Not many people know that the demonologists that made the Amityville Horror House famous also runs a haunted objects museum. They’re sort of really into this stuff. Anyway, sometime in the 1970’s two young nursing students were living in a tiny apartment happy as could be until one of their moms bought an antique Raggedy Anne doll and presented it to her daughter as a birthday gift. The gesture was sweet and comforting… until the doll came to life. Just like Robert it would change positions while the girls were away. At first it was little – maybe someone had bumped into the doll or forgotten they’d messed with it. However the doll got increasingly brazen until it would just wander into completely different rooms and get itself into all sorts of odd positions around the house. Eventually the doll was put in lock down in the poor young woman’s bedroom. Like a haunted doll respects a lock down! This one sure didn’t and decided to keep busy writing creepy notes on paper no one in the apartment owned. Most read cryptically, “help us” or “Help Lou.” Of course the first thoughts that come to mind is, “Wow, what a twisted doll” and “Who is Lou??” Lou was a friend of the girls who complained the doll was evil and they should get rid of it, obviously not winning any brownie points from the doll. The girls were equally scared by the doll’s new hobby of stigmata – where it would appear with bloody hands. Charming.
In order to answer some of their burning questions about the doll the girls hired a medium. The medium held a séance during which a bizarre story came to light. She claimed a seven year old girl who once lived on the property died there and restless and with nowhere else to go she decided to inhabit a doll and become close to the two girls. OK, that’s not freaky at all. Soon the doll was being treated like a seven year old, out of pity. She’d be played with, given attention, talked to, dressed up. The doll adored the attention and garnered up energy to terrorize Lou. In a very typical succubus type of way the doll came to Lou in the night, paralyzed him, crawled up his leg, and sat on his chest where she wrapped her soft little hands around his neck and started throttling the poor guy who blacked out. Not content with this she would later be found luring Lou alone into a booby trap and using him as her own personal scratching post.
The girls started to realize their new red-headed friend was kind of psychotic… so they called a priest. The priest scratched his head, said something along the lines of, “I’m an Episcopalian not a Catholic, I don’t know how to exorcize a doll…” before giving the case to the famous Warren couple. The Warren’s looked at the doll with a deep suspicion. They felt it was a demon controlling the doll, one that was looking around for a human host like some sort of paranormal parasite. They decided to take the doll away from anyone it could harm.
Apparently the car ride home with the doll was quite a story! The car stalled, sped up, wielded wildly out of control, swerved towards trees, but Mr. Warren was strong willed. He stopped the car, got out, sprayed the doll with holy water, as one does, and continued on his way. Now the doll sits at his museum, the Warren Occult Museum, in Connecticut. Its said she’s still not particularly calm as she sometimes growls at visitors and is said to have killed some guy who taunted her in a tragic motorcycle accident right after leaving the museum. I’m intrigued and think I might schedule a visit to Connecticut to see for myself…
