‘This thing is alive, this thing is alive, this thing is alive.” The insistence of this fact, says puppeteer Toby Olié, is essential to his job. “You are the soul and life force of a puppet, and you’re using suspension of disbelief to animate. So when the puppeteer lets go, that’s the moment of death.” The question is: what do you do with the body?

When ventriloquists’ puppets are laid to rest, they have the option of heading to Vent Haven, a museum-cum-graveyard in Kentucky that holds about 900 dummies. Theatrical puppets – whether bunraku, marionette, string, sock or finger – have no such final resting place. Instead, discarded carcasses are locked in closets, dumped in landfill or passed from one generation to another. Some get put on display but are never played with, some wait for years to be picked up again, and others get burned to cinders or forgotten entirely.

You open a box, and think, Oh! That funny thing made someone cry or laugh. It’s still got a bit of magic

“They are tools,” says Chris Pirie, the co-director of the internationally touring puppet company Green Ginger. “No more and no less important than a scalpel or screwdriver, or anything else that we use to create our worlds.” But, he softens: “We’ve given them breath and life.” Then he laughs. “So you do form these weird bonds.” It is these emotional ties that can make puppets so hard to throw away.

‘We’ve given them breath’ … Chris Pirie with a puppet from Green Ginger’s touring production Outpost. Photograph: Adam DJ Laity

After 15 years of making paper puppets, Nic Beard from the Paper Cinema is at a loss about what to do with a wardrobe full of them. “Puppets are made for purpose, not sculpture.” After years of touring, the scraps are broken and crumpled from use. “But that’s part of the lovely nature of them,” he says. “They are finite.” The Paper Cinema creates live films on stage with their 2D paper cut-outs, so a whole show can be small enough to fit into a shoebox. Someone once spilled a pint over months of work, but most have survived the years. “You open a box, and think, Oh! That funny thing made from photocopies of cereal packets made someone cry or laugh. It’s still got a little bit of magic.” He jokes that one day they’ll make the kindling for his funeral pyre. “Or I’ll just put it in the compost or something.” He sighs, thinking practically. “They’ve got to go the way of all things eventually. Who actually wants to keep a rotting Margaret Thatcher?”

The Paper Cinema’s Nightflyer.

“I’ve just had Margaret Thatcher away for restoration,” discloses Michael Dixon, who oversees the National Puppetry Archive in Shropshire, and whose personal collection of 5,500 puppets, kept in storage, includes 40 Punch and Judy sets and several of the cast of TV’s Spitting Image. “She had a facelift and latex scaffolding inside to make sure she doesn’t disintegrate so much.” Modern puppets tend to perish quicker than wooden Victorian ones because foam latex – a popular medium for puppets – gets sticky after about 15 years and falls apart. “They just go to dust,” he explains. “We call it toast because it looks like lots of crumbs.”

Like Dixon, Tim Britton and Penny Saunders from Dorset’s Forkbeard Fantasy keep their retired puppets in storage, but they have found their puppets prove useful, even in death. “There was a break-in at the studio,” Britton explains. “But when we went over, nothing had been stolen.” On the floor was a torch and large metal cutters the intruders had used to cut their way in. “The tools were lying at the feet of a really scary, ghostly little girl with big staring eyes that Penny had made. We think they came in, looked around with their torch, and suddenly there was the little girl, terribly realistic, staring straight at them because of the way the eyes worked. They must have just dropped everything and ran.”

Some makers take a more mystical approach and refute the idea that their puppets ever die. The strings of the gargantuan puppets from French company Royal de Luxe are strong enough to suspend disbelief from beyond the grave. The company argues that its puppets exist in a plane different to our own – not an impossible thing to believe if you’ve seen their enormous elephant or gigantic granny – and therefore they cannot really die, but rather lie in wait. “They pursue an impossible path,” founder of the company, Jean-Luc Courcoult, tells me, “light years away from human memory.”

Penny Saunders with Horse, a lifesize rideable marionette from Forkbeard Fantasy’s Invisible Bonfires.

Other puppeteers have the afterlife of their puppets taken out of their hands entirely. Cat Rock, who works under the company name Muddy Duck in Bristol, and who admits occasionally chatting absent-mindedly to her puppets (“If they’re in the studio I’ll, you know, ask if they’ve seen the scissors”) made her first puppet 10 years ago. It was an evil witch called Mads. “Her favourite hobby was catching animals and cutting them up.” Mads was particularly keen on rat’s tails, and after chopping them off, she’d hang them out to dry. Rock has been storing Mads in her nan’s garage. Last summer, when she was rooting around for some old costumes, she found Mads’ remains, half-eaten and scattered across a dishevelled rats nest. Looking back, Rock laughs. “I couldn’t have planned it better.”

Royal de Luxe’s giant marionette of a girl in St James’s Park, London, in 2006. Photograph: Jim Dyson/Getty Images

Occasionally, puppets can avoid death altogether. When War Horse’s original West End Joey was on display in the V&A’s theatre collection, Olié went to visit him. Though there were five or six Joey puppets being used in rotation in the production, Olié immediately recognised the museum’s puppet as his. “That was the bit that used to rub my hand and that was the bit of binding that used to come undone.” The horse was displayed rearing up on the shoulders of human mannequins, “so it was like a living thing and not a dead prop.” It reminded him of the puppeteer’s meditative state. “You genuinely disappear. If you were in your own body you’d realise it’s madness, but because you’re invested and because you care about it, the puppet takes on a whole other life that’s stronger than the sum of its parts.”

War Horse, currently on a UK tour, is the most popular contemporary puppet show in the world and it is likely this Joey puppet will continue to live in a semi-retired state for ever. Olié compares a puppet’s existence in this limbo to a musical instrument. “It’s got all of the potential to play another piece of music,” he says. “It’s just waiting for the right hands.”