A husband-and-wife team of paranormal investigators claim their ragdoll is possessed, after CCTV footage appeared to show it moving out of its display cabinet. The Annabelle Raggedy Ann doll has also been seeing flipping over a ouija board, they say.
The grinning toy is an identical copy of a notoriously evil ragdoll in the US that inspired The Conjuring and Annabelle horror films. And Lee and Linzi Steer believe their Annabelle could have the spirit of the original.
The couple run the Museum of Haunted Objects from their home in Rotherham, South Yorkshire. They believe Annabelle is responsible for a series of events, including a near-crash and Linzi having mysterious illnesses.
Lee, 37, has been fascinated with the paranormal since he was 14, when he claims he saw things being thrown around his bedroom. And since they met online in 2016, Linzi's interest has grown.
The 52-year-old said she first saw a ghost 25 years ago when she was alone one day at the dressmakers where she worked. She believes she saw a curly haired woman watching her, who then walked through a closed door.
She said: “Even when I saw my first ghost at the dressmakers, I felt calm, rather than frightened. I grew up watching all sorts about aliens and ghosts, so I was always interested in the paranormal, rather than frightened by it. But some of Annabelle’s actions scare me.”
Annabelle was made in the same factory, and looks exactly the same as the original doll, and was given to Lee and Linzi in October 2019. The original Annabelle, which gained notoriety in the 1970s, is now kept in a museum for the occult, as it is claimed that it started to attack people.
When Linzi and Lee’s doll first arrived in their Museum of Haunted Objects, Linzi and one of her close friends got a mysterious illness and narrowly avoided two car crashes. Linzi said: “I just became really ill for some reason, I was in hospital for a week, and the doctors to this day still don’t know what was wrong.
“I got horrendous pains in my stomach and I was being violently sick and they just couldn’t figure out what it was, which was unusual. One of our good friends became very ill as well, he got abscesses in his mouth and all sorts of things. It was just very bizarre.
“In the first near car crash a white van nearly went into the side of my car and I had to go off the road. In the other, I was on a roundabout. I’d sort of pulled out and then another car pulled out in front of me.”
On the two-year anniversary of the couple owning the doll, October 24, 2021, they think the doll struck again. Their heavy ouija table was hurled over, which was caught on CCTV.
Lee said: "Annabelle was sitting on a chair at our ouija table. It’s very solid and it’s got a metal leg holding it up so there’s no way it should have just fell over or collapsed.
"One lady put a little speaker on to the table, walked away and the next minute the table just collapsed. There is no logical explanation as to why that should have happened, and it was just the way Annabelle was standing straight at it.”
After this they decided to put Annabelle in a glass cupboard, on a secure hook. But on Halloween this year at about 3am, their CCTV showed Annabelle “stepping out of” the display cabinet legs first.
Linzi explained: “She’s in a glass cabinet, and the door is quite stiff, so you’d literally have to pull it open. She shouldn’t have fallen legs first because her head is heavier than her legs.
“It looks as though she’s sort of twisting her legs to come out first, stepping out. It wasn’t a natural way to fall, it was very, very bizarre.
"It’s like the last two weeks, since Annabelle stepped out of the cupboard, the museum is getting more and more dangerous and things are getting physical. We’re used to dealing with this kind of thing, however, it is getting more and more intense – it’s building up energy, big time.
“When I was filming a reel the other day, something literally grabbed the back of my neck out of nowhere and squeezed it quite tightly. It wasn’t painful, but I didn’t want to be in that room.
"And it did make me think. So, something major is going to happen, but she’s not scaring us.
"There’s a theory that if you’re scared and the spirit can feel it, it can be worse for you.” The couple are keeping Annabelle in the museum for now, but say if things start getting violent, they will consider getting help from a demonologist.
