The Haunted Toys R Us | Hacker News Reader

The Haunted Toys R Us

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70 pointsspeckx43 comments

Toys making noise when nobody is around to play with them is a pretty common “ghost” encounter. We had one ourselves with a Sesame Street Ernie doll that would randomly say “I feel great” in an empty room , in the middle of the night, etc. caught it on video once triggering with the doll just lying on the floor.

Turns out when battery voltage gets low (but not yet dead) this can happen in a circuit. I swapped out the batteries and our ghost never came back. Not surprised to hear it happening in a store where stock just sits there for a long time.

Pretty creepy though to hear that when you are lying in bed

I was in the house a couple of weeks ago when I kept hearing a voice coming from upstairs every so often I couldn't track down because it never happened when I was up there.

I had forgotten my son bought the Nintendo Talking Flower: https://www.nintendo.com/au/products/talking-flower/ Usually his door is closed when he leaves but that day it had been left open.

Which is to say, nowadays we have some toys that spontaneously speak in the middle of the day with no input too, by design. It didn't "freak me out" or anything, it was clearly an electronic sound from a speaker. Did make me ponder the idea of leaving some sort of speaker with a software-defined-radio wired into the mains so I could do a drive by of my old house a few years later and start transmitting things into it around Halloween or something, though.

One wonders, how the engagement economy will transfer the talking toy industry. A/B testing has confirmed that screaming "Fire!" or yelling "Everybody on the floor, this is a robbery!" - creates instantanious engagement and is thus superior to classic toys engagement.

Strongly recommend the short novel Kentukis by Samanta Schweblin!

The best part is those older toys with low batteries would have an extra creep to the voice because of the low voltage. We had one that sounded absolutely possessed by a devil. It was truly terrifying to hear that in the middle of the night :-D

This effect still happens with cheap battery-powered cat toys that chirp. Some are rechargeable... others are not, and keep squawking pixelated noises of various pitches for years on end. Ask me how I know.

Good for circuit bending! I miss the times when just a resistor or bat voltage controlled the chips clock cycle without insta-crash

Doubly so if they were motorized toys, so when the motors kicked in, the battery voltage would droop and make the pitch shift even more...

It is not uncommon to for some guitarists to use partially depleted batteries to power certain effect pedals, especially fuzz pedals. People can get particular about tracking down specific brands of carbon-zinc type batteries that are perceived to have preferred discharge characteristics. And there are “battery sag simulator” pedals.

https://danelectro.com/product/1960s-vintage-battery/

https://jhspedals.info/products/volture?srsltid=AU7gw4VF4W_4...

Bass players too!

At least that's the story I've read online a few times about the bass sound on Sir Psycho Sexy having to do with the dying battery on the pedal.

And, of course, just a little bit before DSP and simulators become available (or feasible for mainstream availability), those of us who were playing as teenagers in the 90s often got weird sounds on account of trying to juice the last bit of the batteries in our pedals. I love it that some among the current generation of kids like to simulate tape hiss, dying batteries, and other things we'd suffer then :)

I had something similar happen to me as a kid with a furby, as if they weren't creepy enough normally.

I remember waking up as a kid to the sound of "Me scared!" because our Furby had fallen off the bed as I drifted to sleep. It's one of the audio clips the Furby plays when it is placed upside down.

At the time: ME ALSO SCARED.

Wow, nostalgia. I have heard that same "I feel great" Ernie line a thousand times.

If I manufactured toys I'd definitely make 1 in 10,000 toys randomly go off just to mess with people.

You might like the story of the Evil Stick: https://www.mentalfloss.com/fun/toys/evilstick-gruesome-toy-...

One of my son's old toys is up in some box in the attic. Whenever I go up there, about one in three times it says, "The lions says 'Roar'", when I'm walking back down the attic stairs. I don't know why that is what trips it, as walking up them doesn't seem to, and I don't know what box it is in and can't be bothered to look for it the pull the batteries out. It's been doing that for years, as he's in college now.

I know that one. It’s a simple wood puzzle that uses sensors under the pieces shaped like animals.

It was Yanni Yonson who got me fired as a Christmas Temp for aligning the plushies to mount each other. It was him, I swear. 17 year old me thought the plushie orgy was hilarious.

The manager not so.

I got rehired due to the lack of staff and got put on entertainment. Guitar Hero had just came out and I got called up by their parents complaining for not letting their son win.

The store was on the skirts of a rich area which encouraged a lot of rich entitled parents.

Other antics were in the bike isle where I let a kid ride a bike who then rode it in to the board-game shelf. I didn't get rehired the next Christmas.

Good times.

I used to work for Toys R Us, so here's a random anecdote no one asked for. When you called the store and were put on hold there would obviously be hold music. The music that played? It was the same music that was playing in the store. I remember calling in one day to get my shift assignment and the music was super weird, I told me coworker and he was like "yeah that's the music they are blasting in here, it's awful."

