Annabelle’s Tour Of Terror
The internet freaked out last month when the haunted doll Annabelle was taken on tour around the country. Stories started circulating of buildings burning down in her wake, prisoners escaping, and even that she went missing at one point.
But what was really going on, and why was the Annabelle tour such a spiritually chaotic event?
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SOURCES
https://screenrant.com/the-conjuring-creepiest-items-occult-museum/
https://www.nhregister.com/living/article/Real-Annabelle-story-shared-by-Lorraine-11382545.php
https://www.instagram.com/p/DJvGCINKtiF/?hl=en
https://time.com/7287295/burning-of-nottoway-plantation/
https://apnews.com/article/new-orleans-jail-escape-toilet-559f5cfbf7b9f66dfae89454e9610f2e
Ghost sightings there: https://www.wtrf.com/top-stories/unlock-your-fear-explore-the-haunted-history-of-west-virginia-penitentiary-this-spooky-season/
Ryan explaining why he’s doing this: https://www.tiktok.com/@theryanbuell/video/7502863887730036014
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DJ2hHFHuOmF/?hl=en
TRANSCRIPT
The internet freaked out last month when the haunted doll Annabelle was taken on tour around the country. I got soooo many messages from you guys about buildings that were burning down in her wake, prisoners that were escaping, and how she may or may not have gone missing at one point.
But what’s really going on? Why was the annabelle tour such a disaster? I have been obsessively reading everything I can about it and the experiences people had with her and I wanted to put all of that into one big deep dive episode today.
And before we get into it, I love hearing about your morbid little hobbies and jobs and interests and this episode I wanted to shout out Adam
Adam owns the Three Cranes, a pub in Rothram, England from 1470. He says it is possibly haunted and they’re actually going to do a seance there this July, probably to find out for good. If you find yourself in the area please check him out and say hello to the medieval ghosts for me.
Ok, make sure if you’re watching this video on youtube to hit the subscribe button, and let’s take a dive into what Miss Annabelle has been up to these last few weeks..
Part 1- Who Is Annabelle
Before we get into the tour lets do a quick little refresher on who Annabelle is
The story, as Ed and Lorraine Warren would tell it, is as follows. In 1970, a 28 year old nurse in Hartford, Connecticut, was gifted a raggedy ann doll by her mother. It was a cute little birthday gift that she didn’t really think much of, but pretty much immediately the doll started exhibiting strange behavior. For instance, She’d place it on her bed neatly only to find that it had switched positions while she wasn’t looking.
Soon the doll started appearing in different rooms of the house mysteriously, like some invisible force was carrying her around. The woman and her friends would find scraps of parchment paper lying on the floor with scribbled handwriting that read “help me, help us.” It was particularly strange because the woman didn’t have parchment paper in her home at the time, so where were these notes even coming from?
She and her friends thought that maybe an intruder was sneaking in and leaving them, though they could never find any sign of an intruder other than the notes, and the notes persisted even when the house was fully locked down.
Then, one day, one of her friends woke up from a nap to see the raggedy Ann doll staring at him, and he got the overwhelming feeling of hands on his throat starting to choke him.
After that, the friends called a medium who told them that the spirit of a young girl named Annabelle Higgins was trapped inside of the doll. Annabelle had lived on the property previously but died when she was just 7 years old. They were told that this girl just wanted to be loved and they could give her permission to stay inside of the doll, which they did.
That made things much, much worse, however, and it’s now believed that it was not the spirit of a young girl inside of the doll, but in fact, something much more sinister. the name Annabelle stuck, despite not being the ghost of the little girl, and she’s still referred to as that to this day.
Eventually, demonologists Ed and Lorraine Warren came to own the doll, and they kept her locked in a glass case inside of their museum of haunted objects in Monroe, Connecticut.
The couple always made it very clear, whatever is in Annabelle is evil, it’s probably something we’ll never understand so it’s important that she always stays inside of her case and never moves.
So you can understand why the internet was….shocked to say the least when it was announced earlier this year that she would be going on a tour across America.
PART 2- Annabelle’s Tour
The tour was to be organized by the New England Society of Psychic research, or NESPR. Now, NESPR was founded in 1952 by Ed and Lorraine Warren, and they tried to assure everyone that this tour was always part of Ed and Lorraine’s plan. They said that the couple knew that not everyone could come visit their home in Connecticut, and they wanted to give more people a chance to see the haunted objects they’ve collected over their career, so the idea was always that some of these objects would go on tour.
But out of everything in their museum, Annabelle appears to be the only object that constantly needs to be locked up. She is always in a little wooden box with a glass window, because bad stuff happens when she’s not, so people were nervous.
