The Story Behind The Cursed, Naked Sylvester Stallone Doll Found in an Australian Country Town

There are only a few things that can truly haunt a person: an inexplicable ghost sighting, being a by-stander to some unfathomable crime, and stumbling upon a semi-naked Sylvester Stallone latex doll tied by the neck to a rickety trolley in the back of an antiques store in butt-fuck nowhere.

But that’s exactly what happened to Bea Bellingham. 

View on X

The Stallone doll, which is now being described online as “cursed” and a “BDSM nightmare”, sits in the Katoomba Vintage Emporium in the Blue Mountains, twisted in a semi-fetal position, a grotesque face warped in a look of confusion, with backwards, bent hands.

Bellingham posted the visuals to Instagram, “What in the actual fuck…” she said over the weekend, before Twitter user Howsito reposted to the platform.

But this is not a sex doll gone wrong (who knows, maybe it is). It’s actually a replica of Sylvester Stallone’s character John Spartan, a risk-taking police officer who is cryogenically frozen in a “cryo-penitentiary’ in the 1993 film Demolition Man.

After the movie was released, the frozen-in-time Stallones became a prop to be hung across the various Planet Hollywood’s of the world. Whether this is an original or a replica, however, is impossible to tell. 

In one Reddit thread, a user claimed that this particular Stallone had once been hanging in Planet Hollywood Crown Casino in Melbourne. While VICE contacted Crown Casino to confirm, we’re yet to hear a reply. What VICE does know, however, is that the Katoomba Emporium’s doll has been priced at the hefty sum of $6000.

“I did offer him half,” said a curious user on Reddit. “He said ‘come back and see me in a few months, if it’s still here, I’ll think about it’.”

To that we say: good luck to you, Sir. Not sure what you’d need with a life-size Sylvester Stallone, but, hey, to each their own.

While VICE may not have all the answers, our video guy, Nick, was in-store just a few days ago. He summed up the general “vibe” nicely:

“I stumbled across the doll when browsing the antique store. It was upstairs in the middle of the showroom just chained to a trolley. At first, it startled me as it was pretty realistic and I didn’t know if it was legit. After staring at the doll for a matter of seconds and looking around the room for a camera to make sure I wasn’t on a prank show, I slowly backed out of the store as the vibe was way off and I didn’t want a curse or some shit to be put on me.”

VICE has contacted the Katoomba Emporium for more info.

Follow Julie Fenwick on Twitter and Instagram.

Read more from VICE Australia and subscribe to our weekly newsletter, This Week Online.