Frozen Charlotte
The Victorian Era is well-known for producing some of the creepiest customs, stories, and objects of any time period. From post-mortem photography to mummy unwrapping parties, the mid-1800s to the early 1900s were chock full of the macabre, with Victorian society always finding a way to turn the most innocent of items into cursed nightmare fuel. Today, we’ll take a deeper look into one of the creepier Victorian trinkets on the market, in this month’s episode of Aly’s Miniature Hauntings.
In Victorian-Era America and Britain, small dolls called “Frozen Charlotte”s were extremely popular. Manufactured in Germany, these standing dolls were typically made out of china or bisque porcelain with the doll’s arms and legs molded to the body in one solid piece. The dolls ranged in size from about an inch to a foot, with the price getting cheaper as the size got smaller. The cheapest of the Frozen Charlottes were called Penny Dolls and were the most sold of all the Charlottes since children could easily save to buy one for themselves for just one cent. The tiniest of the Charlottes were also popular as dollhouse occupants, or even as charms placed inside of puddings at Christmastime, but more on that later.
Besides their characteristic pale matte appearance, the dolls were also manufactured to float on their backs in water so they could be played with by children in the bath. Some penny dolls came with painted eyes and lips or simple clothing, but the most affordable ones were always naked and plain.
There are a few possible origin stories for the doll’s distinct name, but the most popular version comes from the American folk ballad “Fair Charlotte”. “Fair Charlotte” tells the story of a young girl who gets all dressed up for a New Years Eve Party. Despite the freezing temperatures outside, young Charlotte is so proud of her pretty dress that she refuses to cover up in a winter’s coat. She leaves her house and gets in a horse drawn carriage that will take her to the party, but by the time she arrives at her destination, the carriage driver discovers, in horror, that she has frozen to death along the journey. Some say the tale of “Fair Charlotte” is based on a true story, while others say the backstory is fictitious, based on an old poem, likely the one written by American author and women’s rights activist Elizabeth Oakes Smith. Her poem, entitled “A Corpse Going to a Ball”, became so popular that it was passed down orally, spreading like wildfire around North America. As with most oral stories, her poem has been revised, re-written, retold, and changed by many different orators over the years, the most well-known version coming from a woodsman named Ernest Lord who recorded the tale as he knew it in 1966. Let’s pause to listen to it now:
https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/songstorysamplercollection/28/
Leave it to the Victorians to turn an innocent children’s doll into a horrific cautionary tale! You might still be wondering if there’s any truth behind the ballad of Fair Charlotte, and for that we must return to the original author. Elizabeth Oakes Smith claimed that her ballad was inspired and loosely based on a real death she had read about in the New York Observer. The article was supposedly published on February 8, 1840 and told the tragic tale of a girl who set out 20 miles via sleigh ride for a New Years Eve ball on December 31, 1839. She was on the way to meet a man she hoped to marry who had been courting her for some time. Wanting to look her best, the young woman had saved all year for materials to sew a fashionable dress sure to win over her beau’s heart. Wanting the fancy dress to be the first thing her love interest would see as she pulled up to the ball, she decided to forgo her cold weather coat. Unfortunately, as the horse-drawn carriage pulled up to the entrance of the grand ball and her beau reached out his hand to help his sweetheart down the stairs, he realized she was frozen stiff and solid, looking very pretty, but also very dead.
While this allegedly real unnamed woman died, her vain legacy lived on through the sale of “Frozen Charlottes”, which were sometimes also sold with accessories. But unlike Barbie, Charlotte didn’t get a convertible, she got a coffin.
Spine-tingling, right? But let’s go back to the start of this episode when I told you that Frozen Charlottes were sometimes placed inside of Christmas Puddings.
On the fifth Sunday before Christmas, called Stir-Up Sunday, the Victorian Christian teachings dictated that a Christmas pudding should be served as a family tradition each year.
Each family member was supposed to stir the pudding’s mixture from east to west to honour the journey of the Three Wise Men of the Bible. This ritual was thought to bring the family good luck in the coming year.
