A Little Girl Befriends the World's Creepiest Doll Like It's a Deleted Scene From 'Annabelle'

When thinking about friendship, I gotta turn to one of the finest poets to come out of America: Emily Dickinson. My girl put it all on the page and a lot of that page was filled with brooding thoughts about death. Sure, she was a 19th century goth queen, but Emily also knew that traversing this life alone would undoubtedly be a soul-crushing burden.

She once said, "My friends are my estate. Forgive me then the avarice to hoard them." In other words, sorry for holding on so tightly to the ones I love it's just that I can't live without them. These words echo in my mind as I look at the beautiful friendship that has blossomed between a little girl and her creepy doll. Who are we to deny another goth girl her pals?

In what can only be described as a real-life version of M3GAN, parents document the thrilling yet terrifying friendship between their child and a petrifying doll.

"This was supposed to go out on the front porch but she’s decided it’s her new best friend and won’t let it out of her sight," wrote @garywhitta on Twitter. Below is a photo of his daughter hugging the doll so tightly, you would think it was about to get on a rocket ship in order to prevent a a comet from hitting earth.

Apparently she calls the doll "special baby" and when it was time to put her away, the little girl was not on board with that decision. "I lost," wrote her mother Leah in a tweet. I disagree. How can it be a loss when your child gets to spend more time with their best friend?

Like most buddies, Gary and Leah's daughter enjoys hanging out with her companion. Obviously enjoying a snack together is off the table, but makeovers are always a good time. Similar to Samara in The Ring, their daughter's plastic pal was cursed with hair that was constantly in her face. Thankfully, a couple of pink barrettes fixed things right up.

Perhaps Leah and Gary's daughter needed some alone time which is how Gary was finally able to put "special baby" on the porch where she was meant to be. "Should be able to relax now," said Gary. Of course if he recently watched a certain VHS tape, he might only have seven days of chill time before the madness begins.

According to the Cleveland Clinic, pedophobia is the "fear of dolls or inanimate objects that look real." Perhaps it's this fear that caused people to avoid the doll room at the now closed Pollocks Museum in London. Ken Hoyt, a former museum employee, told Smithsonian Magazine that visitors were just "freaked out" by it.

Dolls have actually been for thousands of years. In 2004, "a 4,000-year-old stone doll was unearthed in an archeological dig on the Mediterranean island of Pantelleria," said the outlet. They've served various purposes but Patricia Hogan, curator at The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, N.Y., believes they "reflect cultural values and how we see children or who we wish them to be." Does this mean we want our kids to be spooky?

Dolls evolved from being a projection of people's own children, to being used as a tool to train little girls to become mothers, to empowering women and showing them they can be anything. Then they got creepy.

Obviously "special baby" is meant to be upsetting because it's a Halloween decoration, but some regular dolls are accidentally unnerving. Why is that? "In 2013, Frank McAndrew, a psychologist at Knox College in Illinois, and Sara Koehnke, a graduate student, put out a small paper on their working hypothesis about what 'creepiness' means," per Smithsonian Magazine.

Of the 1,300 surveyed, a large percentage of them said that collecting dolls was the creepiest hobby one could have. McAndrews said the idea of creepiness is rooted in uncertainty. "You’re getting mixed messages. If something is clearly frightening, you scream, you run away. If something is disgusting, you know how to act," he said. "But if something is creepy … it might be dangerous but you’re not sure it is … there’s an ambivalence."

For the most part dolls look human, but they aren't. It's kind of breaking our brains a bit. "We don’t know how to respond to it, just like we don’t know how to respond when we don’t know whether there is a danger or not ... the world in which we evolved how we process information, there weren’t things like dolls," explained McAndrew. Perhaps Leah and Gary's daughter is able to see more humanity in "special baby," hence her ability to connect. Or, maybe she's a weirdo like me. We must protect the weirdos!