I have a question about a fairly universal childhood experience. Furbies. Why on earth were Furbies as scary as they were? They should have been the best, but instead they were the source of all our nightmares, and rulers of the back of the cupboard where we threw them so we wouldn’t have to deal with them.
They were designed to be cute. They had big eyes, bright colours, and were affectionate. The Wikipedia page for Furbies describes them as looking like “a hamster or owl-like creature,” so theoretically we should have loved them
And then they woke up. And never ever went back to sleep.
There were three main things that had us convinced they were possessed: the fact that they spoke without batteries, woke up in the middle of the night, and would occasionally start speaking in the world’s most demonic voice.
Turns out Furbies had a power store that could keep the Furby running for a little while if the main source of power – the batteries – went flat or were removed. This is all well and good, except you don’t exactly want it to keep chattering away when you take the batteries out to stop it waking you up in the night. Which brings us to possession reason #2.
Those assholes would wake you up in the middle of the night either by yelling ‘Feed me!’ or just being loud in Furbish, which sounds like speaking in tongues when it’s 2am. Apparently we were meant to lay them down when we put them to bed, and a motion sensor inside the Furby would (theoretically) tell it to sleep. If you did what I did and just sat the furby up on your shelf, it assumed it was still daytime and would chatter occasionally to get attention.
As for the terrifying voice? That was deliberate. If you neglected your furby, it would start speaking in that horrible voice until someone interacted with it again. Because nothing is going to convince a kid to play with a toy like a demon voice coming out of it.
There are as many possessed Furby stories out there as there are people who owned Furbies. There’s a good chance that this has been absolutely no comfort to you at all, but hopefully you at least have answers for why the scary Furby with no batteries started screeching from the back of your cupboard now.
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