Know About The Real Story of the ‘Haunted’ Annabelle Doll
Annabelle is the haunted doll that has captured millions of imaginations. And all this started long before the Conjuring universe did. While horror movies like Annabelle (2014), Annabelle: Creation (2017), and Annabelle Comes Home (2019) catapulted the doll to new levels of popularity, the real story about Annabelle goes far deeper into the stories advanced by paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren.
The Warrens say that the Annabelle story began with the gift of a large Raggedy Ann doll to a 24-year-old nurse named Dierdre Bernard by her mother for her birthday. Dierdre, residing with fellow nurse Lara Clifton, soon began to find peculiar occurrences after getting the doll. It apparently moved about on its own or in a way that it would mysteriously shift to another room without anyone moving it. At one time, the girls left the doll in Dierdre's bedroom, but then came back to find it kneeling in the living room. They tried to copy this position themselves but found it quite impossible to make the doll kneel without it falling over.
The more time passed, the stranger the activity became. The nurses began to find handwritten notes that seemed as if the doll itself wrote those notes. The piece of paper said things like "HELP US" and "HELP CAL," referring to Lara's fiancé, Cal Randell. The girls could not find pencils in the apartment anywhere, and they needed to use the ones in their purses to write the notes.
The girls first suspected it was a prank, so they put traps around their apartment to detect intruders. When those traps uncovered nothing and the strange events kept happening—for example, at one time, there were small droplets of blood on the doll—they concluded that they needed a medium. The psychic communicated to the nurses that a little girl by the name of Annabelle Higgins had died on the property, and her spirit was attached to the doll. The ghost allegedly liked the nurses and sought permission to inhabit the doll so she could stay with them, a request the nurses naively granted.
According to Ed and Lorraine Warren, this was a fatal error. The Warrens believed that what the nurses saw was not the ghost of the little girl but some kind of demon. They declared that it was when they invited the spirit to reside inside the doll that it provided a means for this demonic presence to grow stronger. With time, Annabelle's behavior became more evil. Cal had nightmares too terrible to describe - nightmares in which the doll was a part of every nightmare, and at times physically abused him, leaving claw marks on his chest.
The Warrens were finally called to come and view the case. They arranged for a priest to perform an exorcism on the apartment and the people. The Warrens then took the Annabelle doll to their museum of occult, there it was locked in a glass case.
Today, with both Ed and Lorraine Warren deceased, the doll Annabelle stays in ownership of their daughter and spouse. Whether true, at least in part, or a fantasy born from the imaginations of the Warrens, the legend behind Annabelle continues to terrify and entertain people today.