Annabelle: A Real-Life Haunted Doll

We all remember our first toy. For some unlucky people, a doll may have been the first thing they can remember receiving. It seems so harmless. Child's play. Fast forward and you get a doll as an adult. How do you feel now? Why should you feel afraid? Well, for one unlucky nursing student, an innocent looking gift soon brought her into a world of terror when a certain doll entered her life, and that doll was none other than Annabelle. Contrary to popular belief, the real Annabelle doll is not as creepy looking as the movie creators depict her. In the movies, the doll is dramatized as a way to add a level of chilling fear into the audience. From the pale porcelain see and layered makeup to the long pigtails and white dress, the doll in theaters is sure to leave you thinking about her in the middle of the night while you try to fall asleep. However, if you knew what the real doll looked like, you would probably be shocked by its differences. Annabelle surprisingly looks much like the old, raggedy ann type dolls that many of your parents had as children. She has red hair made out of yarn, big black eyes, a triangle nose, and a giant, eerie smile across her face. Perhaps what makes her just as creepy is knowing what she has done is bye, how innocent she looks. My name is Edwin. Here's a dark memory. Seems that for just as long as dolls have served as cute toys and gifts for family members, as was Annabelle, they have also been surrounded by death and morbidity. Let's go back all the way to the Victorian era, a time where many children never lived to see adulthood, and introduce you to mourning dolls. The Victorian era was a time where the divide between the upper and lower class became larger. Therefore, only certain families that could afford to would start to make mourning dolls. Dealing with the death of an infant or a child can be next to impossible, so they would start to make these dolls as a way to cope with their loss. It would be placed on the casket during the wake and funeral, and even some people would take it home and care for it like a real child. If you think that it's disturbing, then this next part will shock you. Not only were the dolls life sized and sculpted with wax around sand weights to add a lifelike effect, they were also made with the deceased child's real hair and clothes. Apparently, the size and the weight of the dolls just wasn't realistic enough. Even later on, people still seemed to connect dolls to real children as is. Robert. The doll was named after its owner, Robert Eugene Otto. He grew up with his family in Key West, Florida, and they gave him the doll as a gift sometimes during their early nineteen hundreds. The boy instantly took a liking to the doll and they became best friends. After some time, though, the family began to have mysterious events happen in the house. The boy would start to blame all of his misbehavior and wrongdoings on the doll. The family said that the doll started changing positions on its own when no one was in the room. But the worst thing was the parents stating that they could hear their son having conversations with a doll in his room in a different voice responding to him. After Robert Otto passed away in nineteen seventy four. The doll was named after him and was donated to the East Martello Museum for safekeeping, sitting there surrounded by letters of both apology and admiration. It is said that guests who are rude or don't ask permission before taking his picture experience a great misfortune, much like Robert. Another supposedly haunted doll that is cared for and on display is Zokiku. She is a female doll that was given as a gift in nineteen eighteen Japan by a young man to his little sister. Sadly, though, the young girl ended up dying a year later from the flu. Grief stricken, the family made a shrine in her memory where they laid out the doll. But soon they began to notice that the doll's hair was growing, which should not be happening. They ended up giving it to the Maninge Temple in Hokkaido, Japan, to be cared for even to this day. Even in a much more modern age, it seems that haunted dolls keep appearing no matter where we turn. Take Harold, for example, a doll that came from none other than eBay. He was put up for auction in two thousand three by a man named Gregg, and his friend Kathy ended up purchasing it from him. Apparently, once Kathy purchased the doll, strange things started happening in her life as she locked it away. Not even a year later, she put it up for auction again in two thousand and four because she could no longer deal with Harold plaguing her life. According to the current owner, she said that while she didn't believe the doll was haunted, she did believe it was cursed. Why cursed, you may ask, This is because in the six months span she had the doll before locking it away, two of her friends ended up perishing tragically. This was enough for her to get rid of the doll by any means, and she was successful as someone else was very eager to buy it. They claimed to still have a doll until this day. The last little fellow on our list before we get to the real star of this show, his Norman the Doll. I have to admit he isn't a very popular one. In fact, I only came across him in a documentary series titled Hunting on the TV channel Destination America. He was purchased from an antique store by paranormal investigator Stephen Lancaster and his wife, who has now written two books on his experiences owning Norman. There were even clips of Steven capturing the dolls, supposedly moving on camera. While there is no way to be sure if it is real, doesn't necessarily mean that I don't get goosebumps every time I watch it. Even if you don't believe in everything you have heard so far about dolls being haunted, why are most of us afraid of them? Well, unsurprisingly, most of us are not born afraid of dolls. In fact, most of us probably love them as little children. So where did all of that change? This may be due to multiple different factors, but there is no certain answer to this question. Perhaps pop