Once kept firmly behind glass, Annabelle is now touring the US, and the grandson of Ed and Lorraine has grave concerns about the harm the sinister doll could reportedly inflict in the wrong hands
For decades, the notorious Annabelle doll has been providing nightmare fuel. Now, amid fears that she could be wreaking mayhem across the US, the grandson of her famous former owners has issued a forboding warning.
The infamous Raggedy Ann doll, best known to modern horror fans by her more menacing fictionalised form in The Conjuring universe films, is supposedly haunted by the spirit of a deceased six-year-old girl, with this strange mythology building over time.
Back in 1970, a student nurse from Hartford, Connecticut, reported a series of strange happenings surrounding the allegedly fearsome red-haired doll, claiming that Annabelle had the ability to move around, and even inflict “psychic slashes” on horrified house guests.
As detailed in the 2014 movie, Annabelle, the student and her roommate, reached out to Ed and Lorraine Warren for assistance—the husband-and-wife duo famed for delving into some of the most chilling paranormal cases ever recorded, from the Amityville haunting to the Enfield poltergeist.
After deeming Annabelle to be demonically possessed, Ed and Lorraine had the doll locked up in their now-closed occult ‘museum’ filled with artefacts from their various investigations. This collection, kept at the Warrens’ former home in Monroe, Connecticut, included a purported vampire coffin as well as a child’s gravestone, which had allegedly been used for satanic purposes.
Out of all these objects, however, there is none that sparks a shudder quite like Annabelle.
READ MORE: Spine-chilling story behind The Conjuring: Last Rites as family ‘shared home with four spirits’
Kept in a glass case bearing the warning ‘positively do not open’, young members of the Warren family were taught from an early age that Annabelle was not a toy. In a recent interview with the Mirror, the Warrens’ grandson, Chris McKinnell, recalled how, in his youth, he was taught to respect the artefacts in his grandparents’ museum, reflecting, “Annabelle is more like a cobra”.
Chris “grew up in” the Warrens’ museum, which was never open to the public, and which he views as more of a “prison” than a place of curiosity. He can still remember one chilling instance when his then two-year-old sister locked him inside at night—an instance reminiscent of a shudder-inducing scene involving a child in the third Conjuring film.
Looking back on this traumatising incident, Chris shared: “My grandfather, luckily, was in his office and heard me screaming bloody murder and he came out and got me, but after that I was so afraid of the dark I couldn’t sleep without a light on.”
Ultimately, Chris was able to face his fears and overcome his terror of the dark in a highly unusual way—by accompanying Ed and Lorraine in their spine-tingling line of work. He joined Ed on his first case at the age of just 16 and claims to have heard wall-shaking poundings, clawings, and growls during this intense initiation. Inspired by his war veteran grandfather’s bravery, however, the teenage Chris stood firm.
He went on to help out his grandparents on some of their best-known cases, including the possession of Maurice Theriault, who inspired the character of Frenchy in the Nun movies. Now 60, Chris is on a mission to encourage others not to be frightened when it comes to activity from the other side of the veil, so to speak.
Having reportedly inherited several of his grandmother’s psychic gifts, although apparently not all, Chris upholds Ed and Lorraine’s legacy through the Warren Legacy Foundation, through which he continues their work on a worldwide scale.
Chris explained: “My goal is to educate people and let them not be afraid. When you hear the footsteps in the hallway in the middle of the night, it’s not the devil, for God’s sake; it’s probably your grandmother or the old man that used to live there.”
However, when it comes to Annabelle, Chris believes caution is absolutely necessary, as family members and those close to them have learned the hard way. Chris recounted the story of family friend Father Bill Charboneau, who reportedly ended up in severe peril following an encounter with Annabelle.
Back in 1975, Father Bill, whom he remembers as “one of these hip young 70s priests”, drove over to the Warren home, located, fittingly, Chris believes, on a dead end, to show off his brand new car and call upon devout Catholics, Ed and Lorraine. Chris, who remembers attending Father Bill’s Christmas Eve mass with his grandmother, said: “Afterwards, he said to my grandfather, ‘Ed, I hear you’ve got a doll that attacks people’, and he says, ‘Yes, Father, it’s downstairs, would you like to see it?’
“Now, at this point, it wasn’t in a box; it was still sitting in a rocking chair. And so they go downstairs, Father Bill looks at it, picks it up, throws it across from him and says, ‘God is stronger than the devil’. And my grandfather looked at him and said, ‘Yes, Father, God is stronger than the devil, but no man is’.
“That night, and this is according to Father Bill, he was driving home that night on Route 8 in Connecticut, and he saw this white light coming out of the sky directly at him. And just before he veered off the road, in the halo of the light, he swore he saw Annabelle. He went into the median, the car was ripped in half, and his leg was broken.
“Now, my grandfather used to talk about that until I think Father Bill asked him to stop, at which point my grandfather changed the story. He still tried to warn the public not to mess with Annabelle, but changed this to a boy on a motorcycle with his girlfriend. Not true, never happened. That’s the Father Bill story that he changed. He wasn’t doing it to be dishonest; he was doing it to warn the public of the dangers.”
