Fort East Martello Museum

At Fort East Martello Museum in Key West, Florida, there's a 40-inch doll in a child's sailor suit who sits behind glass, and the rule the museum tells you is exact. Ask permission before you photograph Robert the Doll. If his head tilts, the answer is no.

People take the picture anyway. The wall behind his case tells you what they think happened next — it's papered with apology letters, pinned up by the museum, and one to three more arrive in the mail every day. They're written to Robert, by name, asking forgiveness from people who blame him for what came after the photo. According to local folklore the list runs to car accidents, broken bones, lost jobs, and divorces.

Robert had a real boy once. Robert Eugene Otto, who called himself Gene, owned the doll from childhood and named it after himself. As a child, when furniture moved or things broke in the house, Gene said the same three words: "Robert did it." He grew up to be a prominent Key West artist, and he designed the very museum gallery where the doll now lives. He died in 1974.

The doll came to the fort in 1994, donated by a woman who'd owned the Otto house and said Robert moved around her home on his own. The museum has kept its own list of what he does since: a facial expression that seems to shift when you talk to him, cameras and phones that fail in his presence, a plumber who said he heard giggling and turned to find the doll had crossed the room. A journalist who got close described it plainly. "It was like a metal bar running down my back," Malcolm Ross said. "There was some kind of intelligence there. The doll was listening to us."

The fort around him was built in 1862 to defend Key West, a brick tower meant for a Civil War battle it never saw. It was never armed and never fired a shot. The most famous haunted object in America lives inside a fortress that never did the one thing it was built for.