For decades the doll sat in a glass case at the back of a house in Monroe, Connecticut, behind a sign that read “Warning, positively do not open.” It is not the porcelain doll from the films. It is a mass-produced cloth Raggedy Ann.
The doll is the one solid object in the story. Everything else, the nurses, the séance, the scratches, the priest, comes from Ed and Lorraine Warren’s own accounts, first found in print in a newspaper review of their lecture in 1979. No police, medical or church record of the events has ever been published. Since August 27, 2026, the doll has been on show at the Haunted Warren Museum in Salem, Massachusetts.
The story the Warrens told
This is the Warrens’ account, from Gerald Brittle’s The Demonologist and their lectures, with the names later retellings take from Brittle.
The story goes that around 1970 “Donna,” a 28-year-old student nurse in Hartford, was given a Raggedy Ann doll by her mother for her birthday. She shared an apartment with another nurse, “Angie,” whose fiancé “Lou” distrusted the doll from the start. The doll moved on its own, the women said; notes appeared, then drops like blood. A medium held a séance, and the spirit said it was Annabelle, a seven-year-old girl who had died on the property. The roommates agreed to let her stay.
Then Lou woke feeling he was being strangled, and later found seven claw-like scratches on his chest that healed within two days. Donna went to an Episcopal priest, “Father Hegan,” who took the matter to his superior, “Father Cooke,” and the Warrens were called in. Their verdict was that there had never been a little girl. An inhuman spirit, a demonic one in their language, was working through the doll. (On the difference between a ghost and something never human, see what a ghost is.) Father Cooke blessed the apartment, and the Warrens took the doll; Ed said it interfered with the car on the drive home.
Later lectures added a priest who mocked the doll and crashed his car, and a visitor who taunted it and died in a motorcycle crash that day. The motorcyclist comes only from Ed Warren, with no name and no date.
What the record holds
The earliest mention found is a review. On November 1, 1979, Bob Quarteroni of the Centre Daily Times covered a Warren lecture at Penn State’s Eisenhower Auditorium. He mentioned “a nasty little raggedy-Ann doll who stabbed a policeman”, under the headline “More Laughs than Frights.” By late 1979 the doll was part of the Warrens’ paid lecture act.
The book followed in 1980: The Demonologist (Prentice-Hall), which Brittle said he wrote under “an exclusive deal” with Lorraine Warren. New Line later said its film rights came through chapters of that book.
The details move between tellings. In the Gloucester County Times in 1987, Ed Warren called the spirit “a six-year-old girl, Annabelle”; in Brittle she is seven. Retellings disagree on whether she was a birthday or Christmas gift.
| The Warrens said | What the record shows |
|---|---|
| Two nurses, Donna and Angie, and a man called Lou | Nobody has identified any of them independently |
| A girl named Annabelle died on the property | No address and no death record have been published |
| Seven scratches on Lou’s chest | No medical record has been published |
| A priest’s car crash, a motorcyclist’s death | No police report, name or date has been published |
The surname Higgins, often attached to the girl, comes from the films; no record gives it. The science writer Sharon A. Hill put the problem plainly in 2014: “We have nothing but Ed’s word for this.”
From Monroe to Salem
The Warren Occult Museum occupied the back of the couple’s house in Monroe, which Lorraine ran with her son-in-law, Tony Spera. Ed died in 2006, Lorraine in April 2019, and that year the museum closed to the public over zoning: a paying attraction in a residential neighborhood.
On August 1, 2025, the comedian Matt Rife announced that he and Elton Castee had bought the house and museum building. Spera told TODAY that the artifacts were not part of the sale: “All of the artifacts, including the infamous Annabelle doll, are owned by Judy and myself.” They are leased under a five-year agreement, and Rife calls himself the doll’s “guardian.” The Salem FAQ calls her “part of the museum’s permanent collection.”
Castee’s company, Haunted Warren Museum, LLC, took a former bank building on Essex Street and opened it on August 27, 2026. It claims “over 1,000” objects; the Monroe Sun put the Monroe collection at about 750, so Salem shows the Warren collection plus additions.
Prices and hours are from the ticket page; the FAQ promises fog and flickering light, “no jump scares or haunt actors,” and an Annabelle gallery with two paths, so a visitor can bypass the doll.
The only dispute with the city on record was over hours. The museum asked for 10 a.m. to 2 a.m.; on March 26, 2026, the City Council voted down later hours 3–8 and approved 10 p.m. Sunday to Thursday and midnight on Fridays and Saturdays, as a 90-day trial. In May NBC Boston reported 11 p.m. on weeknights. No council record of that change has been found.
The rumors
On August 14, 2020, someone edited the doll’s Wikipedia page to say she had escaped at 3 a.m. that day. Spera filmed himself beside the case: “Annabelle did not escape… She didn’t take a trip,” as KSAT reported.
In 2025 the doll went on a paid tour, and TikToks said she had vanished. Spera told Newsweek that “the doll was never missing.”
This October it was a visitor. Kayla Jackson of Saugus visited on September 6 and in a TikTok described a flickering flashlight, a colder room, a dead sparrow at home and a glitching car radio. “The room was noticeably colder the minute that we stepped in,” she told NBC Boston. She does not claim the doll caused any of it. The Mary Sue reported that the radio noise “was later traced to the friend’s phone”. The flashlight was the museum’s, in a building that flickers its lights on purpose.
The skeptics on record
In 1997 Perry DeAngelis and Steven Novella of the New England Skeptical Society toured the Monroe museum and interviewed the Warrens for about five hours. Their report found “absolutely no compelling evidence,” though “there was a ton of ‘evidence,’” and put it in four words: “stories are not evidence.” Lorraine Warren’s answer in 1997 was that the skeptics “don’t base anything on a God.”
The films
Her first screen appearance is the opening of The Conjuring (2013), where two nurses, renamed Debbie and Camilla, bring the Warrens a doll that is no longer a Raggedy Ann. The films kept the change: Annabelle (2014), directed by John R. Leonetti, calls her a “rare vintage porcelain doll.” Annabelle: Creation (2017) invented a dollmaker’s dead daughter as her origin, and Annabelle Comes Home (2019) is set in the Warrens’ artifact room.
The rest of that film’s case is in The Conjuring true story; other Warren files include Amityville and Enfield, and more are in ghost movies based on true stories.
What does not fit
The earliest sentence anyone has found about Annabelle was written by a reporter in a Penn State auditorium in 1979, and it ran under “More Laughs than Frights.” Forty-seven years later the same rag doll has a room of her own on Essex Street, a second path for anyone who would rather not walk past her, and tickets that end in 6.60.