My wife and I were looking at a house, and in the girl’s bedroom there were a few creepy looking dolls/stuffed toys. They were unstructured and made of soft material - reminding me of a sock monkey. One of them looked like a girl, another was kinda trapezoidal and orange. And they had "x"s instead of eyes.
Later in the car my wife commented that she thought they looked incredibly creepy, and had never seen anything like them before. I had noticed them but did not really pay much attention. They impressed me as something I had seen somewhere before - maybe from a children’s book, or a cartoon, or on-line or something. But my efforts at googling have been fruitless.
Anyone have any ideas what I am trying to describe, and where I might have seen them before?
An X for an eye seems to be fairly common in media depictions of simple, homemade dolls, although not as common as buttons for eyes. I can’t think of any examples at the moment though.
If four-hole buttons are used as eyes, then at some point they are torn off or otherwise lost,* there may very well be an x-shaped mark underneath (I.e the remains of the button stitching, or marks/holes left by it). Not sure if this is the origin of the thing the OP describes, or just coincidence.
*Especially if they are broken off, leaving the button stitching intact.
There’s also a (not sure if related) convention of clowns having X or + painted over the eyelids, and a cartoon drawing convention of showing the eyes of a person killed or rendered unconscious as X or +
Not sure why I mentioned this. Might have a bearing on the ‘creepy’ angle, if not the origin of dolls with X eyes themselves.
I think I was thinking of the Uglydolls - but they weren’t exactly the same, as these definitely had the X eyes. And only one had that weird shape - the other was clearly a human figure.
The person who lived in the home was apparently quite “artsy” - had any number of odd things/art through the house. I imagine these were likely homemade or craft/art, and I simply flashed on a vague recollection of the Uglydoll. Maybe with a dose of Coraline tossed in.
If we HAD made an offer, it would have been contingent upon them being removed and burnt!
The whole house had so many quirky and artsy touches, it really made our styling choices seem pedestrian and boring by comparison. Was a very cool house, but on a very busy street. We were checking out comps for the house we are selling, and have bought in a different state.
