The Haunted Doll of Hokkaido

Many wonder why a doll would be haunted and many see that haunted items are just a silly theory, but my theory is a item can have a history just the same as any location therefore why couldn’t it be haunted?

Here is a interesting a spooky haunted doll story from Japan that i think after reading many may see my logic behind this.

THE OKIKU DOLL

In 1918, Eikichi Suzuki purchased a doll for his two year old sister, Okiku, as a present from his current travels to Saporro.

The doll itself was around 40cm (16 inches) tall and clad in a traditional Japanese kimono. Its eyes are black beads set within the life-like porcelain white face, and the black hair is in a traditional style cut shoulder length. Eikichi knew his sister would love it and decided to buy it. His sister, Okiku, was smitten with the doll, and played with it every day, even going so far as to name it after herself, Okiku.

The two were reportedly inseparable and went everywhere together until Okiku became suddenly ill a year later and after complications of severe influenza and fever, Okiku died. The mourning family placed her beloved doll in a family altar in memory of their daughter.

Not long after placing the doll in the alter, the heartbroken family started to notice odd goings on. The jet black hair of the doll, which apparently had been cropped to about shoulder length and with neat ends had started to grow longer and longer day by day. The neatly trimmed ends of the hair had become random and haphazard in length. Before long, the hair had grown all the way down to the brush against the doll’s knees. The family automatically assumed that somehow their little girl spirit had inhabited inside the doll. Many reported, even when the hair was again trimmed it soon grew back and always stopped around knees length.

In 1938, the family  decided to move to Sakhalin, they was still curious of the doll and they believed that their daughter’s spirit resided within the doll. They brought the doll to Mannenji temple, in the town of Iwamizawa, Hokkaido, Japan. The family explained the doll’s unusual characteristics to the priest of the temple, yet he accepted it anyway and soon was able to see for himself that indeed the doll’s hair continued to grow. Trimming the hair became a regular chore at the temple, and soon pictures of the doll with hair of various lengths were surrounded by the shrine where it was kept.
To this day, the doll remains at Mannenji temple, housed within a modest wooden box, and its hair reportedly continues to grow no matter how often it is trimmed.