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On 6 November 2014, a news source local to Dayton, Ohio, published a story about a princess wand toy called the Evilstick. According to that news outlet, Dayton-area mom Nicole Allen had purchased a non-descript, pinkish-orange scepter-style wand for her two-year-old daughter at the $1.00 Store on Linden Avenue in Kettering, and when she unpackaged it, she found in contained a foil flower cutout that concealed a terrifying image of what appeared to be a young girl with red, glowing eyes and a large knife gesturing at slicing her wrist: The toy resembled typical dollar store off-brand merchandise, which is not infrequently foreign-made, poorly labeled, or otherwise different from non-discount merchandise found at larger retailers. Allen said she was angry when her son removed the foil to reveal the picture and added that the toy emitted a menacing laugh, making it even scarier: I'm outraged over it. I want to know how they think this is suitable for a child. The store's owner, Amar Moustafa, wasn't specifically aware of the item, but he said parents should inspect toys before purchasing them to determine whether or not any given plaything was too scary for small children: In September 2014, the Evilstick was included in a New Zealand newspaper's roundup of discount store merchandise. That article described the toy's functionality but made no mention of a hidden embedded image, and it said that the foil flower functioned as a mirror that served to distort the user's face: Another Dayton resident visited the same store and purchased an Evilstick himself to verify the reports. He found that a few of those Chinese-made toys contained the haunting image in question, but most of them did not — they featured a number of different pictures, and he had to sort through two racks of Evilsticks to find one with the same cutting girl image: Other purchasers also posted photographs showing the panoply of images to be found on Evilsticks:
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