Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to Otherworld. I'm your host, Jack Wagner. This episode comes to us from a man named Connor and his wife Lacey.
Chapter 2: What led Connor and Lacy to leave Mormonism?
At the time that all of this took place, Connor and Lacey had just left Mormonism, which they had been raised in their entire life. This was a very big change for Connor, and because of it, he had a complete crisis of faith. He experienced a complete 180, in his beliefs about the spiritual. And when we interviewed him, Connor referred to himself as being a cringe Reddit atheist.
He is not the first person to come on the show and describe himself that way. I think a lot of people who grew up in very religious households end up having a complete reversal like Connor, and they end up being a person who goes out of their way to try to disprove other people's beliefs.
So Connor had a hardline skeptical belief until one day some strange things begin to happen in his house that seemed to be connected to a certain family heirloom that was being stored in the closet. This episode is titled Heirloom and you're listening to Otherworld. Hello? Is this Bobby? Yes, it is. At its core, the science, you can't argue with.
I'm worried about all the science. Up in the sky. It's almost frustrating that it's happening. I'm going to die.
Chapter 3: How did Connor's crisis of faith begin?
His limbs were just like, wrong. Everybody moves back into the light, even if it takes them a minute. So I'm Connor Cox. I'm from Mesa, Arizona. I was born and raised here. I've spent most of my life here. It's only been like maybe a nine month period where I was living in Oregon and I was actually on a Mormon mission. My parents were very, I guess you call them devout Mormons.
It sounds weird, but yeah, they were very devout Mormons. I wasn't really given a lot of choice or like freedom growing up. It was kind of, it was a very strict, very structured household. So like, for example, my parents would go through our music, like our song, and go through like the song lyrics, decide which content they wanted us listening to.
And like, even beyond swear words, like they were worried about like subversive ideas, stuff like that. So that was... and then I ended up actually going to serve a mission. And so a Mormon mission, what that is, once you reach a certain age, What you do is you go out and you basically try and convert people to Mormonism in a very structured sort of way.
They send out the missionaries and all that. While it is voluntary, it's kind of the only choice you have. If you want to be a good Mormon, that is what you need to do. At least as a Mormon man, that was an expectation. I ended up serving a mission at least nine months of one. I came home because I got Lyme disease.
I think just my overall experience with that is actually the first thing that kind of made me start doubting Mormonism. I kind of decided I didn't think what they were saying was the truth, and I didn't believe that the church was actually like God's hand in our life now. It just seemed like it was an organization, and it seemed like they were even kind of corrupt and doing a lot of bad stuff.
That causes a full faith crisis is what I would call it. When your entire worldview and just everything, your whole outlook was based on this, very structured belief system, you try and leave that belief system or try and kind of take that framework out of it, you're gone. It's like, what do I believe about anything? What happens when I die? What is the point of this? What's going on?
What do I wake up for? Everything goes into question. Or even like, is honesty good? It's just like everything, you've got to figure it all out for yourself. And that's kind of the process I had to go through. Rebuilding my belief system without that framework that I was started with for that first 20 years of my life.
Growing up and like with Mormonism, a lot of the kind of paranormal stuff, either they've come up with like a good Mormon answer for it, or you don't talk about it. And we don't talk about that. So specifically, I'm thinking like ghosts. I remember growing up, like even trying to like talk ghost stories and that stuff. My dad was very quick to like shut it down.
He'd say things like, oh, these kind of conversations invite these like bad things, was basically what his answer was for it. But so we never talked about it. And so we never really got to like, explore that or really go there. After Mormonism, so after I kind of left that belief system, decided that wasn't true and like that that wasn't really how you get close to God.
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Chapter 4: What mysterious events occurred related to the heirloom doll?
Or I actually, at that point, didn't think there was a God. I had thought that maybe that was another deception that kind of, I think, maybe threw the baby out with the bathwater and was like, oh yeah, no more God, like no more Jesus, no more spirituality. Like none of that stuff exists. It's not real. It's a trick to get you to be tithing. Like, and that's where I was at. And so I kind of was...
Definitely very jaded and I kind of turned, I would say, like, cringe Reddit atheist. It was very like, if we cannot prove it in a laboratory setting, it doesn't exist anymore. Because someone hijacked my feeling system. Now I can't trust that. So it's like out the window. That's where I was at for a while, like a long time.
And it's wild that I was in that headspace when this experience happened. So I'm actually... Not positive. I mean, it's good that you'll be talking to my wife for this, because I'm not sure how the doll came into our lives. We'd recently moved in together. We'd been together a few years. But it's kind of still in that new period where, like, just stuff appears.
