See, the problem is that you keep thinking of witches and their dolls as collections of individuals. That’s not quite right.
Now, some folks intuitively grasp that the dolls, at least, are more like the limbs and organs of a larger superentity, right? That’s obvious enough.
More seductive is the belief that the witch itself is an independent creature. After all, it shows so many of the classic signs of personhood, doesn’t it? You’d be forgiven for thinking of a witch as just a person with strange powers.
You’d be wrong.
A witch’s abilities do not originate in the books it studies or the sigils it scrawls. A random person cannot simply take some night classes and then go running off to twist reality’s fabric into knots with a gaggle of hand-made assistants. That’s absurd.
No, a witch’s powers come from its essential nature, which is not entirely of the world and those people in it.
The figure you see, the one that directs its dolls and appears to run its house, is only a narrow protrusion from a deeper and wider creature.
You are better off thinking of the Witch House itself as the living entity you’ve interacted with. The witch is its chief organ, sure, its heart or its brain—whichever analogy pleases you, but it is not all there is to fear.
Do not forget: when you are in a witch’s house, it is not merely that you are in the domain of a powerful creature. You are inside that powerful creature, and the rules that apply within it are not those you think you know.