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A cursed doll rumored to have gone missing while touring the US with a traveling exhibit is being blamed for local disasters including a fire and a jailbreak.
The ‘Annabelle’ doll, which some believe is demon-possessed and was featured in The Conjuring horror films, is on a paranormal tour along with other items belonging to her ghost hunter owners.
Word on the street in mid-May was that Anabelle vanished while stopping at the Ghost City Tours office in New Orleans. It happened to be the same week that a fire tore through a nearby plantation and 10 prisoners escaped from a jail.
But Tony Spera, the owner of the Warren Occult Museum in Monroe, Connecticut, said that Annabelle is ‘safely back’ there locked in her display case.
‘You know, it’s easy for rumors to start. The fact of the matter is, that doll was never out of our sight, never out of our control,’ Spera told NBC News this week.
‘It’s in a protective case that many precautions were taken to make it safe.’
Paranormal investigator Ryan Buell sought to further quell rumors by posting a video on Facebook on May 24 of himself at the museum.
‘She’s not in Chicago, she never was in Chicago, and she’s not missing because she’s right behind me,’ said Buell, while pointing the camera towards him with the doll sitting in the case over his shoulder.
Still, social media users and conspiracy theorists have been skeptical about those accounts of Annabelle’s whereabouts.
A blaze destroyed the Nottoway Plantation House between Baton Rouge and New Orleans on May 15, and the very next day, inmates escaped from the Orleans Justice Center.
Annabelle was touring in New Orleans on May 13 and 14, and among the precautions that were taken were having a Catholic priest alongside the doll.
Some people are ‘absolutely convinced’ that Ghost City Tours is at fault for the fire and jailbreak, said its founder Tim Nealon.
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One Facebook user asked why Annabelle wasn’t left at the Connecticut museum and wrote on Ghost City Tours’ page: ‘Did it cross your mind maybe she was there for a reason. Some things are better left alone.’
‘I did not think people were taking it seriously, I kept seeing jokes about it on Instagram and TikTok,’ Nealon told USA Today.
‘But, I didn’t realize people were out here like, actually thinking that this was legit.’
Spera said he doesn’t blame people for being skeptical.
‘If people don’t know about the demonic, it’s very difficult to believe that these thing are happening,’ he said.
‘But they do happen.’
Annabelle has been on sold-out tours across the US – and Buell said that plans are underway for her to be at the Rock Island Roadhouse Esoteric Expo in Illinois on October 4.
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