Originally, the puddings would have been shaped into a sphere and boiled in a cloth. This practice eventually gave way to steaming the dessert in a pudding basin or elaborate mould, particularly in wealthier households.
It was also customary to hide a number of small trinkets in the mixture, similar to the American southern tradition of the King Cake. The charms placed within the Victorian Christmas Pudding often included a silver coin which signified wealth, a ring or a bell to represent a future marriage, a horseshoe or wishbone to represent luck, or an anchor to represent prosperity in the household. But besides these positive omens, some of the trinkets were tied to bad luck. For example, the guest who stumbled across a thimble or a button in their serving was sure to have spinsterhood or bachelorhood in their future, doomed to a lonely existence. The guest who got the “Frozen Charlotte” in their slice of pudding had a more ambiguous year ahead: the charm either represented a baby on the way or the death of a current child.
Today, you can stumble across Frozen Charlottes in the most unexpected of places. Of course, you can likely find one in an antique store or at an estate sale, but because the dolls were so cheap and popular, many people have happened across them in the most unlikely of places, such as creek beds, forests, and even inside old attics or walls.
A simple search of almost any social media site will result in many such stories of unwitting individuals discovering one or several of these dolls, such as this one from a Reddit user who claimed they found the doll while digging in their garden. They went on to say that the doll seemed to have a dark aura emanating from it that made them feel uneasy about picking it up. A few days later, they went back to the garden where the doll was still laying and finally took it inside. No updates were posted after that, so hopefully they’re still doing fine.
In a post to Facebook, a different social media user uploaded a photo of 7 Frozen Charlottes, explaining that she had purchased them from an antique store. The store owner had been very confused when the figurines were placed on the counter to be rung up, remarking that he didn’t know where the dolls had come from and had never seen them before. Nevertheless, they came to an agreement on a price and the woman left with her bag of tiny dolls. A few days later, she returned to the store to ask more questions about the trinkets to find a different employee behind the register. This employee seemed even more confused than the last, saying that the dolls couldn’t have been purchased from their store because they had no such item in their inventory. The woman left the store again, feeling thoroughly weirded out by the interaction.
Frozen Charlottes have also been found at a surprising amount of historical sites during archeological digs. In 1990, a dig at Minute Man National Historic Park in Massachusetts unearthed this eerie Frozen Charlotte, which had likely been buried since the Civil War. When another one-inch version of the doll was found at the same park, staff lovingly named it Creepy Catherine and regularly photographs her in different spooky locations around the grounds. In 1872, a rare clothed Frozen Charlotte was found by firefighters sifting through the carnage left behind by the Great Boston Fire. Now held in private ownership, this Charlotte’s owner claims that sometimes when walking past the doll, she is overcome by the stench of ash and smoke which seems to emanate from the toy over 150 years later.
A rarer kind of Frozen Charlotte inside a glass vial has also been found at several different locations around the U.S. This doll was excavated in the 1970s at Fort Stanwix in New York. The jury’s still out on why some Charlottes appear to have been manufactured or placed inside of corked glass bottles, but one theory has its roots in occult practices. Victorians were obsessed with spiritualism, and some used bottles as “Spirit Traps” to both contain and communicate with ghosts. If an owner suspected their doll of being possessed for example, they might have placed it inside a bottle in an attempt to communicate with it.
Frozen Charlottes are also frequently found by beachcombers and mudlarkers in the U.K. who find them washed ashore from somewhere out at sea. Since these objects were so common, seashore Charlottes are probably just toys lost at the beach by Victorian children, but some wonder if they could be from a capsized boat delivering a shipment to England from Germany, or even part of a “Sailor’s bottle”, which were glass bottles filled with charms thought to protect sailors from supernatural harm along their journey. We may never know the truth, but speculating is sometimes more fun than knowing.
Well, what do we think, Haunties? Could some of these dolls be cursed because of their dark origin story? Would you ever go out of your way to buy one from an antique shop? If you accidentally stumbled upon one at the beach or while hiking, would you keep it? Thanks for joining me on this episode of Aly’s Miniature Hauntings!
