Finedon's history stretches back to the Domesday Book, and the town holds a number of old and locally notorious buildings, but none carries a reputation quite like St Mary the Virgin Church, home for over sixty years to a doll that generations of schoolgirls swore was alive.
The doll's story begins in 1901, when Mary Ozier, headmistress of the town's Charity Girls' School, commissioned a three-foot wooden figure dressed in traditional Dutch costume to mark the anniversary of the school's founding in 1717. Ozier's intentions were straightforwardly sentimental, a keepsake for the girls in her care, but within days of its arrival the pupils were telling a very different story. They said the doll came to life after dark, that its footsteps could be heard moving through the empty halls, and that it stole small personal items from their beds. Fear of the doll became bad enough that girls refused to sleep, a state of affairs that by some accounts persisted for over sixty years, passed down from one generation of pupils to the next until the school finally closed in 1961.
At that point the doll was moved to St Mary the Virgin Church and mounted on the wall, not before someone, their identity and motive both unrecorded, took a saw to its legs, apparently in a folk attempt to stop whatever animated it from walking again. For twenty years it hung there as a curiosity rather than a threat, until the 1980s, when it disappeared from the church without a trace. The vanishing was reported in the local press at the time. The former parish priest Richard Coles, who went on to broadcasting fame, has spoken about the mystery in adult life, and the doll has never resurfaced. Two theories compete for the truth: that a prankster familiar with its history broke in and took it, or, as some locals prefer, that whatever force was said to animate it simply grew tired of being a wall ornament and left under its own power.
Whichever is true, the story was thought interesting enough that on Christmas Eve 2022, Coles brought the writer and actor Mark Gatiss to his old parish for the BBC Radio 4 programme Hunting Ghosts with Gatiss and Coles, giving Finedon's demonic doll a national audience nearly a century after it first supposedly walked the school halls.
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