The Real-Life Haunting of Annabelle, a Doll Possessed

Annabelle is sitting bolt upright in the back of her tour van, gliding down Interstate 80 toward Rock Island, Illinois, a town perched on the Mississippi River. In a few hours, Annabelle will lead a meet and greet with fans from across the Midwest. The event follows headline shows in Maine, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Louisiana. Her strawberry-lace hair falls onto her floral dress; her saucer-plate eyes stare straight ahead. A smile is etched on her face. She is always smiling.

Annabelle is not a pop star. In fact, she’s not even human. Annabelle is a three-foot-high, tattered Raggedy Ann doll, obtained and quarantined by American paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren. In the 1970s, she enjoyed a modest amount of fame, which was eclipsed forty years later when she became a key character in theConjuring universe. Since 2013, the movies have spawned nine sequels, including Annabelle, Annabelle: Creation, and Annabelle Comes Home. They’ve earned more than $2.8 billion, making them the highest-grossing horror franchise of all time. The Conjuring: Last Rites, released in September of this year, has already taken in close to half a billion dollars on its own.

According to paranormal enthusiasts, Annabelle is diabolically evil, one of the most haunted artifacts in the world, capable of wreaking havoc on any unfortunate souls who find themselves in her field of influence. It’s why a team of handlers, which includes a priest, chaperones her from town to town in a cabinet, emblazoned with a hand-painted sign reading: warning positively do not open. The person who built the box, one of Annabelle’s handlers, dropped dead recently. In the van heading to Rock Island, the box is covered with a midnight-black sheet and a baby-blue blanket, wedged next to a bag of Chilli Heatwave Doritos.

Members of NESPR, the group behind the Devils on the Run Tour. Shown from left are Dan Rivera, Chris Gilloren, Tony Spera, and a fourth member named Wade Kirby.

The road trip is part of the Devils on the Run Tour, which began in May at a former penitentiary in West Virginia that’s said to be haunted. Organized by the New England Society for Psychic Research (NESPR)—a group founded by the Warrens in 1952—the tour gives curiosity seekers the chance to view a range of supernatural ephemera at paranormal conventions across the U. S. The showings take place in a pop-up version of the Warrens’ Occult Museum, and items include a haunted piano from the home of a tormented priest, a so-called conjuring mirror to summon spirits, and the Shadow Doll, which infiltrates dreams with insidious nightmares.

Tens of thousands of people are paying around fifty dollars—on top of the cost to enter the convention—to stand mere feet away from Annabelle, locking eyes with this girlish manifestation of devilry. “It was electrifying, like encountering a renowned celebrity,” says Haley Michelle, a paranormal influencer who brought her own haunted doll, Cynthia, along to meet Annabelle in Maine. “I felt a mix of excitement and nervous anticipation as I approached her, sensing an aura of mystique surrounding her.”

It’s wholesome if creepy fun for the whole family, but behind the scenes Annabelle has left a trail of destruction in her wake. More than fifty years after she materialized, the doll is at the center of a bitter disagreement that’s torn apart the surviving family of the Warrens, splintered paranormal research groups, and unleashed personal demons into public view. She truly is a cursed object.

Chris McKinnell, the grandson of Ed and Lorraine Warren, knows Annabelle well. After all, she was part of the family. “I remember seeing it in the box and being terrified of it,” he says. At the Warrens’ museum, which was in the basement of their Connecticut home, she received special treatment, out of not adoration—McKinnell says Lorraine despised the doll—but fear. “All the other artifacts were laid out to touch except for Annabelle,” he says. “It was the only thing that was bound.”

McKinnell, sixty-one, is a soft-spoken man who has traveled to more than one hundred countries investigating paranormal cases—ten thousand in forty-five years, he says.

His interest in the family business started when he was sixteen years old and his grandfather took him on a case in Massachusetts. Inside the house, he witnessed dark, hulking shapes running down the stairs and pounding that shook the walls. He still hunts people’s ghosts for free and is working on an “Anthony Bourdain–meets-the-paranormal kind of program” for TV. Today he lives in Paraguay.

The story of Annabelle begins with a nursing student whom McKinnell calls Debbie. She lived in an apartment in Hartford, Connecticut, with another student, named Lara Clifton. Debbie received a doll as a gift. In the spirit of playfulness, they treated the toy as if it were real, sitting it at the table for breakfast, sleeping next to it, and talking to it. One day in 1970, the doll’s arms levitated up onto the table.

