Posted By Dan Greenfield on Aug 25, 2025 | 2 comments

A MORRISON MONDAYS birthday salute!

By BILL MORRISON

Today is Michael William Kaluta’s birthday — he was born 78 years ago, on Aug. 25, 1947 — and in celebration I’m telling the story of how I came to create a short comics story with one of my favorite horror illustrators.

When I was a teen in the suburbs of Detroit, there was a creepy urban legend that went around about a ranch-style house with a big picture window that was situated on a busy street. Any day of the week you could drive by that house and see a three-foot-tall female child doll, displayed in the window. The doll was always dressed according to the time of day and the weather. If it was a rainy day, the doll was wearing a raincoat, in the evening it would be dressed in a nightgown, and on Halloween, it was appropriately attired for trick-or-treating.

This part of the story is true. I know because I saw the doll for myself on a number drives out to the house in a car full of other curious teens.  But what made it an urban legend was the story of why the doll was placed in the window, day after day.

The doll

The legend, as it was told to me, was that the couple who lived in the house had a daughter who was given a life-size doll which she dressed in her own clothes. One day, the girl’s father was late for work, and as he backed down the driveway in his car, he failed to notice that his daughter was playing in his path. He ran over her, killing her instantly.

Grief-stricken and consumed with guilt, the father hung himself in the basement of his home. The mother, doubly traumatized by the tragic deaths of her child and husband, went insane. She started dressing the doll in her daughter’s clothes every day and placing it in the window, believing the doll was her child, come back to life.

Years later, a Detroit area newspaper sent a reporter to the woman’s home to interview her and try to get the real story behind the chilling urban legend. My mother-in-law sent me the article, which revealed that the true story was a bit quirky, but did not involve a dead child, a basement hanging, nor a woman driven insane by grief. The woman just liked the doll, which had belonged to her daughter, and enjoyed dressing it up every day and showing it off in her window.

Around this time, I got an assignment to write a story for Dark Horse’s comics-format reboot of Warren’s Creepy magazine. I was excited to be writing a story for this new incarnation of the favorite horror magazine of my youth, so I spent a lot of time trying to dream up a great story. But the perfect idea was right there on my desk. The article sent to me by my mother-in-law was the ideal inspiration for a terrifying tale worthy of Creepy.

I had always been fascinated by the urban legend, especially since I had seen the doll with my own eyes, but it was this article that inspired me to write a horror story about a reporter who was given the assignment to investigate an urban legend from his own youth. My twist was that as he discovers the true story, it’s far more terrifying than the legend.

My script was approved, and my editor did something that surprised me. I expected that an artist would be assigned to my script with no input from me, but he asked me who I would like to draw it. I was delighted by this freedom, and told him I would think about it and get back to him, but before I could do that he called back. Imagine my thrill when he said “What do you think about Mike Kaluta? He’s looking for a short horror story to illustrate.”

“Wow, are you kidding me?” was all I could think of to say. I grew up being inspired by Mike’s masterful work in comics like DC’s House of Mystery, House of Secrets, and The Shadow. To have such a legendary master of horror and suspense illustrating my first tale for Creepy was beyond exciting.

And Mike did not disappoint. His visual interpretation of my script was perfectly hair-raising, and I was so thrilled to see my story come to life at the hands of such a comics virtuoso! I’ll refrain from saying more because I don’t want to spoil too much for those who’d like to read our collaboration. You can find “The Doll Lady,” in Issue #4 of Dark Horse’s Creepy comic book, and it was collected in the first trade paperback of the series.

Though I couldn’t dig up the article about the urban legend that inspired my story, I did find this reporting from a few years ago on the death of the real “doll lady” at age 102.

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