Especially because some people mentioned that Annabelle had already been brought to events in the past and those didn’t necessarily go well.
This story happened to a woman named Katrina Despotovich, though I first heard it told by an instagram user named SpooksAndGhoulz.
In 2019, Katrina attended a dinner that NESPR threw called “an evening with annabelle”. At the dinner, NESPR was going to bring a few haunted items from the Warren museum for people to be able to see, including Annabelle in her protective casing.
Katrina actually showed a picture of the waver she had to sign, and it absolved NESPR of “all traumatic influence associated with viewing the items, or being in the presence of Annabelle and or items” which I thought was kind of funny.
Now, other items that were at the dinner included a very eerie satanic idol that the Warrens collected from a man in Sandy Hook, connecticut, just north of the Warrens home.
The figure is tall, lanky, and completely black. It almost looks like it was made out of sticks. It also has these big, uneven black eyes and two tall horns. The story goes that the man was a hunter who was out in the woods when he noticed this figure. He noticed a man in black robes walking away from the scene but didn’t get a very good look at him.
The warrens brought the figure to their museum and Lorraine immediately fell ill. Ed thought it was probably because it had a curse placed on it by a satanic priestess that once owned it. He had mentioned before that satanism was much more common in Connecticut than people realized. Which, being from there, that doesn’t surprise me, the vibes are OFF in parts of Connecticut, if you know you know
Another haunted object that was there is known as The Shadow doll, that’s said to kill people in their dreams. The doll is covered in bird feathers and a black shawl, and has a real human tooth lodged into its mouth. To send the evil of the Shadow doll to someone, you’re supposed to take a picture of it and write a curse on the back of the photo. Then you mail it to the person you’d like to curse.
And then, at this dinner, of course there was Annabelle herself. The woman of the hour. Katrina was very careful while at the event. She’s a darkly curious person like us, so she wanted to see the doll up close but she wanted to be safe. She had holy water sprinkled on her before the event, she made sure to be very respectful to the doll when approaching her and taking a photo.
But after the event, she noticed that she had multiple strange bruises on her arms and legs. The one on her arm looked like something the size of a doll, opened up it’s mouth and bit down on her. It’s almost teeth marks. Not really breaking or indenting the skin, but hard enough to leave a mark. She also had weird bruises on her legs like something was grabbing her.
Katrina was completely shaken by the experience, and her story started circulating around once it was announced that Annabelle was going on a larger tour.
Because what Katrina attended was at a dinner nearby the Warren’s home in connecticut. What was going to happen when she was brought all around the country?
BREAK 1
That brings us to the first stop on The Annabelle tour, West Virginia State Penitentiary.
So it seems like the idea was to bring Annabelle to various haunted locations around the united states, the first one being the very haunted West Virginia State Penitentiary.
The massive, gothic style jail opened in 1866 and ran until 1995 and today functions as a museum and tourist attraction.
It has an incredibly dark past, lots of hangings happened on the grounds, and actually, Bud Petersen who was the last man ever executed at the prison is still buried in the back because his family didn’t want to come collect his remains. It’s said his ghost still stalks the area most nights.
Back in the day executions were actually all carried out publicly and people in town could gather to watch. That is, until the hanging of Frank Hyer
Frank was in the prison for killing his wife and set to be hanged on June 19th, 1931. The Virginia Chronicle reported that that day, frank walked up to the gallows, loudly proclaimed to the crowd “I am guilty and whisky was the cause of it. Jesus has saved my soul and I’m not afraid to die”, and then, the lever was pulled and the trap door below his feet swung open.
The only problem was, Frank was a heavy guy, and the wrong rope had been selected for the hanging. By the time his body fell through the trap door, the rope had sliced his head clean off.
Apparently the crowd could handle regular hangings, but beheadings were far too much for them, and after that, capital punishment was performed in private.
Aside from all of the executions, botched and otherwise, 36 murders also happened within the prison, the most famous being the butchering of a man named RD Wall. Wall was caught snitching on his fellow inmates in 1929, and three inmates slashed him with dull homemade shivs in a hallway.
By the 1980s, conditions in the prison had totally deteriorated. The prison had not been kept up at all due to lack of funding. Rats and flies were everywhere, infecting inmates with diseases and eating their flesh. The plumbing hadn’t been repaired in years and sewage leaked out into the hallways and smeared on the walls. On new years day, 1986, the prisoners had enough, and they rioted, overtaking the guards and the kitchen staff. They held knives to their throats and handcuffed them to each other.
