Episode 20 - Annabelle

You were given the doll as a gift. In many ways, you wished you hadn’t received it.

If you were honest, the doll was off-putting. It was all ragged-cloth, with felt hair and big, black buttons for eyes.

But of course, you did not want to be rude. So you took the doll. You set it aside and promptly forgot about it until later.

Later on, you remember the doll. You return to where it was stowed, and find it sitting upright in the corner where you tossed it.

Knowing it was ridiculous, knowing that it was just coincidence, the doll’s posture made it look annoyed.

You scooped it up and set it in a chair in the living room. With it in place, somewhere slightly more central than where you had cast it, you left the room and put the doll out of your mind.

Second only to Robert the Doll’s fame is the story of Annabelle.

Annabelle is a Raggedy Ann doll which is claimed to be possessed by a demon. It surfaced during the late 1960s, and its story began to spread.

In the last few years, the story of Annabelle has grown immensely in popularity as it became the inspiration for a number of successful horror films.

While the veracity of Annabelle’s story remains suspect, it cannot be ignored as it takes a place among the most influential urban legends and hauntings in American history.

Although the specifics of Annabelle’s story are unclear, the concepts that are presented have left an impression on popular culture and have grown more important to the modern urban legend.

While there are many skeptics, plenty with good reason, something has kept Annabelle from fading into obscurity like so many other hauntings.

I am Andrew Eagle, and I invite you to join me in exploring the tale of Annabelle, a doll possessed by demons.

The doll had been around in your place now for a few weeks. In that time, it had managed to fall from the chair where you’d placed it three times.

Each time, you would be passing the living room, and you would find it on the floor. You sigh and place it back in the chair and carry on.

The third time, you moved it to a low bench near one of the doors. On the bench, it could be leaned against the wall in a way that made it impossible for it to fall.

Then, one day, you came home and realized the doll was holding a folded-up piece of paper.

It seemed unlikely, but not impossible, that the doll had been holding a note the whole time, from the one who’d given the gift perhaps?

You slowly reach down and pull the folded note from the arms of the doll. As you unfold the paper, and scan the page, you feel the hairs on the back of your neck rise, and a chill settles over you.

“Did you miss me?” was scrawled in untidy handwriting.

The story of Annabelle begins in 1968. According to the tale, a young nursing student received the doll as a gift from her mother.

Quickly, the student and her room-mate in some versions of the story noted that the doll behaved strangely. They claimed that it would move about on its own, and it wrote notes while one or both of them was gone for the day.

This prompted the pair to take the doll to a psychic. The medium they visited claimed the doll was haunted by the ghost of a young girl named Annabelle.

The pair didn’t know what to do, so they decided to try to help the spirit that inhabited the doll, doing their best to nurture it and accept it.

However, once they did that, the doll’s behavior changed. Became frightening and even malicious.

The notes were no longer odd and cute. They were threatening and full of hate.

Desperate, the pair looked for help from Ed and Lorraine Warren, self-described paranormal investigators and demonologists.

The Warrens determined that the doll was possessed by something inhuman, something demonic. They confiscated the doll and took it to their Occult Museum, where it remains to this day in a glass case labeled “Positively Do Not Open.”

Something needed done. You were freaked out. It was impossible, but somehow you knew. You knew the doll had written the note, had been moving about on its own…

So, you needed to deal with it. You took the doll and locked it in the small closet in the entry-way. With the thing behind a locked door, you began to search for someone to help you. You certainly didn’t know how to dispose of a haunted object.

Eventually, you found someone. A specialist. They ran a museum in a small town out east. They came, they told you the doll was possessed, and just as quickly, they left. Taking the doll with them and leaving you with nothing else as explanation.

To be honest, you were just glad the thing was gone, regardless of what your specialist said.

In many ways, the Annabelle story carries weight because of the amount of pop-culture that has arisen around it and the other stories of the Warrens.

Among the Warrens’ many claims, there are a few that caught the public eye and became far more widely known.

They have claimed that they were among the first investigators at the site of the haunting that inspired the Amityville Horror. They keep Annabelle in their museum, the doll that inspired the Conjuring cinematic universe which now holds 5 movies and has at least two more planned.

Their work also inspired The Haunting in Connecticut.

The story of Annabelle on screen is far more haunting and frightful than anything claimed by the Warrens to have happened in real life, but of course, that’s Hollywood for you.

Where many enjoy the Warren’s stories for one reason or another, there are a number of reasons to think of them as fiction and nothing more.

For one, their stories are based almost entirely on their own claims. Skeptical investigators have noted that many of the stories surrounding the Warrens seem to be of their own making.

And investigation revealed that two of their most famous cases, the Amityville and Snedeker family haunting, never happened. There is no evidence beyond the Warren’s own claim that suggest that the events ever occurred.

So, it is with healthy skepticism that we must approach the story of Annabelle, who could have been a response by the Warren’s to a rise in the idea of haunted dolls and puppets. Inspired perhaps by Robert the Doll’s growing fame.

Annabelle is perhaps a prime example of how even a story with no backing, no evidence, can become a sensation.

A story like Annabelle’s is filled with enough mystery, and lacking enough detail, that we are able to fill in the gaps. We can conjure details and frightful imaginings that are more compelling than any story we could be told.

And maybe, that’s all there is to her tale. The work of a rising force in urban folk tale and a couple of believers.

Or maybe, the Warrens are right. Maybe the doll was full of malevolent forces, and the only way to keep those students safe was taking the doll and locking it away in a blessed box.

Thank you for joining me for this episode of Through the Veil. I hope you enjoyed. I encourage you to subscribe to receive new episodes weekly wherever you listen as we continue our exploration of folklore, urban legend, and magic.

If you are enjoying the show, and have subjects you would like to hear covered, please email me at throughtheveilpodcast@gmail.com or reach out on Twitter, you can find me @ThroughVeil.

As always, thank you, for listening.