New Hampshire Officer Smashes Car Window to Rescue “Baby” — Turns Out to Be a Hyper-Realistic Doll

Note: This story originally made headlines in August 2016. We’re revisiting it now as a reminder of how real some “reborn” dolls can appear.

On a warm summer day in July 2016, a New Hampshire police officer rushed to rescue what appeared to be a baby locked inside a hot car — only to find out it wasn’t a real baby at all.

Lt. Jason Short with the Keene Police Department responded to a 911 call reporting an infant left alone in a car in a Walmart parking lot. Given the heat and the sight of what looked like tiny feet sticking out from under a blanket, Short made a split-second decision to break the car window.

What he discovered next shocked him.

After shattering the window and pulling away the blanket, Short initially believed the baby was dead. He attempted to perform rescue breaths — but the lungs didn’t inflate. That’s when he realized: it wasn’t a baby. It was an incredibly lifelike silicone doll.

The doll belonged to Carolynne Seiffert, who had been inside a nearby Super Cuts getting her hair done at the time. She explained to the officer that the doll, named Ainslie, was designed to look and feel exactly like a real baby.

Short later told reporters that even holding the doll felt eerily real — the weight, the texture, everything. “It looked so lifelike,” he said.

According to Sentinel Source, Seiffert had purchased the handcrafted doll just a week earlier for $2,300 from a specialized doll nursery. Known as “reborn dolls,” these silicone figures are a niche collectible, often created with painstaking detail to closely mimic actual infants. Seiffert is an avid collector and owns several of them.

No charges were filed in the incident, but it served as a bizarre and unforgettable example of how convincing these dolls can be — and the tough calls first responders have to make when every second counts.