culture has somehow conditioned us to be afraid of them, with horror movies about dolls being released left and right. This may condition our brains to associate the dolls with feeling of being unsafe, or maybe some experience a traumatic event that involve a doll. Whatever the reason may be, it does not seem like our view of dolls is changing anytime soon. Now onto one of the most popular dolls that probably contributes greatly to our fear of dolls Annabel. As I mentioned earlier, the doll looks much different in real life, but that is not the only thing in real life that differs from the movies. In fact, the movies are completely fabricated. Aside from the involvement of Ed and Lorraine Warren, famous American paranormal investigators that is seen in the beginning, the movies never told the real stories of the people who own the doll when the warrants had to step in. In real life, the doll was a gift from a mother to her twenty eight year old nursing student, Donna, in nineteen seventy. At the time, she was living with another nursing student, Angie, and Angie's fiancee, Lou was a frequent visitor. All three experienced supernatural events surrounding the doll. They said that like most hauntings, everything started off small and not necessarily frightening. At first. They would come home and find the doll in different positions, very subtle changes, though then it became more bold. The doll would begin to move between rooms, and sometimes they would find it with its arms folded and legs crossed, and even standing against and bending its knees on a chair, which was physically impossible for the doll to do when one of them tried to maneuver it the same way. Then things slowly started becoming more intense, with them coming home to find handwritten notes on parchment paper that looked like a child scribbled them out. The notes would read help us or help lou, which was a fiance who frequented the apartment they lived in. Things changed, though, when Donna came home one day and reportedly found what looked like blood on the back of the doll's hand and three drops of it on the chest. This was when she decided to contact a medium in hopes of her helping them deal with the doll. The medium decided to hold the seance in the apartment with them and said that the spirit of a seven year old girl named Annabelle was stuck here because the grounds of the apartment had been where the body was discovered many years ago. The little girl asked them for permission to live in the doll, and since the young women felt bad for her, they agreed, but it ended up being one of the worst decisions of their lives and just fiance. Lou had never liked the doll and always felt uncomfort around it. He had constantly tried to warn them about it too. One night, while staying there, he awoke from sleep and was unable to move. He then saw the doll at his feet, and it slowly climbed up his body and onto his chest, where it proceeded to strangle him until he blacked out. Until this day, he swears it was in a dream. This wasn't the only time Blu was a tack, though, as Annabel seemed to have her eyes set on him, maybe because he knew all along something was wrong with her. One day, while in the apartment, Lou and Angie heard noises coming from the room next to them. Lou told Angie that he should check it out. When he entered the room, he found Annabel sitting on the floor in the corner. While walking toward her, he felt something behind him, but when he turned around, no one was there. Suddenly, Lou fell to the floor in pain. They found seven clawlike scratches on his chest. What was even weirder was that they reportedly healed within only two days, which is not scientifically possible. After this, the three of them could not take any more and ended up contacting the local church, who then contacted the Warrants to come look at the doll. The Warrens then informed them that the doll was being used as a conduit for a demonic entity, and there was never a little girl. It pretended to be one in order to gain their trust and fool them. Unsurprisingly, they told the priest to exercise the apartment, perform a blessing on anyone living there, and took Annabelle home with them in order to protect everyone else from evil. So, after all this, I am sure that many people are concerned about where she is now and if we are truly safe from the demonic doll. Well, much to everyone's relief, she is still safe and sound in the same place she has been for decades, the Warren's Accult Museum in their house, now managed by their daughter and son in law. She sits there day and night in a glass box made from holy objects, and is blessed every week by a priest. On the front of the box reads a sign warning people to never open the box, aside from those trained to do so for the blessings, although perhaps even the box can never truly contain the evil that is attached to that doll. Even Lorraine Warren said when she was alive that she never liked to make eye contact with Annabel. Sadly, not everyone heeds the warning surrounding Annabel, and such was the case of one man who visited the museum during a tour Ed was giving. The man began taunting the doll and challenging it. Eventually Ed kicked him out and the man took off on his motorcycle with his girlfriend. On their way home, the motorcycle crashed and the man died instantly. No matter where we go, we can never escape the evil that exists in this world, but we can listen to those who warn us. It is the same for dolls. We can never get rid of dolls because they will always have a place in this world, from the morning dolls to sweet gifts that slowly turned into our sinister waking nightmare. Let's just hope that they never fall into the wrong hands. This episode of A Dark Memory was researched and written by Madeline Guera and produced by me Edwin Collarolas. If you have a topic for A Dark Memory, please send a message over on a dark memory dot com links are also in the description of this episode. Don't forget the tap follow to stay up to date with upcoming weekly episodes. Until next time, Thank you very much for listening.