The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
‘Annabelle’ among demonic items housed at Warren’s Occult Museum
MONROE — The newest home of the demonic Annabelle doll at the Warren’s Occult Museum is a glassfronted case whose wooden frame is infused with holy oil and holy water and has three crosses attached, as well as two figures of St. Michael, the protector.
But the doll is said to contain so much evil that also attached to the case is a copy of the Lord’s Prayer and a prayer to St. Michael.
When lead paranormal investigator Dan Rivera moved Annabelle to her new case — first drenching his hands in holy water and putting on welding gloves, all after having a priest’s blessing himself — “the temperature in the room dropped 30 degrees,” he said.
Stories about the real Annabelle and other items in The Warren’s Occult Museum were shared this week during a tour on Facebook Live by museum director Tony Spera and Rivera.
The rare glimpse was to promote a Nov. 1 show by Spera at the John Lyman Center for the Performing Arts at Southern Connecticut State University, “The Warren Files Night of the Haunted.”
Spera is the soninlaw of the internationally known, late paranormal investigators, Ed and Lorraine Warren. The Nov. 1 show will start at 8 p.m.
The museum, visited over the years by hundreds of thousands, according to its website, and located in the Warren home, has been closed because of zoning regulations. The museum are looking for another location.
Questions about Annabelle, the famous doll featured in a series of movies, are expected to be a popular topic. There are three Annabelle movies: “Annabelle,” released in 2014, “Annabelle: Creation,” released in 2017 and “Annabelle Comes
Home,” released in March of this year.
It was a stormy night last Wednesday when the piece was shot and shown on the John Lyman Center for the Performing Arts Facebook Page, where it can still be viewed
“This is the kind of night where it’s really spooky. We don’t usually come in here at night,” Spera said, before he took the viewers on a candlelit tour. “If you’re going to be a paranormal investigator, you have to take it seriously.”
Spera said his organization investigates to help people tormented by evil entities or by human spirits, two different categories.
The Mirror
An ordinary looking mirror from a woman in New Jersey belies what lies inside. The woman called the Warrens when she began seeing shadows in the mirror and then a figure of a woman presenting herself.
“It scared the daylights out of her, Spera recalled.
He said during the tour a spirit finds it easy to manifest in mirrors or other shiny objects, such as a television that’s not on or a crystal ball. They want to frighten you, he said, because “they want to use your energy.”
He warned people not to try and conjure spirits, as one man did using a mirror, getting what he asked for after two weeks in the dark and regretting it because of fright, Spera said.
“People should never dabble if they’re not serious about the occult,” he said. “Were not here to jump scare, we want to help people.”
Here is some of what Spera shows on the tour:
The Shadow Doll
A couple found the creepy looking doll in the back of an antique shop and it was “hideous,” Spera said, as it had a human tooth in its mouth and included an animal bone in its structure.
Spera said it’s a doll used for curses, and that if a person takes a picture of the doll, has it developed and writes a on the back, another person receiving it would be cursed just by opening it. he said the doll is “the opposite of holy or good.”
Satanic idol
The 6foot, 3inch porcelain figure of an inhumanlooking creature with pointy ears was found in the woods of Sandy Hook in 1993 by a young bow hunter, Spera said.
It was on top of rocks, and the hunter knelt in front of it to get a better look, suddenly feeling so tired that he got up to walk away, Spera said.
According to Spera, the hunter was lost and out of nowhere appeared a man about 65, dressed in black, with white hair. He walked step by step alongside the hunter and didn’t speak. When the hunter asked how to get out, the man pointed right, Spera said.
The young man found his way home, and later a friend of his called Ed Warren. Spera said his fatherinlaw knew what it was — a satanic worship idol, and he knew the man was a high priest in the Satanic world.
They retrieved the and brought the figure to the museum. A few days later, as Ed and Lorraine were working happily and routinely in the yard, Lorraine suddenly fell to the ground, in and out of consciousness, Spera said.
She was rushed to the hospital and all her tests were perfect. Spera said Ed Warren concluded it was the Satanic priest sending a warning for the Warrens not to interfere with his people.
