The Effect
Listen to Part 1 for the effect!
The Method
Zak Bagans, the star of Ghost Adventures, together with Peggy’s owner Jayne Harris and spirit medium Patti Negri, are conducting a seance. They are trying to establish, once and for all, whether their suspicions are correct, and Peggy the doll is actually possessed by a powerful and malevolent demon.
As the seance gets underway, bizarre things begin to happen. The candles surrounding them start to dip and flicker, as though a hand …
The Effect
Listen to Part 1 for the effect!
The Method
Zak Bagans, the star of Ghost Adventures, together with Peggy’s owner Jayne Harris and spirit medium Patti Negri, are conducting a seance. They are trying to establish, once and for all, whether their suspicions are correct, and Peggy the doll is actually possessed by a powerful and malevolent demon.
As the seance gets underway, bizarre things begin to happen. The candles surrounding them start to dip and flicker, as though a hand is being passed over their flames. Other candles burn out far quicker than usual, hot wax streaming to the floor. An unseen energy passes beneath the chairs, and a vintage typewriter, located in the same room in which the seance is being conducted, apparently springs into life.
When the episode of Deadly Possessions featuring Peggy airs, still more people come forward to share their disturbing experiences and physical symptoms. They are all very similar to the symptoms shared by the people who saw Peggy on Facebook and the Daily Mail’s site, chest pains, dizziness, and headaches. But this time the shared symptoms also include bizarre scratches and bruises to the skin, and even, perhaps most unsettlingly of all… bite marks. After Katrin Reedik watches Deadly Possessions, she suffers a stroke, which follows hot on the heels of the heart attack she suffered months earlier after viewing Peggy’s photograph on Facebook.
Given the plethora of seemingly inexplicable happenings to have befallen both herself and others, Jayne Harris is convinced. Peggy the doll is bedevilled by some malicious energy source, an energy source that she and the people who have reported experiencing symptoms are able to pick up on. Jayne’s ill health - and the ill health of others - has been caused by a phenomenon known as ‘Psychic Drain’, a common side effect of a prolonged spirit presence, which occurs when a spirit needs to ‘plug into someone else’s energy’, subsequently depleting the energy of its human host.
But could the malicious energy of a troublesome demon really be causing such a variety of physical symptoms and side effects, or might there have been a more earthly explanation?
When the photograph of Peggy was initially shared online, it was posted on Jayne Harris’s Facebook page, a page specifically set up for fans of paranormal investigation. Therefore, it could be said that everyone coming to the photograph was primed. On seeing an image of a doll on a page established to share experiences of the supernatural, followers were expecting it to be linked to paranormal activity. Moreover, the initial photograph of Peggy featured the doll prominently wearing a large gold chain and cross-shaped pendant around her neck. For a modern audience, conditioned by many decades of tales of evil being repelled by crucifixes, such a symbol acts as another form of priming. It instantly implants in a viewer’s mind the type of thing that viewer should be taking away from the photograph.
Peggy’s Facebook followers, readers of the Daily Mail’s website, and the audience of Deadly Possessions, could also have been experiencing some form of MPI or Mass Psychological Illness, also known as a Mass Sociogenic Illness. This is a rapid spread of symptoms affecting members of a cohesive group, whereby physical complaints that are exhibited unconsciously have no corresponding organic causes that are known. In the case of Peggy the Doll, the cohesive group is the people who saw her, their physical complaints manifestations of what they are being told about Peggy: that there is something powerful and strange about her, that she embodies some clash of good and evil, as symbolised by her crucifix. The result, therefore, is a false correlation between seeing Peggy and any physical symptoms from which people who viewed the doll’s photo might already have been suffering.
Put in simpler terms, people are shown a doll - an item which many already find spooky - and are receiving cues from the images themselves, and later each other in the form of social media comments. They then become hyper-aware of genuine physical symptoms completely unrelated to Peggy and, perhaps not stopping to consider their cause, attribute their symptoms to the doll’s non-existent malicious powers.
After considering sealing Peggy inside a cabinet for the safety of her family and others, Jayne Harris donated the doll to Zak Bagans, who became, as he described it ‘Peggy’s new father’ in 2017. Peggy now resides in his Haunted Museum, where she continues to terrify visitors to this day.
Jayne herself remains convinced that Peggy is possessed, and if not by a demon, then by the spirit of someone long deceased. As she wrote in her book on Peggy: ‘If you turn off a light bulb, the electricity itself still exists. The bulb is simply not making use of it any more.’
© 2025, Lora Jones. All rights reserved. Reproduction prohibited without written permission.