Three inmates died in the process, BUT they were able to get a meeting with the mayor and he agreed to a new list of standards within the prison.
The prison did eventually close in 1995, and to no one's surprise people started reporting that the prison was haunted almost immediately.
Stories started surfacing of disembodied voices being heard throughout the building, security guards would see figures out of the corners of their eyes, and visitors reported feeling like they were being touched and grabbed by invisible hands.
And so, NESPR thought this was the perfect place to bring Annabelle for the first stop of her tour.
I saw a lot of comments from locals about her being brought to the penitentiary. Mind you, it’s in appalachia, so a lot of people were basically like, Appalachia has enough going on as is we do not need annabelle here running amuck as well thank you very much.
But then, something really unexpected happened.
After Annabelle’s night at the Penitentiary, Ryan Buell, who worked for the Warren’s organization and seemed to be organizing the whole tour, took to tik tok to explain that when they brought Annabelle into the building, all of the paranormal activity quieted. It was like someone turned the dial on all the ghosts down.
He said that Annabelle herself was quiet as well, and not much happened around her. And He seemed surprised by this, as if bringing Annabelle into an already paranormal hot spot was like adding fuel to a fire, everything would amplify, annabelle would be the maestro conducting the ghost choir. But no, everyone watched in confusion as everything got quiet once she was wheeled in. And then, when she was wheeled out the next day, all of the ghostly activity resumed.
Maybe Annabelle is more like a shark in the water, once she comes around the spirits go into survival mode and hide. If that’s the case, then they were in for a really boring next few weeks on this tour.
At least, that’s what they thought. Because after this, they brought Annabelle to New Orleans.
Stop 2: New Orleans
Now, for her New Orleans stop, Annabelle was brought to the french quarter as part of an event thrown by Ghost City Tours.
New Orleans is a very, very haunted place. We did a whole episode on some of the most famous ghost stories from New Orleans, I’ll link it in the description for those that are interested, but think modern day vampires, big above ground cemeteries with ghosts that stalk the aisles, a long and rich history of voodoo and other forms of folk magic.
There’s ghosts about, but after Annabelle’s quiet stop in West Virginia, it seemed like NESPR was feeling pretty calm about her visit, like it would be just another quiet evening.
But it became very clear very quickly that some of the locals did NOT want her there.
This is a woman known as the Bone Lady, shaking a tambourine at Annabelle and telling her to go back to hell. The Bone Lady is a fifth generation Voodoo Priestess who lives in New Orleans and owns the Voodoo Bone Lady Voodoo Shop.
Apparently, when annabelle arrived, the van carrying her was parked directly in front of the bone lady’s shop, and weird things started happening immediately.
The bone lady also stopped some people who were coming out from seeing Annabelle to get their reaction, and people were really all over the map. One woman was excited because she saw the dolls hand move on its own and she may have caught it on camera. Another man had that look you get when you get off a really intense roller coaster. Like he was in shock from the intensity of the experience
Another man refused to speak about his experience until he was standing outside of a cathedral.
It’s a little hard to hear, but he says that her eyes turned from black to red and he ran out of the building.
By this point, It was becoming clear to Ryan and NESPR that New Orleans was not going to be as quiet as West Virginia was. If West Virginia State Penitentiary went dark to avoid antagonizing her, New Orleans was on full attack mode, sending the living and the dead to get her out of their city.
After one night in town, though, Annabelle was whisked away to her next spot. And maybe the people of New Orleans all exhaled, because they thought the nightmare was over. But it seemed like the mayhem was only just beginning.
The next morning, as Annabelle was being loaded into NESPRs black van to be transported to her next stop in Texas, residents of Louisiana awoke to the news that the largest antebellum plantation in the south, Louisiana’s own Nottoway plantation, had burned to the ground.
people were shocked at the news. How did a house that had lasted 165 years, that had continually been maintained, that had grants given to it specifically for renovation and upkeep, suddenly burn to ash in the night. And I mean Ash, when you look at videos and pictures of the event, you’d be hard pressed to find a square inch of this place that was not engulfed in flames. It was like hell had opened up and swallowed it whole.
And a lot of people in Louisiana started looking at Annabelle. Because if, lets say the ghosts of New Orleans were on high alert the night before, waging a spiritual war with the doll, well there was another place in Louisiana that was also incredibly spiritually dark, the exact type of place Annabelle would have wanted to attack, at least according to some people in Louisiana.
Let me give you a brief history of the Nottoway plantation.