The narrator of the Facebook Live asked Spera how they stay safe in the museum. Spera said they have high security, including alarms and surveillance, and that three Catholic priests bless the museum and the individual items.
Why can’t the items of evil just be thrown away?
“You’re just throwing away the vessel, and not the evil infused in it,” Spera told the Facebook narrator. “Our blessings won’t take away what’s there (the evil), but they will confine it.”
At the Nov. 1 event, Spera said, he will talk about the supernatural and about movies born out of the Warren files, such as “The conjuring,” “Amityville Horror” and the Annabelle movies.
Investigator Rivera said he was heading Saturday to look into a case in which a woman whose mother practiced satanism was hearing voices and finding unexplained scratches on her neck. The woman found her mother’s satanic bible under the bed as a child.
“We’ll see what we can do,” Rivera said. “Our job is to take this evidence to clergy.”
Lorraine Warren and Spera drew a sellout crowd in 2014 when they appeared at Lauralton Hall High School in Milford, on the night the horror movie, “Annabelle,” was released. The story of the real Annabelle remains one that keeps audiences spellbound.
The doll in the movie is a frightening looking porcelain figure in a child’s image, with long hair, while the real Annabelle — the one in Warren’s museum — is a plainlooking classic Raggedy Ann doll with red yarn for hair.
According to the Warren files, the real Annabelle in their museum is inhabited by an “inhuman spirit,” and there is a warning on the glass case not to touch. One museumgoer who ignored the warnings and taunted the doll, died in a motorcycle crash shortly after being told to leave the museum, Spera said at that 2014 presentation.
The movie is a prequel to “The Conjuring,” based on the Warren’s reallife case involving the doll. The couple had a lot of input in the first movie, but in the “Annabelle,” movie, the story is fabricated.
The Warrens investigated more than 10,000 cases of paranormal activity.
At the time, Lorraine Warren said, presenting at Lauralton was like “going home,” because she attended the school in the late 1930s, but had to leave because of illness.
Lorraine Warren was a devout Catholic who maintained that the power of faith got her out of many scary situations which came down to fighting the demonic with goodness. She said her Catholic faith was both her protection and her drive.
Warren told the audience at Lauralton Hall that ever since the age of “7 or 8” she saw auras around people, but was afraid to tell her parents, for fear they would think she was, “crazy.” She spent many years praying about it because, “I didn’t want to be different,” she said.
In 1952, Ed Warren founded the New England Society for Psychic Research. He was a selftaught “demonologist” — an interest he developed after growing up in a house he said was haunted. With Lorraine, the couple would pool their talents and become worldfamous paranormal investigators.
Spera spent part of the Facebook talk on the eerie, reallife Annabelle story and emphasized that of all the items in the family’s Occult Museum, “that doll is what I’d be most frightened of.” Curators believe the doll has the power to kill, according to a film on the Annabelle case.
Annabelle
According to a clip Spera showed, the reallife Annabelle story began in 1970, when a 28yearold nurse received the Raggedy Ann doll as a birthday gift from her mom. She put the rag doll on her bed and noticed it changing positions — a leg would be crossed, or the doll would be lying on its side.
Then the girl and her roommate began to find parchment paper on the floor with written messages,
such as, “Help me, help us,” the story says. The doll began appearing in different rooms and at one point appeared to be leaking blood, according to Spera’s presentation.One day a friend was taking a nap and woke up with the doll staring at him, as he felt like he was being strangled, the presentation said, and he had deep scratch wounds.
The girls thought maybe an intruder was moving the doll around and leaving notes, Spera’s presentation said. When they ruled that out, according to the Occult Museum website, “Not knowing where to turn they contacted a medium and a seance was held.”
The girls were then introduced to the spirit of Annabelle Higgins, said to be a young girl that resided on the property before the apartments were built and died there at age 7, according to the legend.
The website said the spirit related to the medium that she felt comfort with the two roommates in the apartment and “wanted to stay with them and be loved.”
According to the story, the roommates gave Annabelle “permission to inhabit the doll,” but things got worse. The Warrens took an interest in the case and contacted the women.