“Weirdo!” says an upsetting group of boys passing by Harriet (Dean) Mochel’s house. Why is this? This is because of the dolls that stand at her window. If you’ve ever passed Highway 331 in Bremen, then you’d know about a pair of dolls with blonde hair waving as you pass.

There’s a legend that started since the 1970’s that the woman living in that house had twins that were killed by a car while they were crossing the street and that she started dressing them up and went insane. According to Harriet’s mother-in-law, she’s even heard about it from Ohio. But that’s not the truth. Harriet Mochel is the owner of the two dolls, and, no, she’s not psycho. She and her husband, named Rich, have four daughters that are all in their fifties. They’re all alive and they all have children of their own.

So what is the actual story? Why has she been dressing these dolls all these years? The actual story is that Harriet bought the two dolls for her two youngest daughters during Christmas, Sherry and Gail, because they were unusual and cute. Once the girls would stop playing with the dolls and become outgrown of them, Harriet wanted to keep them instead of just throwing them away.

“I didn’t want to just put them in the attic to let them rot, so I decided them to put them at the window.” she said. She later then started to dress them up in the clothes the daughters outgrew and dressed them accordingly to the holiday. They have 10 outfits total. Later after, the dolls were put in the sun too long and their faces turned black and we’re no longer nice to display.

Later after, one of her daughters named Jill found the same two dolls at a department store, even though her mother insisted of not wanting to carry the tradition, she still got them anyways. She didn’t want to because she didn’t want them to affect people. Some people would come up to her door to ask or talk about them; some heartwarming and some hurtful like the group of boys passing her house. After a lot of negativity, she considered about taking the dolls down. Telling her husband Rich, “I think I’m going to give up on this tradition”. He tells her encouragingly that a lot of them do really enjoy them and look forward to see them when they pass. After that, she decided not to give up because if she’s enjoying it and others are, too, there would be a point to keep them up.

An Amish woman approached her one day, coming to her door telling her that they had prayers for her. She told her that she was wrong and that the rumor wasn’t true. Another woman that was a teacher wondered why she doesn’t just put them up in the attic. Her response was that she still keeps them out because people enjoy watching them as they go by. She said that her children have enjoyed Harriet’s dolls over the year and she thanked her. It made her day. A lot of the kids always get excited to see what the dolls new outfit is going to be. A lot of people even honk or wave back at the dolls, pretending and acting as if they were real, which Harriet finds very amusing.

But the experience of the dolls that has touched Harriet most is about a man who drove by to get cancer treatments. His daughter came up to her door to tell her about how her father always asked her mother to slow down the car when driving to see the outfit they had on. “I thought it was a tear-jerker.” says Harriet. It’s also another reason she continues doing her tradition of having those two twin dolls at the window.