen Carrion. Be sure to check out eeriecast.com for more terrifying podcasts.
Until next time, be safe out there. Until I see you at our next destination.