Nottoway was built in 1859 by enslaved people, for a man named John Randolph, one of the most prominent slave owners in the south. John was a farmer of both cotton and sugar, which made him incredibly rich. At its height, Nottoway held 155 enslaved people, many of which are still believed to be buried on the grounds in unmarked graves.
One of those people was Alice Thompson, a woman who would go on to bear the children of John Randolph’s son. One of her descendants is Judy Whitney-Davis who would go on to lead tours at Nottoway.
One thing Judy noticed about Nottoway when she started working there, is the website calls it a “Resort”, and “mansion”, and it’s mostly marketed it as a wedding venue. The small houses in the back of the property are now referred to as “cottages”. Instead of what they most likely originally were, slave quarters.
And When Judy went to the history section of the site, it only mentioned the trees on the property… no seriously. In the history tab there is one section that reads “Nottoway's grounds feature 16 majestic oak trees spread across the 31-acre property.” And THATS IT. No other history of the place is mentioned at all, they don’t even really talk about when the house was originally built. It seems like the whole website had scrubbed its dark history and even the word Plantation.
But we’ve discussed this a lot here at Heart Starts Pounding. Just because your website is neatly designed with italic, forro rounded font. Just because the photos are all of smiling couples on their wedding day, and just because you’ve swapped out some of the original furniture, doesn’t change the history of what happened there. It doesn’t remove the hundreds of unnamed bodies that are buried in shallow graves by the levee in the back yard. It doesn’t eradicate the spirits of those who can’t ever find rest, who still patrol the halls no matter how hard the new management tries to ignore them .
And so, the day Annabelle left Louisiana, a fire broke out in the attic of the Nottoway Plantation. And for 17 hours, it demolished the structure of the house, wrecking the silk curtains, the antique family portraits, the remaining original furniture, and other valuables still left in the home.
And immediately, social media exploded. There were memes of annabelle standing in front of the plantation while it burned, her wicked grin taking on a new meaning.
It actually became such a viral thing on social media that Ghost City Tours who hosted Annabelle in New Orleans issued a statement saying “We've seen the comments blaming us and Annabelle's visit to our store in New Orleans for the fire, ha (we realize people are joking, we hope). No, Annabelle didn't burn down the Nottoway Plantation. Don't go giving Hollywood any more ideas for horrible movies.”
The official report said that the damage was caused by an electrical fire, but that it was a total loss, there was no hope of any sort of recovery of the plantation’s main building.
Some people felt like this was too spiritual to be just an electrical fire. They pointed to images of the fire where it looked like figures were on the second floor while everything burned around them. Other people said they could see faces in the flames. As if the fire was releasing all of the spiritual energy of the place in a sort of cleansing.
I did see one quote in all of this that I still think of. “In a city built on spirits, nothing burns without reason”. And it seems like a lot of people in Louisiana agree with that statement. Especially because not long after the Nottoway fire, another historical building, this time back in New Orleans, would also go on to suffer a catastrophic fire.
But not before the people of New Orleans woke up the NEXT day to even more shocking news.
BREAK 2
The day after the Nottoway fire, May 16th, maybe everyone thought that day would be a chill day in the area. Maybe they were finally reaching some equilibrium after Annabelle's departure. But no, once again, the people of new orleans woke up to a very shocking notification.
That night, at 12:23am, 10 inmates from the New Orleans Parish Prison had managed to escape and were currently on the run.
Security footage shows the men running out of the prison in the dead of night with their orange and white uniforms on, using blankets to protect themselves from the barbed wire fence, then running across an interstate into a neighborhood.
And these seemed to be particularly scary inmates, I’ll add. The men all ranged in age from 19 to 42 years old and had been in prison for a variety of different offenses, from domestic abuse battery, to rape, to murder. A few of them were in prison for life without parole. Not necessarily the people you’d hope would be fleeing through the woods in your back yard.
Initially, it seemed like faulty locks were the source of the escape, especially after it came out that days before the prisoners were able to flee, the Orleans Parish Sheriff’s office asked for money to fix faulty locks on the cells. But those who were familiar with the prison, knew that it would have been nearly impossible to escape without help.
And that’s when a little bit more about the escape started coming to light.
So one of the escapees, Derrick Groves, was in there for a 2018 marti gras shooting that earned him a life sentence without parole. He is currently still on the run, actually. But he was dating a woman named Darriana Burton who used to work for the Orlean’s Parrish Sheriff’s office, but she was let go for smuggling contraband into the prison for inmates.
It’s now believed that she aided in the escape plan by helping the prisoners communicate with people outside of the jail that could help them.
A janitor was also discovered to have cut off the water supply to a toilet so it could be removed.
