Herman Winkler

Before polished mascots and cheerful mechanical performers, there was a prototype.

A towering wooden-and-steel moose built in an era when machinery was loud, crude, and barely understood by those who feared it. His nameplate, bolted crookedly to his chest, read Herman Winkler. Rivets showed through his hide. His antlers were iron. His smile never quite reached his eyes.

Some historians claim he was the first true walking animatronic ever constructed. Others whisper he was an abandoned predecessor to a more famous and friendlier mechanical moose that would later capture the world’s heart. Whoever commissioned him made one critical mistake:

They hired Dr. Frantic.

Herman could walk. Herman could turn his head. Herman could move his jaw as if to speak. But something inside him ticked wrong. His gears never idled; they waited. His hollow eyes followed movement even when his body stood still. And when left alone with someone for too long, tragedy had a way of finding them.

A night watchman once took shelter from a storm in the workshop where Herman stood deactivated. In the morning, the lights were still on, the doors still locked from the inside, and the guard’s flashlight lay crushed flat on the concrete floor. The only other mark in the room was a trail of deep, circular dents leading from Herman’s hooves to the far wall… and stopping abruptly beneath a dark stain no one could fully scrub away.

Years later, a maintenance engineer insisted the old machine was harmless. He volunteered to prove it by spending an hour alone recalibrating Herman’s internal mechanisms. Forty minutes in, the building’s power cut out. When it returned, Herman was standing six feet from where he’d been bolted down, facing the exit. The engineer was never found. Inside Herman’s rusted chassis, something could be heard softly knocking for days afterward.

Officially, Herman Winkler was deemed defective. Unstable. Too dangerous to display. He was dismantled, crated, and quietly removed, replaced by a brighter, friendlier mechanical moose built with safer hands and gentler intentions. The world forgot Herman ever existed.

But machines built by Dr. Frantic are rarely as lifeless as they appear.

Decades passed. Wood rotted. Metal corroded. Records vanished. Yet somewhere in the dark, gears continued to grind.

Now, at Hauntmare, the floor trembles with slow, thunderous steps. A hulking silhouette moves through the fog, joints shrieking, antlers scraping the air ducts above. He smells of oil, dust, and old blood baked into rusted steel.

Herman Winkler has returned.

Perhaps he was built to kill from the beginning.
Perhaps abandonment taught him how.
Or perhaps he simply never forgave being replaced.

You won’t see him at first.

You’ll hear him.