The Effect
In 2015, Patti Negri, a Psychic and Spirit Medium, arrives in Las Vegas to conduct a very special seance. The seance is being carried out as part of TV personality and paranormal investigator Zak Bagans’ new show Deadly Possessions. But as soon as Patti arrives at her Vegas hotel, a host of strange events begins to plague her. Her brand new mobile phone unexpectedly goes ‘completely haywire’. Her brand new tablet does the same, mimicking the phone, in Patti’s words: ‘doing strange and never-before-seen oddities’. Baffled by these goings-on, Patti spends over four hours talking to her phone provider’s helpline, leaving even the company’s top techxperts dumbfounded by the problems with her devices, and so utterly stumped as to how to fix them.
As the evening wears on, Patti starts to suspect that some ominous, malevolent force may be hanging over the hotel. She turns on the TV in her room, only for it to switch itself off again. And after she takes a shower and turns the water off, it gushes on once more, multiple times. Patti is now certain: the doll she is scheduled to conduct the seance with the very next day in Zak Bagans’ Haunted Museum possesses some very unsettling powers indeed.
The strange doll had come to public attention the previous year, when paranormal investigator Jayne Harris had unexpectedly received an email, with a subject line simply reading: ‘doll’. The email was from a woman, who was at her wits’ end, claiming she had in her possession a doll embodying such potent forces of evil, that it had not only prevented her from sleeping, but caused a host of paranormal activity within her home, culminating in the manifestation of a dark figure that, at 3am every morning, would loom over her bed. The woman, who bought the doll from a jumble sale, had been so scared by the frightening occurrences she had marked crosses on the walls of her home, before relegating the troubling object to an outbuilding.
When Jayne Harris visits the woman and sees Peggy for the first time, taking in the doll’s plastic face, short blonde hair, blue eyes and enquiring expression, her ears begin, as Jayne later describes, to hum, buzzing like a radio transmitter struggling to pick up a frequency. The sensation continues for around 60 seconds. Despite this, Jayne Harris is intrigued by the doll, and decides to take it home with her. As she leaves, the doll’s previous owner issues a chilling statement: ‘That doll nearly ruined my life. I hope God protects you all.’
But around six weeks after receiving Peggy, Jayne Harris begins to suffer a range of puzzling physical symptoms, from debilitating fatigue to migraines, nausea and dizziness. More puzzling still is the fact that the blood tests Jayne undergoes rule out any underlying medical conditions. Yet whenever the doll is removed from her house, Jayne reports that she starts to feel normal again, her symptoms lifting. Increasingly unnerved and fascinated by the object, Jayne Harris invites two mediums who do not know each other to tune into the doll’s name. Both separately declare it to be ‘Margaret’ or ‘Peggy’ for short.
It is February 2015 when Jayne Harris shares the first photograph of Peggy on her Facebook page, and is quickly inundated by messages from the page’s followers. Despite sharing nothing with them in advance concerning her own unsettling experiences with Peggy, just one photo of the doll unleashes a tidal wave of direct messages. ‘I’ve had migraines and palpitations since seeing your doll’, one user writes. ‘This doll you’ve just shown sets off my asthma!’ claims another. And many more write of spinning sensations when viewing Peggy’s photo, sensations of being watched, of their monitors flickering. Many more describe how, after seeing Peggy’s photo, their dogs have been gripped by panic; spitting, barking and growling at the screen. After watching a video of Peggy shared by Jayne on the page, one dog even suffers a seizure. When the dog watches the video again, a second seizure occurs.
Another message Jayne Harris receives comes from a Virginian woman who alleges that, every time she has viewed a photo of Peggy, she has been stricken with the same recurring dream. In the dream, the woman’s pet cat is chased by an unseen entity, which eventually catches the animal and chokes it to death, right outside her front door. Three months after having the first dream, the woman leaves the house one morning to find her cat dead on her front step, apparently having been strangled.
And the messages keep coming. Almost everyone, it seems, who views Peggy’s photo or video, suffers some sudden physical symptom. When the story is taken up by the Daily Mail and shared on their website that same year, just like the Facebook followers, more and more people report experiencing dizzy spells, chest pains, and headaches.
One woman who experiences an abrupt decline in her health after viewing Peggy’s images is Katrin Reedik. Every time she sees Peggy on her screen, she is stricken with palpitations. Not long after, and even though she is still young, Katrin Reedik suffers a heart attack. And that is not the only instance of someone being seized by an extreme health problem after seeing Peggy. A medium and paranormal investigator who is left alone with Peggy overnight to conduct some experiments is found collapsed. Paramedics confirm she has suffered a stroke.
As the months pass and similar reports continue to flood in, Jayne Harris receives a call from Las Vegas. Zak Bagans, the star of Ghost Adventures, she is told, is intrigued by Peggy the doll and wants to invite Jayne and Peggy to fly to Vegas and feature in an episode of Zak’s new show Deadly Possessions. Jayne agrees, not knowing that the night before filming, the medium Patti Negri has experienced some strange phenomena of her own relating to Peggy. And things are about to get even stranger.
After Jayne arrives at Zak’s Haunted Museum, the camera filming Peggy suddenly switches itself off. Only minutes later and the room is infested by flies, despite Zak attesting he has never seen a single fly in his museum before. This confirms what many now suspect. That Peggy must be possessed by some kind of demon, as fly infestations are common occurrences in such cases.
The only way to now proceed is for them to begin their seance, to see if they can make contact with the demonic entity lurking within the dark heart of Peggy the doll.
The Method
Listen to Part 2 for the method!
© 2025, Lora Jones. All rights reserved. Reproduction prohibited without written permission.
