UPDATE JAN. 26, 4:37 P.M.: Check the end of the post, they found who was doing it, and it was a false alarm.
Before reading this story you might want to lower the lights a little, and maybe even crawl into bed. Wait, no–this isn't a ghost story. This is real life! Over the last several days, 11 families in the San Clemente community of Talega opened their front doors to find a single, porcelain doll on the porch. Each family has at least one young daughter around 10 years old. Eerily, they said the doll dropped at each porch shares a resemblance with that daughter.
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Once the story broke, another mother in Talega came forward, saying that two weeks prior she also received a strange present. Three small, wooden dolls appeared on her porch with three matching Ziploc bags of interchangeable clothing for each of the dolls.
The families are understandably spooked and staying away from the media at this point. But the incident says a lot about the times in which we live. If several girls received dolls on their doorsteps 100 years ago, it would probably have appeared as a kind gesture, a sort of Ol' St. Nick deed. Have we just seen too many horror movies? Was Michael Moore right when he said we're a society stupefied by fear? The indisputable fact is that we do make our biggest fears into blockbusters, so the images that petrify us are well known. Whoever placed the dolls didn't do so in a vacuum.
UPDATE:
So, they found the person who was doing it. A woman was giving away her dolls because her daughter had outgrown them, and contacted the sheriff after reports broke.
“Her motivation was out of goodwill,” the an OCSD press release said. “It was a kind gesture.”
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