“This was the Age of Aquarius,” McKinnell says. “They were like, Oh wow, there must be a spirit in the doll.” According to Gerald Brittle’s 1980 book, The Demonologist: The Extraordinary Career of Ed and Lorraine Warren, the doll began to move from room to room and write a series of notes on parchment paper with messages including help us. After a few weeks of increasingly bizarre events, the roommates contacted a local medium who, after a series of séances, had a vision that a little girl called Annabelle Higgins had died on the land the house was built on years ago and was looking for a family to love her. The roommates named the doll Annabelle. This was, McKinnell insists, a terrible mistake. “They gave this thing personality and a story and a scaffolding to build on.” Fear creates evil, he says. “It’s why we don’t get manifestations of Santa Claus.”

Despite the spooky context—or maybe because of it—the women’s infatuation with Annabelle grew. They bought her a bracelet, babied her, and essentially treated her as their daughter. Then even weirder things started to happen. Cal Randell, the boyfriend of Lara Clifton, said that Annabelle had started to enter his dreams and strangle him in his sleep. Later, he suffered an actual physical attack, with claw marks on his chest that rapidly faded.

Eventually, the Warrens were brought on to the case. At the apartment, Ed Warren invited a local Episcopal priest and delivered his own sermon on the nature of Annabelle. “There is no Annabelle!” Warren said, according to Brittle’s book. “There never was. You were duped. However, we are dealing with a spirit here.” Influenced by the medium, the women, by bestowing recognition on the doll, had essentially given a spirit permission to take over the Raggedy Ann.

The priest spent about five minutes in each room performing an exorcism and then did one on each person. At the owners’ request, the Warrens took Annabelle to their home. On the way back, according to Brittle, their car stalled and the brakes failed, all because of the “vicious hatred” of Annabelle. Of course, the most logical next step would be to burn the doll to a crisp and run for the hills. But Brittle explains that if “the profane item” wasn’t contained, it could teleport back to the girls’ apartment.

In the years that followed, several conflicting accounts of Annabelle’s mayhem emerged, and they often involved her causing serious traffic accidents. Whatever happened, McKinnell believes the deceptively cute figure is pure evil. But he doesn’t think she is omnipotent.

Ghost hunters and paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren in 1980.

“Annabelle is dangerous if your energy interacts with its energy,” he says. “It’s not an all-powerful being, but you have to treat it like a cobra. Don’t get close enough to get hurt.” He sees Annabelle as a tulpa, a Tibetan word used, in this case, to describe an entity created through the power of the imagination. And like many in his field, he is adamant that he accepts demonic activities only when evidence is concrete. “[Most of the time] it’s not the devil coming knocking, you know; it’s probably your grandmother letting you know she’s there.”

For me, a skeptic and materialist, Annabelle is a child of pseudoscience. There are enough gaping plot holes in her story to trigger a trypophobia sufferer. At times, the accounts of McKinnell and Brittle, two primary sources on Annabelle, don’t line up. For instance, McKinnell says the incident in the Warrens’ car never happened. He also refers to the nursing student who received the doll as Debbie, whereas Brittle identifies her as Deirdre Bernard. Either way, I can’t find any evidence of her or her roommate even existing. (I was able to confirm the identity of the priest McKinnell mentions.) I ask McKinnell to explain the discrepancies. He says he doesn’t have any biographical information, that he sometimes mixes up names, and that his grandparents occasionally got details wrong.

“Stories like Annabelle’s were part of their lives long before they were public figures, so there wouldn’t have been any need to invent details,” he says by way of explanation. The Warrens claimed videotapes existed of paranormal activity, but all the public has been presented with are tangled yarns.

Whether or not Annabelle’s powers are legit, the doll has exerted real influence over the Warren family, including her current owner, Tony Spera, McKinnell’s stepdad.

It’s just past midnight when Spera asks me whether I believe killing someone is immoral. “Let me ask you a question,” he says over Zoom, picking some gastronomic shrapnel from his teeth as Chris Gilloren, NESPR’s lead investigator, looks anxiously on. “Is it wrong to murder somebody?”

Yes, I say, ready to launch into a discussion about moral relativism.

“Is wrong to rape a woman?” he continues. “Is it wrong to hit an old lady over the head and steal her purse?” Bewildered, I repeat my affirmation. “Why is it wrong if we’re just a bunch of cells not created by God or anything?” Spera says. “It’s because God gave us morality. God is real. The devil is real.

