Robert the Doll

Forty inches tall, stuffed with wood wool, and quite possibly made to look like the boy who owned him.

Robert lives at the Fort East Martello Museum in Key West, Florida, where the Key West Art and Historical Society has exhibited him since 1994. He is a one-of-a-kind handmade doll from around the turn of the 20th century, dressed in a sailor suit, and he once had painted features not unlike a jester's. The museum notes that his unusual size suggests he may have been fashioned in the image of his constant companion, a boy named Robert Eugene Otto. The doll took the name Robert; the boy went by Gene.

The Otto family were prominent in Key West. The doll is reported to have been made by the Steiff Company in Germany and bought by Gene's grandfather on a trip there in 1904, given to the boy as a birthday present, and the sailor suit was probably an outfit Gene had worn himself.

Robert stayed in the family home at 534 Eaton Street while Otto studied art in New York and Paris. Otto married Annette Parker in Paris on 3 May 1930, and the couple came back to the Eaton Street house and lived there until he died in 1974. His wife died two years later. The house was sold to Myrtle Reuter, who kept it for 20 years, and it is now run as a guest house by its current owners. In 1994 the doll was donated to the museum, where he became a considerable tourist attraction.

The legend says he moves, changes expression and giggles. The museum leans into it and displays letters people have written to him apologising.

Go and look at him properly. He is a genuinely strange object even before anybody tells you a story about him.