It also seems like the prison wasn’t aware of the escape until a routine headcount in the morning when a guard realized 10 people were missing. Eventually, a hole in the prison was found with the words “Too Easy, LOL” scrawled above it.
I will add here, that while 8 of the prisoners who escaped have been captured, there are still two that are on the run, and people in the area are still on high alert.
Was this back-to-back mayhem the work of Annabelle, or just mere coincidence? Why was all of this happening so soon after her visit to the area?
Well, people didn’t even really have a chance to wonder that question, because that’s when the next fire erupted.
On May 19th, just days after the Nottoway fire and prison escape, Judy Beaudreaux awoke to the smell of smoke and popping sounds coming from her kitchen. Immediately, she rose from her bed and her heart sank. Because she was living on one of the most spiritual sites in all of New Orleans. A site that is a stop on every single Voodoo tour that goes through the city. Judy lived in a cottage that was built on top of Marie Laveau’s original home.
Marie Laveau was the most famous voodoo priestess to ever live in New Orleans. She was known for appearing to never age, and for carrying her snake named Zombi around her neck at all times.
Born in 1801, Marie grew up to be what some called the most powerful figure in New Orleans society. People both feared and respected her, like a machiavellian prince. She made such an impact that the New York Times ran her obituary when she died in 1881.
And there are countless stories of the way that Marie could use Voodoo to help people in New Orleans. there was the time that a wealthy business man approached Marie. His son had been accused of murdering a creole girl, and his father begged marie to use her powers to exonerate him of the crime. Marie agreed to, but only if he would sign over all of his land to her. the businessman agreed, and she got to work.
According to legend, marie went to the St. Louis cathedral with Zombie, her python, wrapped around her neck. She prayed at the altar as she held three spicy guinea peppers in her mouth. She asked that the pain she felt from the peppers be penance for the crime committed.
Then, she took those three guinea peppers and placed one under the judges seat, one under the jury, and one under the seat of the business man’s son. He was eventually acquitted of the crime, and the land was signed over to Marie
To this day, her house had remained a pillar of New Orleans's spiritual history, but that almost all changed on May 19th.
Luckily, the fire department was able to put the fire out in about two and a half hours, but that didn’t stop it from creeping up the walls, damaging the kitchen and other parts of the house with fire and smoke damage.
And once again, the internet cried Annabelle. All of this mayhem started just after she left, she somehow changed the spiritual makeup of the area and now everything was going haywire.
After New Orleans, Annabelle was sent to The Psychic And Spirit Fest in San Antonio Texas. The event, put on by Curious Twins Paranormal at Victoria’s Black Swan Inn was a festival of booths that included tarot card readers, psychics, mediums, crystals, potions, as well as a day long program of speakers, paranormal investigators, and even demonologists.
But the main event was being able to see Annabelle, and it was actually here that we had some members of the Heart Starts Pounding community actually go and see her, though no one reported any bite marks or bruises. I trust that’s because you guys went to lengths to make sure you’d be ok in her presence.
It was at this stop, though, that rumors started swirling that she had gone missing.
A Tik tok, that has since been debunked, claimed that after Annabelle left San Antonio, she was on her way to Chicago for another stop of her tour when she somehow vanished.
Ryan with NESPR did jump on tik tok pretty much right away and debunked this. He let everyone know that she was never going to chicago, and never got lost. After San Antonio, she went straight back to the Warren Museum in Connecticut, where she is right now.
And so, it seems like this leg of her tour ended on a calmer note, considering how chaotic it had become. But, I will add, the tour is far from over. Annabelle has some more stops on the tour this year, should you be brave enough to go see her.
She’ll be at an orphanage in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania from July 11th to July 13th, and then she’ll be in Rock Island, Illinois from October 4th through October 5th. And then I believe she’s ending her tour at scarefest in Lexington Kentucky October 17th-19th. Just in time for spooky season.
What do you think, will the second leg of the tour be as chaotic as the first? Can anywhere in the US truly top New Orleans when it comes to spirits? I’m honestly not sure myself. Let me know wherever you listen if YOU plan on seeing Annabelle while you can? Or is she better off left alone?
That’s all I have for you this week. We are off next week for the holiday, and once again, consider it a chance to catch up on our bonus content. We just did a bonus episode on dark psychological experiments throughout history that you wont want to miss. That was voted on by the high council, so make sure to join the high council tier on patreon if you’d like to help select the bonus episode each month.
Alright, I’ll see you back here for our Dark Summer series kicking off the second week of July. Starting with terrifying camping stories. Until then, stay curious. OOOooooOOOO