“There are people who say the devil’s bullshit. These are the same people who would say God’s not real and he didn’t create us and there’s just evolution,” he continues. “Why can’t I just kill you if I’m not going to hell ever? We all know deep inside our heart of hearts that things are wrong. God gave us that.”

Spera, seventy-one, wasn’t always this strident when it came to spiritual matters.

He met Judy Spera, daughter of Ed and Lorraine Warren, in September 1979 while working as a cop in Connecticut. After a week of dating, she invited him to a lecture her parents were hosting; there, Ed asked Tony if he believed in ghosts. “Maybe—I believe in Casper!” he remembers quipping. The lecture convinced him. Ed, Lorraine, Judy, and Tony went for pizza afterward, along with a man in a sport coat furiously taking notes. This was Gerald Brittle, author of The Demonologist.

Turkey dinner at the Warrens’ house followed a few weeks later. When the meal was finished, Ed invited Tony downstairs to the museum. He came face-to-face with Annabelle for the first time, in her display case, newly built by a second carpenter after the first one freaked out and fled. “I wasn’t a skeptic anymore,” Spera says. “I believed them.” Judy, who had had her son, Chris McKinnell, with her first husband, married Tony. They remain together.

Today, Spera and McKinnell are locked in a bitter feud. After a falling-out, McKinnell left NESPR and formed a group called the Warren Legacy Foundation. Spera is still part of NESPR, backed by an entourage of colleagues and enthusiasts. McKinnell, for the most part, is a lone wolf. Theirs is a war of integrity, with both parties claiming to have more paranormal expertise, closer ties to the Warrens, and better intentions when it comes to respecting the ethos of their family.

“[McKinnell] didn’t want anything to do with the paranormal for years,” Spera says. “Now he’s come out of the woodwork. He thinks he can make money by being the big kahuna.”

“Tony doesn’t believe in the paranormal,” McKinnell says, positioning him as a charlatan.

Each man denies the accusations of the other strenuously—but both are still advocating for a supposedly possessed doll.

After Ed Warren died in 2006, his wife carried on the family business with Spera’s help. He would invite people to the house for private museum tours and join Lorraine on local lectures. During one of those lectures in 2009, Ryan Buell met Annabelle. The producer of the A&E Network show Paranormal State,Buell already knew the Warren family because he had been filming and conducting paranormal investigations with Lorraine since 2007. But this was his first encounter with the notorious doll.

“I crouched down and said, ‘So you’re the doll that everyone’s been making this fuss about,’ ” he tells me. “Then the doll’s head just dropped and slowly went back up. . . . I quickly became a believer.”

In November 2009, Warner Bros. and New Line Cinema worked with Spera to buy the intellectual property behind the Warrens’ story, including Annabelle, for an undisclosed sum. Everyone in the family with whom I spoke seems relatively satisfied with their compensation and depiction. They emphasized that the series is inspired by a true story, rather than total gospel. Annabelle, for instance, was changed to a porcelain doll to avoid copyright issues with the Raggedy Ann brand.

But there were some unusual clauses in the contract that Lorraine Warren reportedly initiated. “The films couldn’t show her or her husband engaging in crimes, including sex with minors, child pornography, prostitution, or sexual assault,” a 2017 Hollywood Reporter article says. The story included an explosive allegation in the paranormal community: Ed Warren had an extramarital affair with a woman that began when she was a minor. “It appears that top studio executives were made aware just weeks after the first film opened in 2013 of allegations that, in the early 1960s, Ed Warren initiated a relationship with an underage girl with Lorraine’s knowledge,” the article says. The girl, Judith Penney, said in a sworn declaration that she lived in the Warrens’ house for four decades. According to McKinnell, Penney took care of the house and the Warrens’ animals when they traveled.

The resurfaced allegations didn’t stop moviegoers from heading to the theater or embracing the story of the Warren family. Thousands of people flocked to the Warrens’ house, with NESPR hosting annual tours and private events.

At this point, McKinnell and Spera were still on relatively good terms. “I thought everything was gonna be hunky-dory,” McKinnell says. “Hell, I even named my son after Tony.” (His son’s middle name is Anthony.) But after they discussed the future of NESPR, Spera shot down McKinnell’s plans. “He said, ‘You should have asked me what I wanted to do first. Don’t do anything until I’m dead. This is my time now.’ Those were his exact words.” McKinnell says that Spera started telling his wife—McKinnell’s mother—that he had been stealing items from the house. The family began to fracture. (Spera says items were missing from the home but denies suggesting to Judy that McKinnell stole them.)