That's pretty common, a lot of older phone systems will literally have a line input where you can hook up a looping music player, Muzak receiver, a radio (illegal but common anyways), or whatever else to provide the hold music feed and for the most part if the business has overhead audio they'll want to use that as their hold music as well.

Was it apple I called? They gave you the option of music on hold or silence on hold. So nice.

the worst is calling into doctor - a mix of terrible music and all kinds of nonsense like flu season advice piped into your brain.

It is like the audio equivalent of "helpful" tip popups with no [X] don't remind me again or even (X) to dismiss

A coworker told me that the bank she worked for would put you on hold for a 20 minute minimum, during which they played background music with intermittent static, to annoy you into hanging up.

Pure evil.

>I learned about the haunted Toys R Us the same way most other people did. I saw it on the TV show That’s Incredible.

This made me feel young again and part of the Zeitgeist. Someone else thinks of "That's Incredible!" and "Real People" all the time as well!

That store in the photo looks SO much like that one in Battle Creek, MI, that closed... probably 20+ years ago?

I remember driving up on the lot, for some reason, sometime long after it had closed its doors for good. There was one lighted feature still glowing inside: a fluorescent display comprised of several tubes in blue and yellow, bent into this wavy form. Just glowing away...

I went back up there, now and again, for several years until I moved out of the area. As far as I can remember, that display was always on, still lighting that empty space no one ever visited. It's been over a decade since I last saw that place, but for all I know, it might still be there, glowing away...

Old World: Here is a haunted castle built a thousand years ago.

The USA: Here's a haunted toy shop that opened ten years ago.

Old World: "The owner was very cruel, so at one point the citizens rioted and brutally murdered him"

The USA: "See, there once was this weird Janitor..."

Although to be fair, "it was built on an indian graveyard" was a gift that kept on giving alot ;)

We had the "built on an Indian graveyard" trope about our local little league fields. Turns out, true story bro. Ref attached 1960 newspaper story, "From an Ancient Indian Burial Ground":

https://www.nyshistoricnewspapers.org/?a=d&d=sfcn19600623-01...

https://www.fireislandnews.com/history/long-islands-native-a...

I had a conversation with a foreign roommate in college once.

Me: My city is old - maybe 250 years old

Him: My city's a thousand years old

He wasn't Swiss, but:

https://www.chur.graubuenden.ch/en/chur-oldest-city-switzerl...

A lot of European towns and cities are far older than their official incorporation date or founding. I can think of ones that are built on obvious defensive and trading sites that appear to date back thousands of years

When I went to the UK for the first time I was blown away at how much old stuff you guys have. I was allowed to walk through a centuries old castle by myself. I could have taken home a castle rock if I wanted to. Here if something is 300 years old you can look at it from 6 feet away behind a velvet rope.

It was pretty wild to me going to a toy store that was itself older than America.

London is a very old city. One of the Wren churches has a crypt from an earlier church, so 21st Century, then into 17th century then down to something like 13th century. Another staircase down under that and you are standing in a Roman structure.

Oxford: On the main road through the centre is an old tower, the Carfax Tower, 11th century so 900 years old. You can sit in the churchyard outside that tower and have a coffee and pastry. People have been stopping for a while outside that tower for a long time. It is nice on a sunny day towards evening when the warmth of the stones staves off the chill from the rivers.

Chester: Pop into Superdrug on Northgate Street for toothpaste. Medieval chapel, wool exchange, theatre and music hall. Dickens did a reading there.

I visited Spain at the tail end of Franco. Interminable great inequality had left ruins bare, in long slumbering decay, preserved by poverty. A kid could crawl out on sketchy crumbling walls, on stones perhaps last touched many centuries before by builder's hands... or perhaps by another kid in the last few. A couple of decades later, something rather different stood there... stabilized, safe, "restored", Disney-ified, and far less compelling.

I love a good ghost story, but yes, when analyzed rationally and logically, ghosts don't exist.

Maybe it was the ghost of Toys R Us Future (venture capital)

I remember That’s Incredible.

I was a young teenager, full of knowledge and a sense of what’s cool. I was chatting with my neighbor, another kid about the same age and temperament.

My buddy’s dad, sensing an opportunity to bond with the teenagers, approached to tell us about last nights episode of the show ( which he knew we liked ). Marshaling all of his cool factor, he walked up and asked if we had seen “This is Incredible”.

We howled like hyenas.

I miss laughing. I haven't laughed since 2016.

I distinctly remember this episode as a kid and it was so good. It took a safe space, a toy store, and made it so creepy.

Apropos of nothing, one of my guilty pleasures is watching "real paranormal" videos on Youtube and even though they're all fake it kind of sucks that they're going to be all fake and AI generated soon. The charm is lost when there isn't even someone putting in the effort to pull a chair with a string.

That address is a REI now. I wonder if it's still haunted...

Sounds kind of like they may have had their own Roofman.

Now I want to goto the haunted REI

Jesus that looks super ominous.

This is different than the "haunted" toy store that randomly appeared in an empty lot near my house.

They had super discounts on Chucky Dolls and sets of steak knives.

I guess all sales are final since it disappeared right after I walked out.

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