WTF: The Duggars Believe Cabbage Patch Dolls Are Possessed By Satan

I loved playing with dolls when I was a little girl. Sometimes I'd dress them up, and other times I'd take off all their clothes, and throw them into the bathtub, watching as they disappeared down into the bubbles. I played dolls with my friends who were girls, and boys. Everyone knows that G.I. Joe is a manly doll.

Dolls aren't just for children, as there are fetishists who dress up as dolls (yes, it's a thing — I saw a documentary about it), and people (mostly all men) who have life-sized dolls they like to play with, and have unique relationships with.

Dolls mean many things to different people. Dolls can be more than a toy; they can be your best friend, a member of your family, and someone to talk to.

Dolls can be treasured and collected ... and they can also be evil.

There always seem to be something about a doll possessed by the dearly-departed or possessed by a demon. There are dolls that just seem creepy — strange facial expressions, missing body parts, and clothes that look as if they were damaged in a fire.

There's haunted baby dolls sitting on a shelf, their eyes seeming to follow your every move, or charmed voodoo dolls bewitched to hurt you.

Don't forget Annabelle, the doll that was the inspiration for two movies — The Conjuring and Annabelle. Annabelle still exists under lock and key in Ed and Lorraine Warren's (famous demonologists) Occult Museum.

Then there's Robert, the inspiration for Chucky in the movie Child's Play, who will curse you if you take his picture without his permission.

Robert and Annabelle are just two of hundreds of evil dolls, but not everybody believes in these tales of evil dolls.

One group fully on-board with the evil doll belief is The Advanced Training Institute (ATI). Let's just say its a cult-like "homeschool program" subscribed to by the Duggars, which believes that dolls, especially Cabbage Patch Kids and Trolls, are filled with Satan's demons. 

In a 1996 newsletter, Bill Gothard (founder of ATI) wrote about how dolls would hinder a family from having a successful and happy birth: 

"The Lord prompted me to ask them about any items in the home through which Satan could gain entrance to interfere. There was a Cabbage Patch doll in their home. They threw it outside and agreed to burn it when they could get a fire going. Within two hours, this mom had a beautiful son."

Part of the problem with the Cabbage Patch dolls (besides being holding cells for demons) was that the child who owned the doll would have to sign a written agreement to love a doll, thereby violating the first commandment and directly disobeying God. ATI believed that any sort of disobedience against God gave Satan the chance to get his foot in the door.

In some ways, ATI is correct. Not that Cabbage Patch Kids dolls are the Devil's receptacle, but that they have the mark of another kind of evil — that of greed and thievery.

In the late 1970s, American folk artist, Martha Nelson Thomas, created what she called her Doll Babies, and sold her soft sculpture dolls at craft fairs.  Xavier Roberts bought one of these Doll Babies (who came with a special adoption certificate) for his gift shop, made a few changes, and started selling his own brand of Doll Babies, calling them Cabbage Patch Kids.

Eventually, Thomas sued Roberts and they settled out of court. She didn't make a ton of money, but as her husband said, they were able to send their kids to college.

Roberts, on the other hand, retired with an apparently clear conscious and an obscene amount of money, proving that sometimes dolls and their creators can do not just evil, but naughty and not very nice deeds.

Check out the video below if you enjoy evil dolls:

Vice