On another, separate occasion, Ed and Lorraine were driving along Route 84 in Pennsylvania, a “pretty lonely road”. There weren’t really any other cars around, but there was a truck about a quarter mile back. As they drove, the religious couple couldn’t help but notice the abundance of biblical-sounding place names along the way, communities such as Lords Valley, Bethlehem, and Paradise.
Chris revealed: “My grandfather made an offhand joke, and said, ‘Not even Annabelle or Amityville can bother us here because of all of the biblical influences’.
“And they said that it felt like something had smacked the back of their car, like they’d been hit by another car, and their car spun and went into a ditch. This was a big black beauty. I had the licence plate GHOST. My grandparents gave me the car many years later. The truck stopped, obviously, to help, and he said that he swore they’d gotten in a car accident like another car had hit them, but there was nobody there.”
He added: “My grandfather said, ‘I learned then never to joke around about Annabelle’.”
Annabelle is reportedly now travelling around the US, as part of The Devils on the Run Tour, and those who’ve long followed Warren’s adventures can now get right up close to America’s most feared doll. Fascinated crowds have turned up in droves. However, there are those who are more concerned than excited, with some even believing Annabelle’s presence has sparked everything from fires to jailbreaks.
Chris does not believe Annabelle is demonically possessed and also does not think she’s capable of causing catastrophe on such a colossal scale. However, he does believe she contains a certain energy that could be dangerous, especially to those who are particularly vulnerable.
According to Chris, “My grandfather would have told you the same thing. When you go into the museum, he always told us, he told everybody he invited in: ‘Do not touch anything’.
“If your energy interacts with its energy, you can be hurt if you’re the wrong person, if you are that susceptible person. I believe there are enough people who are terrified of Annabelle that even if this were not the actual doll itself, if they’re using a stand-in, which I don’t know. It would still be dangerous because there are people who are psychologically vulnerable. They can easily believe that they’re being influenced by this thing, and they could cause harm to themselves or others.”
In recent years, Chris says he’s “constantly” getting requests for help from people who believe Annabelle has appeared to them – something that didn’t happen before she exploded onto multiplex cinema screens. Although it’s purported that Annabelle hasn’t actually harmed a human being since 1975, the psychological hold she has over modern believers in the paranormal remains undeniable.
As for Chris, he views Annabelle as an egregore, an entity “created through human energy” that has reacted over the years to the fears of others. The innocent-looking doll’s seriously creepy backstory gives it shape, identity, and ultimately power over those who roll up to stare at it.
He said: “I’m not afraid of this thing, but that’s because it’s like a snake handler learning how to handle snakes. I know what this thing is, I know how to deal with it, and I’m not going to be afraid of it, but I do respect it and its power. I don’t believe it’s a demon. But I do believe it has energy. I don’t believe it has tremendous intelligence or anything of the sort. I think it’s reactive, not active. So why doesn’t it break out of its case? It’s reactive, not active.”
Ed died in 2006 at the age of 79, seven years before the first The Conjuring movie had cinema goers shrieking in their seats. Lorraine died in 2019 at the age of 92, having lived long enough to see their work immortalised in Hollywood blockbusters. This pop culture phenomenon has certainly been strange for Chris to witness.
Chris remembers his maternal grandparents as “just good people” and far more ordinary than the “pedestal” of “Hollywood fantasy” would suggest. They were open to changing with the times and admitting they were wrong when needed. Chris recalled: “Even my grandmother said the best psychic in the world is only right 60 per cent of the time, which is a terrible average to change your life.”
While the couple did both enjoy painting spooky pictures, Ed wasn’t a keen singer or guitar player, as was depicted in the blockbuster franchise. Chris doesn’t see too much of his grandparents in the portrayals, however, he admits to having felt emotional during a scene in The Conjuring 3, when Ed presents Lorraine with a gazebo – an event which actually occurred in real life.
Grandma Lorraine was soft on her grandson and sweetly fond of keeping chickens when she wasn’t tackling otherworldly mysteries, but also wasn’t one to be crossed. Grandad Ed could be a “joker” when it came to the spooky nature of their work, especially when it came to his “Halloween room” in the basement, which connected to the museum.
Chris laughed: “Oh, he could be a pain sometimes. I was already afraid. And he’d have me going down the stairs to the basement and have rubber bats dropping on my head and things like that.”
As for his own experiences with the museum, Chris has only encountered one inexplicable occurrence, which occurred when he invited a friend to see the eerie display. This was after the death of his grandfather, and Chris and his friend stopped by Union Cemetery.
In life, Ed had been “fascinated” by Union Cemetery, a spot said to be haunted by the spectral ‘White Lady’. They stopped by his grandparents’ home and museum on the way to visit Ed’s grave in Stepney. And what at first seemed like an ordinary trip turned extraordinary once they looked back at the photos they’d taken.
Chris told us, “We took photos there first. Then we went to the museum, my grandmother told us, ‘Go right ahead’. I took pictures of her at my grandfather’s desk. I took a picture of her with Annabelle and everywhere else. Then we went and visited my grandfather’s grave and took pictures there. She’s looking at all these photos, and there’s no problem. But the next morning, when we go to look at the photos again, Union Cemetery is there. My grandfather’s grave is there, but everything that we took in the museum was gone.”
Do you have a story to share? Email me at [email protected]
READ MORE: This £24 water-resistant hair mask stops the sun, sea and chlorine from damaging your hair on holiday
