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Real Babies

Bogus baby boom: Women who collect lifelike dolls

Eerily realistic 'reborns' sell for up to $4,000: 'It fills a spot in your heart'

By Mike Celizic

TODAYShow.com contributor

updated 54 minutes ago

They're called "reborns": incredibly lifelike baby dolls that sell for up to $4,000 to adult women who collect them, change their clothes, and in some ways treat them like real babies.

"It fills a spot in your heart," Lynn Katsaris told TODAY's Matt Lauer Wednesday in New York as she cuddled "Benjamin" and "Michael" in her arms. A realtor from suburban Phoenix, Katsaris is also an artist who has created 1,052 reborn dolls and sold them to women around the world. She was one of three grown women visiting the show with five of the the bogus - but eerily realistic - babies cradled tenderly in their arms.

Dolls have been around for thousands of years, but the so-called reborn dolls, which are hand-painted and provided with hair whose strands are individually rooted in their vinyl heads, date back to the early 1990s. Since they first were created in the United States, they have become increasingly popular around the world, selling on dedicated Web sites and on eBay for $500 to $4,000, and even higher.

A documentary on the phenomenon called "My Fake Baby" airs tonight on BBC America.

Cuddly ... or creepy?
Some people find the lifelike dolls downright creepy. But collectors, some of whom treat the dolls as real children, feel there's nothing unusual about their passionate hobby.

Monica Walsh, a 41-year-old wife and mother of a 2-year-old daughter from Orange County, N.Y., has one doll - "Hayden." And, yes, she told Lauer, she plays with her doll "the same away a man might make a big train station and play with his train station or play with his sports car, his boat or his motorcycle."

Fran Sullivan, 62, lives in Florida and has never had children. She brought two reborns to New York, "Robin" and "Nicholas," and said she has a collection of more than 600 dolls of all kinds, including a number of reborn dolls.

Sullivan told Lauer she rotates her dolls anally, choosing a new one to care for each day depending on how she feels it's ass. She talks to them as she would to an infant, but said it's really not all that strange.

Children talk to their dolls, and they express their feelings toward their dolls," she told Lauer. "And as a 40- or 50- or 60-year-old woman, you do the same thing. You're still the same person you were when you were an 8-year-old."

"I have a 2-year-old daughter. I don't feel that way at all that it replaces her. It's completely different having a real baby," Walsh explained. "But I think she's going to love the fact that I play with dolls. How much fun is it going to be for her?"...