Children’s Folklore Recent Titles in Greenwood Folklore Handbooks Myth: a handbook

Potato Chips and Milk
There was this girl once who was going babysitting at a new house for the first time. 
When she got there it was afternoon and the people weren’t going to be home until mid-
night. They left her nothing to eat, and the T.V. was broken. Before they left, they told her 
she could do anything she wanted except for opening the closet door.
As it got later and later she got hungrier and hungrier, and she kept wondering what 
was in the closet. Finally she couldn’t stand it any more and she opened the door. Inside 
was lots and lots of potato chips and big glasses of milk. She ate them all up. When the 
people got home she was dead on the fl oor. Do you know why? They weren’t potato chips 
and milk, they were scabs and pus.
Eleven-year-old Sally told this story at her home in Suffield, Connecticut, in 
October 1977. This is one of many legends about beleaguered babysitters, which 
were very popular in the 1960s and 1970s (see Bronner 151–52). This babysit-
ting situation bodes no good: miserly parents leave no food and a broken TV. 
Here we recognize the “Bluebeard” tale pattern: a forbidden room or door, the 
opening of which will lead to punishment. The babysitter dies from contamina-
tion; what she thought was a tasty snack was actually disgusting by-products 
of infection. I heard a variant of the “Potato Chips” story as an 11-year-old in 
Washington, D.C., in 1959.
Th
e China Doll
This one woman loves to buy china dolls, and since her husband is rich she likes to 
buy the best ones. One day she goes up to the finest store in America for china dolls. 
She finds a beautiful one in the store. The cost is over $4,000, but she doesn’t care, she 
loves it. The artwork was hand-painted, but she notices something. The doll has teeth. 
Wondering—well, she says she doesn’t care. When she hands the money to the owner he 
says, “You don’t want that, lady! That thing is haunted.” Haunted? What kind of nut was 
this? She knew then that she was going to write a complaint to the owner of the store. She 
said, “Just put it in the bag, mister.” That was what she said. She paid the bill.
She comes home. She puts it in her big collection where all the other dolls are. But this 
time she puts it on the top shelf. Laughing. “Haunted!” She goes to bed. In the middle 
of the night she hears “Scratch, scratch, scratch.” She thinks it’s just her dream and goes 
back to sleep.
In the morning she wakes up before her husband. She goes up to feed the canary and 
all of a sudden she sees it dead. Clawed to death. Stricken, she screams a loud shriek. 
Her husband comes and finds what happened. When she sees the doll, she finds his nails 

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86 Children’s 
Folklore
have grown longer and he has blood that resembles the canary. She doesn’t know what 
to do and neither does her husband. She buries the canary in a shoe box, giving it a fit-
ting ending, and thinks what must have happened: the canary got loose and who knows, 
maybe the cat got it.
The next day she hears the same noise, “scratch, scratch.” She thinks, “Oh, no, not the 
cat again!” She goes back to sleep. In the morning she finds her cat dead. Mauled to death 
like the canary. She goes to see if there was a vandal who did something to her dolls, then 
she sees the dolls. Their finger nails have grown longer and they have the blood which 
looks like the cat’s. Then she screams, but the voice doesn’t come out of her lips. She’s 
scared to say a word. Maybe that sales clerk wasn’t dumb after all. Who knows. Couldn’t 
have been true. She gets scared again. She doesn’t know what to do. She just goes back to 
sleep til the end of the night. She hears a scratch, but it’s louder and louder. She goes back 
to sleep. In the morning she finds her husband mauled and scratched terribly over the 
chest. He lies there dead, sheets soaked and stained with blood.
Reporting this to the police, she gets scared. She thinks about the china doll and the 
nails and runs back. This time the nails are bigger and he has the blood of her husband. 
She screams and picks up the doll and throws it outside in the garbage can. For protec-
tion she takes a baseball bat, that’s her son’s who’s away at college, and sleeps with it. In 
the middle of the night she hears”scratch, scratch,” a sound of scraping of metal. She 
hears another distant scratch, but doesn’t know what it is. Then she hears one close; 
soon she can see little holes begin in her door. She picks up the baseball bat and sees 
the doll walking in. The doll with the nails pointing right at her. She begins to hit the 
doll with the bat, banging and banging it, shattering the doll to a hundred little pieces. 
The doll died, of course, in a way. So what she does is she scoops it up. She takes it back 
to the sales clerk. She tells him the story. He believed it. He said it happened to three 
other people. He picks up the charred remains and begins to glue them up. And another 
woman then buys it. Then she begins to hear the scratching noise. And again the story 
continues.
This extraordinarily detailed story came from Elliott, a fifth-grader at a pri-
vate school for Jewish students in upstate New York, in May 1987. Elliott’s tal-
ent in developing complex episodes and using strategically placed sound effects 
makes this a fine example of the “China Doll” narrative, which has circulated in 
oral tradition since the mid-twentieth century (and probably earlier). In many 
variants of this legend, a seafaring father buys a doll for his daughter in China 
and sends the doll home to her; then the doll kills each member of the family, 
one by one.
The last part of Elliott’s story resembles what happens at the end of “Johnny, 
I’m on the first step” stories. Although we might expect the doll to kill the 
woman, it does not, and the woman successfully returns the doll to the store 
where she bought it. Why does the store owner glue the doll together to sell it 
to someone else? This macabre ending makes the story even more sinister than it 
would otherwise seem.

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Examples and Texts 87