And, like, you're like, oh, there's more stuff. So the doll just kind of appeared one day in a closet. And I believe that she—it's like an heirloom or something she can explain—
My name is Lacey. Connor is my husband. We've been together for about 10 years. When I was growing up, for some reason, I really liked glass dolls. I thought that they were really pretty and I enjoyed collecting them.
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Chapter 5: What was the significance of the dream Connor had?
So this specific doll was given to me by my grandmother on my dad's side that's passed away. I'd gone through my doll collection when I moved out or as I got older and chose specific ones to keep. And this is one that I kept because of the fact that it was given to me by my grandmother.
She was really little and had really pretty like red curly hair and a blue dress that had like lace and stuff sewn on the edges of it. I had this doll in a cardboard box and I just stored it in our closet and called it good because obviously I wasn't going to put those up in my house anymore. But it was kind of just like a nostalgic thing.
And I don't know, a weird attachment thing that I just I just kept it.
The way that I came into knowing we even had these was that I had a dream, and it was a really weird dream. It was like all the features and all the details of my house were the same. Like everything was spot on. It just was like hazy, like super blurry and hazy and dreamy. Like this doesn't feel like the real normal version of my house.
At some point in my dream, I ended up opening like one of our closets in the hallway. And there was a woman just like standing right there. And she had deep red, like ringlet-type curly hair. And the... Dahl had, I mean, it was like white complexion. So it was like a white complexion. Same with the woman had a white complexion.
Otherwise, though, I don't remember many details about like what she was wearing or anything in the dream. That was, feels weird to say this, but it's like that wasn't what I was supposed to see is how I feel about it now. And that's like a wild way to say it. But it was like the face was important.
Like, if you were painting a picture, you would want this thing to be detailed, and then this other thing that's in the painting that you don't want it to be as important, you wouldn't paint as detailed. That's, like, how it was in the dream. It was more like, I'm showing myself to you, and here's my face. The clothing was not important, and that wasn't what I was supposed to see.
It was just a look at her face, because it was very, like, close to you. I mean, like, a person standing in that closet, there's not a lot of room. Like, she barely fits in there. So it was like, oh, wow, there's someone right here. And it was just like, hi, kind of energy. Not that she said anything. That's pretty much all I remember. That startled me awake.
But I ended up telling my wife about the dream and her kind of first answer and instinct, she actually was just like, she started going through family members of hers. Because again, she's a much more like, in touch with spiritual stuff than I am. And so she was just kind of like, oh, like, was that my great aunt this person or like grandma this person or like this person?
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Chapter 6: How did Lacy react to Connor's dream about the doll?
This is what you're doing here. Atheism was like, oh, there is no point. There's nothing. Get what you can out of it. Good luck, dude. That's depressing as hell. It's just at its core. That's super depressing. Whereas now it's kind of like, I'm not sure what life even is. and I'm not sure what death is, and I'm not sure what the hell is going on, but I'm going to go for it.
As a Mormon, I believed when I died, I was going to go be like just tested on how good, like judged on how good a Mormon I was, and I was going to go to heaven or hell. And then as an atheist, it was like 100% it's over after you die. Good luck conceptualizing that.
Like now, I don't know what happens, but like I think it's a lot more reasonable to believe that there's a question mark there than that there's nothing.
Thank you to Connor and also Lacey for sharing this experience with us. You know, I've mentioned on episodes in the past that haunted dolls were one of those things that I really did not expect to be a thing people actually experienced. I put haunted dolls into the same category as floating pumpkins and skeletons walking around.
You know, the type of stuff that you see in Goosebumps books and on Halloween decorations not something you actually hear about people experiencing in the real world. But we have had so many stories written in to the show about situations like this, and a lot of them have similarities.
In fact, we've had enough haunted doll stories sent in to us that we only have recorded a few of them, and the ones we do record, I kind of have to space out because I don't want Otherworld to accidentally become... a show entirely about haunted dolls, but we'd get a lot, which is worth noting.
Whenever we do have one of these stories, I'm always left wondering where the doll ended up, because the story usually ends with the person getting rid of it. In the case of Connor and Lacey, they donated this doll to Goodwill,
You have to wonder who might have bought this doll, what they did with it, and whether or not this presence that seemed to come with it carried on into the household of whoever purchased it. That being said, if you go on eBay right now, you'll find a lot of people trying to sell dolls that they claim to be haunted, and apparently,
There are also a lot of people out there in the world who want to buy dolls that they think are haunted. The market does exist, so maybe it ended up with a person who actively wanted a haunted doll, I'd say that would be the best case scenario.
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