One of the most recognizable faces in horror belongs to not a person, not a creature, but a real doll that exists on Earth, right now.
Annabelle was first received by a nursing student named Donna in 1970. Her mother gave her this Raggedy Anne doll as a gift for her 28th birthday (weird gift for your adult daughter, mom), and to show her appreciation, Donna displayed Annabelle on the bed in her room.
Donna and her roommate started noticing that the doll would be positioned differently nearly every day when they left the house. Sometimes Annabelle would be in different rooms when they got home. If Annabelle was left in a room that wasn’t Donna’s, she would always be positioned back on Donna’s bed when she got home.
As friends progressively begged them to get rid of the doll, the strange happenings continued to accelerate. Donna and her roommate would come home to find scraps of parchment paper (which they did not keep in their house) with notes like “Help Us” and “Help Lou” (Lou was the friend who tried to get them to get rid of Annabelle) scribbled in a child’s handwriting.
This prompted Donna and her roommate to contact a psychic medium, that confirmed that the doll was in fact possessed by the spirit of a seven-year-old girl named Annabelle Higgins. Higgins is rumored to have been buried right beneath where Donna and her roommate’s apartment then resided.
It wasn’t until Annabelle attacked Lou, that prompted Donna to contact a priest. That priest contacted a higher ranking priest, who then contacted Ed and Lorraine Warren, two paranormal investigators who were famous for collecting cursed items. They had also investigated some of the most famous hauntings in history.
Ed and Lorraine Warren theorized that this doll wasn’t possessed, but that it was being manipulated by a demon that had planned to infest the home that Donna and her roommate lived in. The Warrens took the doll with them, back to their home collection of haunted and creepy artifacts. On their way home, they claimed that the doll caused their car to swerve and the brakes failed.
This was not the last case of Annabelle messing with someone’s car. A priest visited the doll, mocked it, and then had his brakes fail on his way through an intersection, totaling his car, but leaving him uninjured. The next case is of a couple that visited Annabelle while it was on display in the Warren’s museum, they mocked and challenged Annabelle. On their way home from the museum, their motorcycle failed and caused them to crash into a tree, killing the man who had mocked the doll.