Remembering Evil Elmo

Instead of friendly phrases, the freshly juiced-up Muppet suddenly started to say, ‘Kill James’.

June 18, 2023

2–3 minutes

America, Cursed, dolls, Elmo, Muppets, Sesame Street

James Bowman was a normal 2 year old boy who loved to watch Sesame Street, especially his favourite character, Elmo. Naturally, when the toddler’s birthday was looming, his mother thought of the perfect gift; a talking Elmo doll. At first, Elmo was a hit. The chatty, fun cuddly toy left James smitten.

The Elmo Knows Your Name doll was released in 2005 by Fisher Price and was programmable via USB. Once set up, Elmo could say over 100 personalised sentences and have a data bank of over 15,000 names (although strangely, some common names like ‘Rose’ and ‘Ross’ were missing)[1]. Elmo’s internal clock would help announce when it was bed or dinner time, and thoroughly irritate parents in the process. That was, if all was working correctly.

When Elmo’s batteries needed replacing, the Bowman family of Lithia, Florida, noticed a distinct change in Elmo’s tone. Instead of friendly phrases, the freshly juiced-up Muppet suddenly started to say, ‘Kill James’. Not once, not twice, but multiple times, all in a sing-song voice.

*Melissa Bowman. Imag via Muppet.fandom.com*

“It’s not something that really you would think would ever come out of a toy,” James’ mother, Melissa, told the news site TBO. “But once I heard, I was just kind of distraught.”

It only took an hour for the batteries to be replaced before Elmo’s murderous phases came to light, and little James was soon repeating them.

Unsurprisingly, James’ Elmo doll wasn’t kept in the house for too long afterwards, and we can’t be sure if they accepted the replacement toy voucher from the Fisher Price company But we can be sure that Elmo’s killer tendencies had quickly imprinted into the internet’s spookier quarters. Even today, a cursory YouTube search leads to hundreds of videos about sinister Elmo experiments, with questionable click bait titles such as ‘DO NOT PLAY WITH A HAUNTED ELMO DOLL AT 3AM’ (alright, but why are you shouting?), ‘DISTURBING TRUTH BEHIND THIS HAUNTED ELMO DOLL’ and ‘(SCARY) CUTTING OPEN HAUNTED ELMO DOLL AT 3AM!! *WHAT’S INSIDE HAUNTED DOLL*’…

While the ‘Kill James’ Elmo may be lying at the bottom of a Florida Landfill site, we can only imagine what horrors Muppet technical advancements will bring us.

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