Toy terror just a tall tale
Doll’s creator wasn’t pleased with fictional account
Three years ago, the Yuma Sun published a fictional horror story for readers’ Halloween entertainment, written about a doll that had been found in storage at the Heritage Library.
“Heritage Hexa,” a Native American doll named after the word for “moon” in a local language, had been donated to the library in the 1940s, and was tied to a couple of incidents with people who had looked at her in her glass display case shortly before doing terrible things, according to the story by Heritage Library Branch Manager Bryce Rumbles.
One man allegedly drove his car off the Ocean-to-Ocean bridge in 1967, and two teenage brothers heard and obeyed “a girl’s voice” telling them to murder their family 15 years later.
Hexa also vanished from her case one night in 1948, returning the morning after but leaving scratches behind on the hardwood floor. She briefly came to life and tormented an employee in 2011. Her “dead but piercing eyes” only opened after she was moved to the storage room, and were widely reported to follow workers around.
One more thing: “She wears a blue Yuma County Fair ribbon, but nobody knows why.”
All this came as a shock to Yuma nurse Maria Stephens when she read the Oct. 30, 2014, story in the Sun. With a photo of “Morning Breeze,” the doll she’d made and won “Best of Show” for at the 1996 county fair.
“When I saw it I said ‘Oh my gosh, this is my doll,” she said. “I felt like they were making fun of my doll.”
It was the first ceramic doll she’d ever made, and her daughter, Sally Frazier, taught her how to form the body parts by pouring clay into a mold. The objects were then fired multiple times in a kiln to get the right color and to set the eyes, mouth, fingernails and other features after they were painted.
“It was made with a lot of love, I tell you,” Stephens said. “I love Indians and Indian artifacts, and I love anything to do with the Indian culture. And she’s a Navajo, I put rings and stuff, silver, turquoise, even some coins that were old.” This would explain why Rumbles, for his story, was not able to trace the style of her costume to any local tribe.
Stephens created all of the doll’s costume and jewelry on her own, deploying her “gift” of being able to sew garments without needing to follow a pattern.
The 29-inch-tall figure cleaned up at the county fair. Word spread through Yuma Regional Medical Center, where Stephens was a floor nurse in Tower 3 for 31 years until retiring two months ago. She was approached by Dr. Ashvin Shah, who wanted to buy the doll and display her in the office of his pulmonology practice.
“After I sold it I kept the check for a while, and I kept saying, why did I do that? And my daughter (kept) saying, ‘Mom, it didn’t cost that much, you can make another one,’ and I did make another one, similar, not the same. But it was my first baby. I think deep in my heart, I never really wanted to sell it,” she said.
In fact whenever she went to Shah’s office, she tended to hang around the glass case, telling anyone who would listen that she made the doll.
When Shah moved into a different office, he didn’t have enough room to display Morning Breeze, so he donated it to the Yuma County Library District. Rumbles said it was probably added to the collection before the current Main Library opened on 21st Drive in 2009.
By 2014, the year he was hired by the library district, the doll hadn’t been on display for a while, but an employee’s comments about it and the just-released possessed doll movie “Annabelle” inspired him to invent the legend of Heritage Hexa.
“I was alerted to its ‘power’ by a staff member who was creeped out by it — the creepy staring “dead eyes,” as she called them — and claimed it was to blame when things mysteriously fell off shelves and such. So I created the story to explain why she was no longer kept on public display,” she said.
The doll, in her 4-cubic-foot glass case, was brought out of storage for display on the main level, under a tablecloth (as the last employee to encounter “Hexa” did, to calm the beast), with a copy of Rumbles’ story and signs warning people not to look underneath the shroud.
The day after the story ran in the paper, which was Halloween, he came
to work a late shift, and an understandably upset Stephens had already come in to ask about the doll, before going to the Yuma Main Library to get permission to take it back.
She returned to the Heritage branch that afternoon with a note from Dr. Shah, giving the library permission to turn the doll back over to Stephens.
“She was still a little hot when I met with her and gave her back the doll, but I explained it was all in good fun and we hadn’t meant to besmirch her or her doll in any way,” Rumbles said. “She told me a lot about the doll and how it was the first she’d made from scratch. And I was empathetic that no wonder she felt bad from what I’d written!”
But she seemed to be happy with his explanation and having the doll back, Rumbles said.
Stephens confirms that she was and is very happy to have the “possessed” Morning Breeze back in her possession, and said she is enjoying her new retirement status.