In 2017, authorities shut down the museum inside the Warrens’ house over neighbor complaints and zoning issues. (The house wasn’t zoned as a commercial property.) But that didn’t stop Spera from dragging the doll around town. He continued to host “Evening with Annabelle” events at restaurants in the area, including Roberto’s, an Italian joint in Monroe, Connecticut. For $169, families could enjoy parmigiana with a side of the paranormal and, if they were lucky, an appearance from Lorraine Warren, who was increasingly frail due to Alzheimer’s disease.

A couple years later, in 2019, Lorraine died. McKinnell remembers being beside her bed, alone, in the final moments of her life. All the power from his iPad, he says, was sucked out as she died. “I could feel the spirits in the house . . . almost like they [Ed and Lorraine] were dancing again downstairs,” he says. Lorraine left the house and artifacts to the Speras.

After the Covid-19 lockdown ended, NESPR began to take Annabelle to paranormal conventions. These appearances paved the way for the Devils on the Run Tour, which would be marked by tragedy.

The internet went into a frenzy this May when Annabelle reportedly caused a plantation fire in Louisiana and a prison escape in New Orleans, then went missing and reappeared in Chicago. NESPR quickly shut down the rumors, which may have been started for marketing reasons anyway. “Annabelle is not missing and was never in Chicago,” Dan Rivera, a senior investigator with NESPR, said in a TikTok video. “She’s not missing because she’s right behind me.”

In July, Rivera, fifty-four, collapsed in his hotel room in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, during the tour. His coworkers found him; he was dead. When NESPR announced his death on Facebook, news outlets and social media seized upon the story, suggesting or even saying outright that Annabelle had caused it. NESPR’s Chris Gilloren, who describes Rivera as his best friend, is deeply frustrated by this narrative. According to Gilloren, Rivera had underlying health issues that he kept private. “It’s not like he dropped dead carrying Annabelle,” he says, his voice raw with emotion. “What people do for clicks and the stories they fabricate hurt his family, his wife.”

Despite the tragedy, NESPR says the tour has been a financial success, filling ever bigger venues. But not everyone is an advocate of bringing an evil doll on tour. McKinnell says the family’s museum was more of a prison for specters and spooks, a way to protect the public from them. “[My grandfather] would have been livid about what’s happening right now,” he says.

Annabelle’s appearances are also causing drama in the paranormal community, members of which question why, if NESPR truly believes Annabelle is evil incarnate, they would parade it around. McKinnell insists it’s all an effort to go from rag doll to riches. “He’s turned it into a sideshow carnival,” McKinnell says of Spera.

“I live out of a backpack,” he continues. “I have lost everything I own three times in my life . . . but I know what’s important. I don’t care about the stuff. I never wanted the museum or the house. I just wanted it protected.”

Spera denies that it’s nothing but a moneymaking scheme and says that it’s McKinnell, in fact, who’s trying to cash in. “He [McKinnell] is bitter because he wanted to take control of the museum, and I denied him,” Spera says. “Money is the root of all evil. All they want to do is make a lot of money and be famous.”

According to various NESPR members, the Devils on the Run Tour is an extension of Ed and Lorraine’s work. They would take Annabelle on the road to educate audiences, the group says. “It was actually the norm for Ed and Lorraine to bring the items out every so often,” says Buell, the Paranormal Stateproducer. “There’s this myth that they never took the items out.” Spera justifies Annabelle’s tour as being a way to remind people of the devil. “It’s to show that evil is real, that God is real, that there’s plus and minus, yin and yang.”

Most vehemently, the group emphasizes that it takes extreme precaution when transporting and handling Annabelle. It claims the box, designed by Dan Rivera, has special features that serve as an electric fence against evil: a balm of holy oil, three crosses engraved on the side, blessed metals that provide spiritual protection. People use gloves when transporting it. Sometimes a priest travels with the doll. “It’s very safe this way,” Spera says. “It’s not a danger to the public.”

This doesn’t exactly jibe with Zak Bagans’s story. In 2020, the well-known American paranormal investigator invited Spera to his own museum—the Haunted Museum in Las Vegas—for an episode of Ghost Adventures. Bagans paid Spera several thousand dollars for the appearance. According to Bagans, Spera also requested a first-class ticket for himself and Annabelle. “It planted a seed [of doubt] in my head right off the bat,” Bagans says. Spera arrived with Annabelle crammed into a cheap suitcase and used what looked like “oven mitts” to handle her, he adds.

