While doing research for my newly revised edition of Demonic Dolls, I came across a fun little story about an allegedly haunted Elsa doll. (Elsa, as in the movie Frozen.) While the story didn't make it into the book, I didn't want to just "let it go," so here it is, and yes, I'll stop now with the puns.
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Some haunted dolls come with centuries-old provenance and gothic backstories. Elsa came from a toy store shelf in 2013—a mass-produced Disney merchandise doll modeled after the character from Frozen. When Emily Madonia of Houston, Texas, gave the doll to her daughter Aurélia for Christmas that year, it seemed like an ordinary gift for a Frozen-obsessed child. The doll sang “Let It Go” when you pressed a button on its necklace and spoke cheerful phrases from the movie. It was exactly what it was supposed to be.
For two years, anyway.
In 2015, without warning or explanation, the doll began alternating between English and Spanish when it spoke. There was no button to change languages, no setting to adjust. It simply happened—sometimes English, sometimes Spanish, sometimes a jarring mix of both. The Madonias found this odd but chalked it up to a manufacturing glitch, the kind of minor malfunction that comes with cheap electronic toys.
Then the doll began speaking and singing on its own, even when switched off.
For six years, the family never changed Elsa’s batteries. Six years. Yet the doll continued to function, randomly breaking into song or reciting movie lines at unexpected moments, often in the middle of the night. The voice would drift through the house, high and tinny, singing about letting go while the family tried to sleep. When they flipped the doll’s off switch, it made no difference. Elsa spoke when she wanted to speak.
By December 2019, the Madonias had had enough. Emily’s husband Mat threw the doll in the trash, and that should have been the end of it. It wasn’t.
Weeks later, Emily’s daughter came to her with a puzzled expression. She’d found Elsa inside the wooden bench in their living room. The kids insisted they hadn’t put it there, and Emily believed them—they wouldn’t have dug through the outdoor garbage to retrieve a doll they’d outgrown. Besides, the doll bore the distinctive marker stains from years of Aurélia’s coloring. It was unmistakably the same Elsa, not a replacement.
Determined to be rid of it for good, Emily and Mat wrapped the doll tightly in its own garbage bag, then put that bag inside another bag filled with other trash, and buried it at the bottom of their garbage can beneath multiple layers of refuse. They wheeled the can to the curb. The garbage truck came and took it away.
The family went out of town and tried to forget about it. When they returned, they learned that Elsa hadn’t forgotten about them.
“Today Aurélia says ‘Mom, I saw the Elsa doll again in the backyard,’” Emily wrote on Facebook, the creeping dread evident even through the screen. “HELP US GET RID OF THIS HAUNTED DOLL.”
Some suggested it was a prank. Emily considered the possibility. But who would dig through garbage that had already been collected by the truck? Who would break into their property multiple times to return a child’s toy? “Either the doll is haunted,” she wrote, “or some crazy psychopath has dug the doll out of the garbage and broken into my house/property multiple times. I am going to go with the haunted thing.”
The family couldn’t burn the doll, Emily explained when people suggested it. “If there is something in the doll, it will come out. You can’t destroy what’s inside.” So she came up with a different solution, one that would most assuredly get the doll off her property: mail it far, far away.
Chris Hogan, an online running friend of Emily’s who lived 1,500 miles away in Minnesota, agreed to take the doll. Emily packed Elsa into a box with no return address so he couldn’t send it back even if he wanted to.
As she was sealing the box, the doll began to laugh.
It wasn’t the brief, programmed giggle that usually followed Elsa’s recorded phrases. This was different. The doll laughed for thirty seconds straight—a continuous, mechanical cackle that had never happened before in the six years they’d owned it. Emily and Mat stared at the box in horror before taping it shut and rushing it to the post office.
Hogan, who described himself as “a skeptic that doesn’t believe in ghosts or magic,” thought the whole thing was hilarious. When Elsa arrived, he taped her to the brush guard of his Jeep. “If anything weird happens,” he posted on Facebook, “I’m welding her into a steel pipe and sinking it in the Lake of the Woods.”
As of late 2020, Emily reported that Elsa had not returned. “We have had our fair share of weird things happening around the house, though,” she noted, keeping her eyes out just in case.
The Elsa doll’s story differs from most haunted doll accounts in its very ordinariness. This wasn’t an antique from a mysterious estate sale or a handcrafted heirloom passed down through generations. It was a factory-made toy from a children’s movie, one of thousands identical to it sitting on store shelves. If something truly latched onto this particular doll, it chose the most mundane vessel imaginable.
Perhaps that’s what makes it unsettling. If a mass-produced Disney toy can become haunted, then anything in your home could be next. The story forces a question that most people would rather not consider: What if the ordinary objects around us, the ones we barely notice, are capable of becoming something else entirely?
Emily Madonia never wanted to be known as “the haunted doll lady.” She’s a mom, a violinist, a wife—someone who simply wanted her daughter’s old toy to stay in the garbage where it belonged. Instead, she became part of a story that thousands of people have since shared, debated, and shuddered over. And somewhere in Minnesota, an Elsa doll remains taped to a Jeep, her frozen smile unchanged, singing “Let It Go” in two languages to no one in particular.