Artist House

Some guests in the turret room at the Artist House, on Eaton Street in Key West, have a whole conversation with the woman in the wedding dress before they understand what she is. She comes down the staircase to talk. Others never reach the conversation — they just wake to a shadowy female figure standing at the foot of the bed. Most believe she's Anne Otto, the concert pianist who lived in this house for close to forty years.

The address is famous for something else. This was the family home of artist Gene Otto, and it's where Robert the Doll spent his childhood, propped in a turret window facing the street. Robert moved to a museum in 1994. The house kept right on being haunted without him.

The Ottos were native Key Westers who settled into the fifteen-room Queen Anne house in 1898, under the octagonal turret Gene later used as his painting studio. Gene married Anne in Paris in 1930. He died in 1974; Anne died two years later. The reports on the staircase began long before the doll ever left.

There is a second figure, and she's the one that lingers. A 1980s caretaker named Poochie Myers described a small girl who sits scrunched up on the stairs, sometimes crying, sometimes angry. "She sits all scrunched up in a little white, old-fashioned nightgown," Myers said. "She has long, light brown curls. She seems to be about five years old."

No one is sure who the girl is. A local researcher ties her to a nanny named Emeline Abbott, who sued Dr. Thomas Otto's estate in 1924, and to a child who may have died in the doctor's home office near the front of the house. That part is theory, drawn from old census records, not record. Gene Otto turns up too, in the paranormal logs alongside a woman in white near the attic.

The doll was always the headline. He was never the whole house.