Fear not: The real-life “demonically possessed” Annabelle doll, which has been blamed for an alarming number of attacks and hauntings since the 1970s, is safely behind glass at Warrens’ Occult Museum in Monroe, Connecticut.
The doll is perhaps best known for inspiring the Annabelle character that appeared in 2013’sThe Conjuring and the spin-off trilogy Annabelle (2014), Annabelle: Creation (2017) and Annabelle Comes Home (2019).
In truth, however, the real Annabelle is not porcelain with arched eyebrows and blonde hair as she appears in the films. She is simply a seemingly ordinary mass-produced Raggedy Ann doll, with a smiling face and hair made from bright red yarn.
Her story began in 1970, when a nursing student named Donna is said to have received the antique doll as a birthday gift from her mother. The doll became a colorful addition to the apartment Donna shared with another young nurse, Angie, but before long, the two women were claiming that the doll seemed to be able to move around on its own when it wasn’t being watched. At first, these movements were slight, such as a change in position or a crossing of its arms. Later, it began to appear in different rooms with the door closed behind it.
Donna and Angie then claimed that parchment paper, which they did not keep in the house, had appeared scrawled with the message: “Help Me.” Donna and Angie invited a psychic medium to their apartment to investigate, who held a seance and proceeded to inform them that their doll had been possessed by the spirit of a dead seven-year-old named Annabelle Higgins, whose body had been found in a field on the site where their apartment building was later built. The medium told the women that Annabelle just wanted to be loved, and Donna gave permission for her to inhabit the doll.
Things didn’t end there, though. While staying at the apartment, Angie’s boyfriend, Lou, dreamed that Annabelle had tried to strangle him. The following day, he claimed he heard noises and found the doll lying face down on the ground in Donna’s room. After he picked the doll up, he felt a severe pain in his chest and said that when he looked down, he saw seven bloody claw marks. Within days, the marks had healed and vanished.
Following the incident, Donna and Angie contacted a priest who, in turn, contacted the paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren, founders of Warrens’ Occult Museum. The couple spoke to Donna, Angie and Lou and concluded that rather than being possessed by a dead child, Annabelle was in fact being manipulated by a demonic, inhuman presence.
The Warrens claimed that the spirit of a dead human would only be able to possess another human, but an inhuman presence could possess an inanimate object such as a doll. They claimed the demonic force was trying to draw attention to itself by using the doll, with the ultimate aim of possessing one of the apartment’s human inhabitants. They arranged for a priest to bless the apartment and took the doll away with them.
They claimed that unexplained events continued to surround the doll. On their way home, they said their car swerved and stalled inexplicably. The Warrens also said that a Catholic priest had been involved in a near-fatal car accident after telling the doll: “You’re just a rag doll, Annabelle, you can’t hurt anyone.”
The Warrens built a glass case to house Annabelle at their museum, which they claimed stopped the doll moving of its own volition. However, they said another incident occurred when a young male visitor to the museum heard the story about Lou and banged on the case, taunting the doll to leave scratch marks on him as well. The Warrens claimed that the man crashed his motorcycle on the way home from the museum and was killed instantly.
The Warrens’ Occult Museum has been closed to the public since 2019, after the death of Lorraine Warren. Ed Warren had already passed in 2006. Since then, the New England Society for Psychic Research (NESPR) has maintained their collection. In 2020, Tony Spera, the son-in-law of the Warrens and now director of NESPR, was forced to clear up rumors that Annabelle had escaped her enclosure.
More recently, NESPR dismissed recent reports that Annabelle had been stolen or gone missing in Louisiana, debunking online rumors that the doll was somehow connected to the recent fire at the Nottoway Plantation-turned-Nottoway Resort in White Castle.
NESPR’s lead investigator, Dan Rivera, posted a social media video showing Annabelle in the shuttered museum in the case the Warrens built for the doll. He did confirm that there are plans for Annabelle to appear on tour this year, with dates listed in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania in July and at the 2025 Rock Island Roadhouse Esoteric Expo in Rock Island, Illinois, on October 4.
Reached for comment by The Independent, Spera said that the purpose of taking Annabelle on tour was “to allow paranormal enthusiasts to witness the infamous doll in person, to visually show that evil exists. And the devil exists.”
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