Good evening and welcome back to Nighty Night with Robbie and Chathry. Bedtime stories to keep you awake.

I'm DJ Luke Bell, the shows producer. Tonight's tale warns us. Be very, very careful what you play with. Please enjoy the doll.

It's easy to get lost when you're sifting through memories that aren't your own. That's why I lean loved estate sales, yard sales and garage sales. In order to find the rare stuff though, sometimes you'd have to hit the good old fashioned antique stores and consignment shops.

The only real rub was the finder's fee she'd end up paying, a mark for someone else already coming through the junk. She tried to avoid going to places like that on principle, but sometimes for the real treasures she just had to take her lumps and pay the price. After years of pre-dawn drives to out of county estate sales and many dust-induced asthma attacks, Eileen finally started calling around to antique shops in search of her white whale, her holy grail.

Her still working, ready, teddy, reading doll. Any child of the 80s might remember these things. Ready Teddy was a stuffed bear that would read bedtime stories via a tape deck encased in its chest. Now at the time, the technology was revolutionary. It was like having your very own robot to snuggle with.

But in reality, the ready teddy reading doll was just a clunky tape recorder stuffed into a teddy bear body with some plastic gears to move his mouth and eyes. Sadly, no amount of cotton stuffing would make those plastic buttons and mechanical parts cuddly.

The cotton set was great, but the execution, not so much. To further complicate things, the tapes that fit into the player were not standard cassettes. Instead, they were housed in odd shaped cartridges.

Apparently, this was to prevent bootleg stories from being released. By the time the ready teddy reading doll was discontinued, they had produced three taped story times.

Each tape came with an illustrated book so you could read along with ready teddy, but parents quickly grew tired of hearing the same three stories over and over.

Unfortunately, the man behind the stories died unexpectedly, shortly after the release of the doll. While the toy company scrambled to find a new author, they pivoted in an unexpected way to maintain sales.

Against their better judgment, they released a blank cartridge tape. The doll had always been able to record, after all it was just a pretty basic run of the mill tape recorder, but without a recordable cartridge to activate it, the record button had gone unused.

But with this new tape, a new feature was unlocked and teenagers everywhere made their younger siblings ready teddy reading doll, say the most foul mouth crude things you could think of.

Parents did, as you would expect, and blamed the company not their kids on the abuse of technology, and so ready teddy quickly gained a bad rap.

By the early 90s, the doll was no longer on the shelves. Those that remained were either discarded or so well loved that their plastic gears were worn smooth,

rendering ready teddy's mouth, slack jawed and haunting.

Eileen had always wanted one, but her parents never saw the benefit, opting instead to read the stories to Eileen the old fashioned way, sitting in a chair next to her bed.

For all the false and issues surrounding the doll itself, though, the stories that came with it were incredibly well written.

The author, Arnold Shek, sold those stories to the company, and the doll was crafted around them to support his wonderful tales, his untimely death only strengthened his legacy.

Mr. Shek wrote other books, but he never lived long enough to record a real audiobook of any of his other work, so the only remaining records of his voice were on those old cartridge tapes.

Eileen had found bootleg quality copies online, but it just wasn't the same. She loved those stories, and wanted nothing more than to hear them told by the man himself, Arnold Shek.

The call came in late on a Sunday afternoon. Over the years, Eileen had left her number at various shops scattered across the tri-state area, and on one particularly warm Sunday, while Eileen was reading a loan on her back porch, the phone rang.

After two rings, she made her way inside and recognized the number before answering. It was Anna from Fishy Fines, one of her favorite little consignment shops the next town over.

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