The Annabelle Doll Haunting, Hartford, Connecticut

The story begins in an apartment in Hartford, Connecticut. Its address has never been published. Two nursing students lived there, known only as Donna and Angie. Donna's mother gave her an antique Raggedy Ann doll, with yarn hair and a cloth face. The Warrens' own group dates the gift to 1970. NBC Connecticut says 1968.

The women said the changes began after they moved into the apartment. The movements were small at first. The doll was found with legs crossed, arms folded or upright. Then it turned up in a completely different room. Donna would leave it on the couch before work and return to find it back in her room, on the bed.

About a month in, notes appeared on parchment paper, in what looked like a small child's handwriting. "Help Us." "Help Lou." The women said they had no parchment paper in the apartment. Then came drops that looked like blood, on the back of the doll's hands and on its chest.

A medium held a séance. The doll, the medium said, was inhabited by Annabelle Higgins, a girl of seven whose body had been found in the field where the apartment complex now stood. The spirit was harmless and wanted to be cared for. Donna let it stay.

Lou had been sceptical from the start. Then he woke unable to move. "Looking down toward his feet he saw the doll, Annabelle. It began to slowly glide up his leg, moved over his chest and then stopped. Within seconds the doll was strangling him."

Later he found the doll lying face down in an empty room. A sharp pain followed. He found "7 distinct claw marks, three vertically and four horizontally, all were hot like burns."

The women turned to an Episcopal priest, Father Hegan. His superior, Father Cooke, brought in Ed and Lorraine Warren. After interviewing all three, the Warrens concluded that the doll "was not in fact possessed but manipulated by an inhuman presence." They took it away. On the drive home, they said, the brakes and power steering failed at every dangerous curve until Ed sprinkled the doll with holy water. It ended up behind glass in their Occult Museum in Monroe, Connecticut, under a sign: "WARNING. POSITIVELY DO NOT OPEN."

Every account runs through one chain. The witnesses told the Warrens. The Warrens told lecture halls, Gerald Brittle's 1980 book The Demonologist and the New England Society for Psychic Research. No police report, church record or 1970 newspaper story confirms it. Donna and Angie never came forward publicly. Other Warren cases, like Amityville, share the same pattern.

Sharon A. Hill wrote: "We have nothing but Ed's word for this." Joseph Laycock called the doll an "interesting case study in the relationship between pop culture and paranormal folklore," and pointed to Robert the Doll as a model. Others suggest a prankster in the apartment, and note that Lou's episode fits sleep paralysis.

Hollywood redesigned her as a porcelain doll. The Conjuring came in 2013, Annabelle in 2014, and a franchise followed. The museum closed in 2019 over zoning problems. In 2025 the doll toured, rumours said it had disappeared, and Tony Spera replied: "The doll was never missing." That August, Matt Rife bought the Warrens' house and museum building. The doll went on show in Salem, Massachusetts.