Halloween might be months away, but residents of the town Victorville, a quiet desert town about 130 kilometers from Los Angeles, received a horrifying and unexpected scare recently when something incredibly creepy showed up outside a gas station. In what appeared to be a normal day, residents of the area found what looked like a teddy bear, and while that alone would not have been cause for concern, other than for the child that lost it, this teddy bear appeared to be made out of human skin, which made the residents panic and with reason.
Podcasts and documentaries about serial killers may be fun for many, as they find them fascinating, but have something like this turn up and you create panic in the community, which are not used to (and should not be used to) dealing with the macabre in any real sense.
The teddy bear was left behind by an individual who had taken care to position it neatly in a sitting pose, probably to attract more attention and have people look at it. This did not take long, and those who found it immediately contacted the authorities so that they could deal with this unsettling find. One of the witnesses stated in his call that they had found “a teddy bear made of what appeared to be human flesh” left right in front of the gas station.
The teddy bear mystery solved
The authorities quickly responded to the situation and took it quite seriously, after all, this could be evidence of a very gruesome crime. They launched a full-on investigation, and forensics were brought in to figure out what exactly this thing was made of and if there were any clues that could point towards who made it or who would have left it there. Their quick work made what could have been a mass panic situation into a controlled chaos explosion that was contained to the area.
The theories were plenty and swirled around for days, with most people ascribing the creation of the teddy bear to a serial killer, but when the results of the investigation came back, there were good news all around. The bear was not made from real skin at all. It was a highly detailed and very disturbing piece of art made from synthetic materials designed to look horrifyingly real. While this was good news, after all, there is something really nice about not having a criminal running rampant making teddy bears out of human skin, this prank was not harmless.
The artist behind the unsettling creation is Robert Kelly, a horror art specialist based in South Carolina who is well-known for crafting bizarre and gruesome props for horror films and themed art shows. According to Kelly, the bear was one of his pieces listed for sale on his Etsy shop and someone from Victorville bought it, but never mentioned they were going to leave it outside a gas station like some twisted prank.
Kelly told People Magazine he had “started getting tons of messages and calls from people telling us about the incident” after the news hit. “Our work is pretty easily recognizable and people were sending the articles left and right. I looked and sure enough it was the bear I sent out last week,” Kelly told the publication. “Every artist wants credit [for] their work, so I said ‘I made that’ and haven’t been able to catch up with messages since.”
Even though the bear turned out to be harmless the sheriff’s department did not find the situation amusing. The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Office released a statement saying that incidents like this waste valuable emergency services and could delay help for real emergencies.