We’re all familiar with the infamous ‘Escalator Safety’ Public Information Film from 1970, from which the image of the child’s welly boot being crushed down the sides of the escalator haunted the minds of just about every child subjected to it.
Here it is, to relive the trauma…
But there was another.
While the above PIF has been showcased many times online and led to much discussion and nostalgia among kids of the 70s and 80s, many times I have seen members of the Haunted Generation recall another Escalator PIF that they say scared them much more than the above infamous one.
And this one featured a doll.
It’s a well-known fact that the guaranteed way to make a PIF terrifying is to feature a doll in it. (Click for a case in point) But this particular Escalator PIF, in which a doll rather than a wellington boot is crushed by an escalator, has somehow remained elusive, even though many seem to recall it.
From the recollections of members of the Weird British TV Memories (70s-90s) Facebook group:
The PIF featured a little girl on an escalator, holding a rag doll. She dropped the doll and tried to pick it up, but the doll was hideously mangled and scalped underneath the bottom step, and the PIF ended with a shot of a man standing holding the doll’s hair.
It doesn’t seem to have run for as long as the ‘welly-boot’ PIF did, and the escalator might have been one of the old wooden escalators that were banned after the Kings’ Cross fire.
I’ve seen many people talk about their recollections of this PIF across various nostalgia sites and YouTube. But somehow, despite having scarred the minds of many, it remains elusive and has yet to show up online.
Either way, it seems to have inspired a more contemporary Canadian PSA…
The Canadian one above definitely seems to follow the same formula. But the original British PIF with the doll on the escalator seems to allude us.
Can you find this PIF for us?
If you have any more detailed recollections of this PIF, or better still, have a copy of it – comment here or drop us an email to let us know!
Unidentified Weird TV 
I remember the doll one and, being born in 1969, it, not surprisingly had a horrifying impact on me. Curiously, it wasn’t so much the mangled doll itself that I found the most disturbing , it was the way the man was frantically tugging at it to try to release it
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I think this advert traumatised me with the doll as I try to avoid escalators as much as possible
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I still remain convinced that this is a false memory syndrome/Mandela Effect scenario. Bits of different PIFs involving escalator safely and rag dolls have got mix-and-matched. The reason that no copy of the rag doll/escalator PIF hasn’t turned up is that there almost certainly never was one!
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This is the conclusion I’ve been coming to – I find it very plausible. Although some people remain very certain this PIF must have existed, given how many different people seem to remember it independently of each other. A search of the internet reveals a lot of different people seemingly remembering this PIF independently, across different forums. Though without concrete evidence it’s still very possible they’re misremembering – the confusion between different PIFs could well date back to the 80s themselves, leading to word travelling and a whole chain of people with false memories across the decades!
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