Annabelle was then placed in a high chair as Spera sat with the Ghost Adventures audio engineer, watching the security cameras for activity. “Tony was pointing out every single bit of dust as a spirit orb,” Bagans says, laughing. “It was like, Come on, man.”

Still, some “weird phenomena” happened, Bagans says. An electromagnetic reader picked up some activity, he explains, then a device that supposedly detects the presence of spirits said, touch leg, which Bagans believed was a message from Annabelle. He obliged. Spera was furious; he says he had a strict rule when it came to Annabelle: no touching. Bagans had violated it. Spera shoved Annabelle back into the suitcase and left his rosary beads in the museum. Later, in a Facebook post, he cursed Bagans for, essentially, cursing himself.

Here’s how Bagans explains the incident: “I think a lot of what I experienced when Annabelle was here wasn’t necessarily so much Annabelle’s energy as it was Tony Spera’s energy.”

The experience left Bagans worried about NESPR showing Annabelle to the public. “If you’re taking the devil himself on tour, do you care about the safety of other people?” Ed and Lorraine would’ve never allowed it, he says.

Annabelle’s days of living in a van or suitcase are numbered. Soon she’ll be in a new museum. In August, comedian Matt Rife and YouTuber Elton Castee said they had purchased the Warrens’ house for $1 million, with plans to turn it into an overnight experience that includes access to the family’s haunted artifacts. An auction, set to take place on Halloween, of the Perron house in Rhode Island, another famous site for the Warrens, was also canceled recently. The speculation is that Rife and Castee are planning to buy it. (Neither Rife nor Castee responded to interview requests.) According to NESPR’s Gilloren, the pair are scouting a location for a new permanent museum.

NESPR members are thrilled, seeing it as the perfect solution for preserving the Warren legacy and curing financial problems. “They’re going to keep the legacy of Ed and Lorraine alive,” Spera says, explaining that they’ve already spent tens of thousands of dollars fixing up the original house. “They could have just bulldozed the house,” Buell says. “They appreciate the cultural weight and significance of the property.” An overnight stay starts at $1,999.

McKinnell is devastated by the development. “It floored me,” he says. “I could not believe that my family would do something like that. They had enough money to keep the house.”

Contrary to online speculation, Rife and Castee are not the permanent owners of the artifacts. They’re only leasing them for the next five years. Bagans, who is supportive of Rife and Castee’s plan, is annoyed he wasn’t asked to bid on Annabelle. “I would have paid astronomical [amounts of money],” he says. But Bagans isn’t that upset. “I have hundreds of haunted items that are way darker than Annabelle,” he says.

An untold number of people believe that Annabelle is a doll with evil powers. Contact with her can lead to terrifying dreams, car crashes, sudden death. I talked to many of them and read through much of the purported evidence of her mischief. I do not believe Annabelle is possessed by the devil, or any evil spirit for that matter. But she has become a powerful possession—a trophy doll prized among paranormal enthusiasts who are forming, ironically, a parasocial relationship with her. James Delbourgo, author of A Noble Madness: The Dark Side of Collecting from Antiquity to Now, connects it to “an unmistakable attraction to the power of dark objects.”

“People have always told stories about objects,” he says. “The collector is a heroic figure. They will almost sacrifice themselves for the love of the object.” And paranormal enthusiasts take their obsession further, believing their objects hold innate power and boost supernatural abilities. It makes them even more coveted.

An obsession with an inanimate thing comes with the added humiliation that it doesn’t return the affection. “The tyranny of an object,” Philip K. Dick wrote in his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? “It doesn’t know I exist.” The benefit of a doll possessed by a spirit—evil or otherwise—is that perhaps it does care about its owner.

Many objects, demon possessed or not, carry an allure that influences people in their orbit. If the object has significant value, it can also corrupt us. “You don’t need to believe in the supernatural to believe in the possibility of harm,” Delbourgo says. “There’s the sociological account of how an object that becomes so prized and fought over does cause harm. There is a war for the soul of the object.”

The people who believe Annabelle causes harm to those around her are, in one respect, correct. She has afflicted the Warren family. The war for the soul of Annabelle has ripped them apart, creating a ripple effect among many in the paranormal community. The curse that started in the Hartford apartment lingers today—and you can pay fifty dollars to be part of it.

Oblivious to the drama, Annabelle heads to Rock Island to meet her terrified public. In this he-said, he-said, she says nothing. She will keep smiling. She is always smiling.