The True Story of the Haunted Doll Annabelle

Annabelle is perhaps the most famous of the cursed dolls, having inspired the 2014 film Annabelle, a spin-off from The Conjuring. The film is, of course, highly fictionalized but is based on the true story of Annabelle, the cursed doll.
Here is her story, according to demonologists Ed and Lorraine Warren.

Annabelle, the cursed doll

First of all, the doll is not made of ceramic like the one in the film, but is a rag doll very famous in the United States, a Raggedy Ann.

Donna, a student, received it as a gift from her mother in 1970 for her 28th birthday and put it in her bedroom.

Just a few days later, Donna’s roommate Angie said that the doll was strange, and soon after, both began to notice that it was moving on its own.

They noticed several times that it changed position, crossed its legs and arms, and often, after placing it on the living room sofa before going to university, they found it back in their bedroom, with the doors closed.

In one of these episodes, Donna noticed not only that Annabelle had changed position, but that she also had blood on her hands and chest.

In addition, the two girls began to find messages written on parchment in childish handwriting that said “help.”

The séance

The woman, frightened and not knowing what to do, decided to call a medium who wanted to hold a séance. During the séance, the medium said that inside the doll was the spirit of a 7-year-old girl, Annabelle Higgins, who had lived in the area and whose body had been found on the very land where the building in which the two girls lived had been built. She also said that the spirit claimed to be comfortable with Donna and Angie. Just like in the case of the Okiku doll, it seemed that the spirit of a little girl had chosen a toy to manifest itself. The two girls, moved by the story, gave Annabelle permission to stay in the doll with them, but they did not know what they were getting themselves into.

Lou’s accident

Angie’s boyfriend, Lou, sometimes stayed over at their place and didn’t like the doll at all, often saying that they should get rid of it.

When he slept in the girls’ apartment, he often had nightmares about Annabelle, and once he woke up suddenly with the doll trying to strangle him. In the morning, he thought it was all a dream, but he wanted to get rid of the doll anyway.

Donna, however, did not want to do so. Lou then took Annabelle and threw her across the room. As soon as he did, the young man felt a sharp pain in his chest and four marks appeared on his chest and three on his abdomen, like scratches. The wounds were so deep that blood began to show through his shirt.

The Warren mediums

Terrified, Donna decided to contact religious authorities, who advised her to contact Ed and Lorraine Warren, two demonologists. After examining the doll, they concluded that it was not the ghost of a little girl, but a demon that wanted to possess Donna’s body.

The Warrens asked the priest who had come with them, Father Cooke, to perform an exorcism and bless the house. Donna then begged them to take her with them to their occult museum. During the journey, the car malfunctioned several times, but this stopped once the doll was sprinkled with holy water. Annabelle was then placed in a glass case in the Warren’s occult museum in Connecticut.

The last victim

Even though she is locked up in a museum, Annabelle still has the power to do harm. The Warrens themselves recount a strange episode that occurred during one of their tours at the museum. A young man arrived on a motorcycle with his girlfriend and kept teasing Annabelle, lifting his shirt and challenging her to make the same scratches appear on his chest that had appeared on Lou’s. In fact, he even challenged her to do her worst, tapping his fingers on her display case. The boy was thrown out of the museum, and later the Warrens received news that three hours after leaving the museum, he had an accident on his motorcycle, crashing into a tree and losing his life.

His girlfriend survived but had to remain in the hospital for about a year. Ed Warren died in 2006 and Lorraine in 2019, and since then their collection has been looked after by their daughter, Judy, and their son-in-law, Tony Spera. On February 23, 2017, the transfer of Annabelle to a portable display case was shown live so that she could be moved to the museum’s new location.

Annabelle today

In 2019 the Warrens’ occult museum in Monroe, Connecticut, closed to the public because of zoning problems. Since then Annabelle has rarely left it, and only under the strict control of the New England Society for Psychic Research (NESPR), the organisation founded by the Warrens and now run by Tony Spera.

In May 2025 a rumour spread on social media that Annabelle had “vanished” from her case. Spera denied it at once: the doll had never been missing, she had simply gone on a tour, called Devils on the Run, to show the museum’s objects to enthusiasts. According to Wikipedia, the rumour was actually promoted as viral marketing for the tour.

But the tour added an eerie chapter to the legend. On 13 July 2025 paranormal investigator Dan Rivera, one of the organisers and Annabelle’s main handler during the tour, died suddenly in a hotel in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, aged 54. The coroner pointed out that the doll was not at the scene and that Rivera was alone. The tour went on nonetheless.

Finally, in August 2025, American comedian Matt Rife bought the Warrens’ home and the Monroe museum, becoming the legal guardian of the whole collection, Annabelle included, for at least five years.

What the sceptics say

The whole Annabelle story rests on the Warrens’ account, spread mainly through Gerald Brittle’s 1980 book The Demonologist. Sceptics point out that there is no other evidence: as science writer Sharon A. Hill put it, “we have nothing but Ed’s word”. Religious studies scholar Joseph Laycock has noted that the idea of the demonic doll may derive from the legends about Robert the Doll and from a Twilight Zone episode, “Living Doll”, aired five years before the Warrens’ story, in which the mother is called Annabelle.

On screen, meanwhile, the rag doll has become a terrifying porcelain doll: besides Annabelle (2014), Annabelle: Creation (2017) and Annabelle Comes Home (2019), she appears in almost every film in the Conjuring series, up to The Conjuring: Last Rites in 2025.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bL5RliA4hgs&feature=youtu.be

Sources

• Wikipedia – Annabelle (doll)
• NBC News – Paranormal investigator Dan Rivera dies on tour with Annabelle (2025)