Joey
In 2013, the world was introduced to Elsa, and it wasn’t long until Disney’s ‘Frozen’ was everywhere. The shelves were lined with merchandise displaying the likenesses of Elsa, Anna, and the loveable snowman, Olaf. That same year, Emily and Mat Madonia purchased their one-year-old daughter, Aurélia, an Elsa doll for Christmas. What they didn’t know at that time was that this doll was bound and determined to never let this family go.
In 2019, Emily took to Facebook to chronicle the story of the allegedly haunted doll.
The particular Elsa doll they had purchased for their daughter would recite phrases from the movie when a button on its necklace was pressed. Along with the phrases, the doll would also sing “Let it Go,” a song that had quickly become the film’s anthem.
The doll continued to sing and talk as it was designed to do until, in 2015, the Elsa doll began to cycle between English and Spanish, something it had never done before in the two years that Aurélia had owned it.
What makes this even more bizarre is the fact that this particular doll didn’t have any setting to change between the two languages; it would just alternate at random.
The Elsa doll would continue to speak in both languages for another four years, and would often speak even when no one was around it.
Tired of hearing the thing talk on its own, Emily went to turn the doll off, only to discover that the doll’s on/off switch was already in the off position. The doll had continued to speak this entire time despite already being off.
To make matters even stranger, when she checked the doll’s batteries, she discovered that they were still the original batteries the doll had come with. In the six years that they had owned the Elsa doll, the batteries had never been changed.
Now, this might not seem like a big deal, except for the fact that when Emily tested the batteries, she discovered that they were stone dead.
The doll had been talking despite being switched off and having dead batteries.
Figuring that the doll was broken, Emily finally decided to throw the Elsa doll away. After all, Aurélia had outgrown the doll and had stopped playing with it.
Mat threw the doll in the trash, and the Madonia family figured they had seen the last of the malfunctioning Elsa doll. They could not have been more wrong.
Just a week later, when Mat went to open a large, wooden storage bench that the Madonia family kept in their living room, he found the Elsa doll inside. It was lying on top of a bunch of blankets inside the bench.
All members of the family denied having gone through the trash and placed the doll inside the bench.
Uncertain about how the doll had gotten there, Emily and Mat decided that they weren’t going to take any more chances.
This time, Mat wrapped the Elsa doll in its own garbage bag and then put that bag inside another bag filled with garbage. He then put that bag in the bottom of the garbage can and placed a bunch of other bags on top.
Come garbage day, they wheeled the garbage can to the curb and watched as the garbage was collected. The doll was gone and out of their lives…or so they thought.
Following this incident, the Madonia family went out of town on vacation and forgot all about the Elsa doll. That is, until they returned home.
Not long after the family got back, they discovered that Elsa had also returned. On one unspecified day, Aurélia called out to her mother that she had seen Elsa in the backyard.
When Emily went to inspect the doll, she found that it was, in fact, the exact same doll Mat had thrown in the trash. She was able to confirm this by the fact that the doll had the exact same marker stains from where her daughter had colored on it years ago.
Every stain and mark matched perfectly with the one that belonged to her daughter. It appeared the doll refused to let this family go.
Determined to finally rid themselves of the doll, Emily mailed the Elsa doll, without a return address, to Chris Hogan, a family friend in Minnesota.
Emily stated that, as she placed it in the box to be mailed, the doll laughed for 30 seconds straight, something it had never done the entire time they owned it.
“If the doll comes back, I might have to open my mind to some of the more supernatural solutions,” Madonia told local Houston news station, KPRC.
In a Facebook post of his own, Hogan confirmed that he had received the Elsa doll and “taped it to the brush guard of my Jeep.”
He added that, “If anything weird happens, I’m welding her into a steel pipe and sinking it in Lake of the Woods.”
On January 14, 2020, Hogan shared on Twitter that Zak Bagans had messaged Emily and offered to purchase the doll.
The last update shared on the doll’s whereabouts was a tweet posted by Hogan on March 31, 2020, where he revealed that he had constructed a new home for the doll in his welding shop.
With no news on the case, one has to presume that the Madonia family finally managed to rid themselves of the doll…the doll that had been so determined to never let them go.
